A big thanks to David Frum and Dave Weigel for a fine week of filling in for Andrew.

In Weigel's last round of posting, he responded to criticism of his NBP coverage, reiterated his exasperation with the NAACP, replied to TNC about the TPM backlash, doubted that policy will get much coverage if Palin gets the nomination, rolled his eyes at Politico's coverage of the Palin-Romney spat, knocked Pawlenty for opening the wound of Al Franken's contested win, built on Krauthammer's assessment of the Obama presidency, showcased Gene Weingarten, talked video games, and signed off with a final dispatch from Unalaska.

Frum tackled immigration policy, countered Rove's op-ed on his biggest mistake during the Bush years, and highlighted Kirchick's op-ed on Madrid's gay-pride exclusion of Israelis. He also aired responses to his bleg about how to reform the conservative movement. Frum's own input here, here, and here.

Reax of the financial reform passage here. Patrick sounded off on a forthcoming book on Iran and a reader dissented. More posts about sex and monogamy here, here, here, and here. Hilarious gender-swapping here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

Thursday on the Dish, BP finally stopped the leak and Argentina became the tenth nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Sharron Angle showed her cards on her media strategy, Jean Howard-Hill called out the GOP for blank-checking the Tea Party, and TNC sided with the NAACP.  Patrick compared two new polls on Palin, Litbrit rebutted Weigel over Trig, readers piled on, and Chris Rovzar saw everything work out for Bristol.

Weigel examined the comparison between militias and the New Black Panthers, checked in on Alvin Greene, looked at how Hayek is making a comeback, downplayed the Mama Grizzlies video, broke down the polling on Al Gore, scratched his head over Politico's coverage of him, and filed another dispatch from Unalaska. Frum received kindergarten insults from Mark Levin.

Eli Lake reported on how US espionage delays Iran from getting a bomb, Elizabeth Weingarten observed the decline of polygamy in Saudi Arabia, Veronique de Rugy argued the political upside to spending cuts, Andrew Gelman reviewed the politics of stimulus, and James Capretta scrutinized Obamacare over the cost curve. Dana Goldstein and Tracy Clark-Flory wondered if we're getting free birth control, Julian Sanchez mulled over liberaltarianism, Erik Voeten covered nudges, and Ryan Avent followed up on manufacturing.

The monogamy thread continued here, here, and here. Other readers sounded off on eating habits and another on budget cuts. OKCupid exposed faux bisexuality. Xeni Jardin found some tragically comic illustrations on DADT. Incredible parking garage here. Cool ads here and here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

Wednesday on the Dish, Bristol and Levi got engaged - again. A reader summed up reaction in the inbox, Pareene bemoaned the MSM's role, and Jesse Griffin reported a damning detail on Levi. In other news, a Tea Party spokesman fueled the NAACP's fire, Dan Choi got off the hook, John Cloud relayed research on cougars, and Pew showed how the blogosphere lives off traditional media. DOMA coverage here and especially here. Cannabis coverage here and especially here.

Weigel responded to reader objections over Trig, destroyed Megyn Kelly for fomenting racial discord, went after Beck for the same, analyzed the defeat of two Tea Party darlings, dissed Democrats for their economic politics, spotlighted a particularly unjust obscenity case, and filed another colorful dispatch from Unalaska.

Frum artfully pwned Mark Levin, recommended a payroll tax holiday for a whole year, honored Bastille Day, and chuckled at the Levi-Bristol announcement.

In other Palin coverage, Michael Kazin frowned at Cottle's admiration of her PR and Drum dreaded the spread of it. Plumer and Fallows compared BP to other oil giants, Balko defended the cop accused of murdering Oscar Grant, Jonathan Cohn touted Mariah Blake's piece on medical supplies, and Bill Peckham criticized the kidney trade. Dan Savage scolded a Dish reader and advised on open relationships while Patrick injected disease into the monogamy debate.

Readers joined the discussion on eating habits, another corrected Wilkinson on Singapore's healthcare system, and another sounded off on markets. Goddard launched a political dictionary. Badger-blogging here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

St. Louis, Missouri, 10.43 am

Tuesday on the Dish, the NAACP leveled the racism charge at the Tea Party, tea-partiers punted on the DOMA ruling, Jesse Jackson played the slavery card over LeBron, and Susanna Ferreira warned us about anticipated violence after the Cup. In Palin coverage, Dave Weigel went after Andrew's take on Trig, Michelle Cottle marveled at her media strategy, Tim Mak downplayed her PAC haul, and readers doubted her ability to maintain a campaign staff.

Weigel, blogging from a remote island in Alaska, covered the NAACP uproar, clarified the record on the New Black Panther case, showed how the GOP is getting aggressive for Byrd's supposedly safe seat, and wished Rand Paul wasn't so boring now. David Frum, our other guest, dwelled on the state of libertarianism, addressed the prisoner problem in America, drew a deeper lesson from the NewsRealBlog row, praised a new pro-Israeli group, noted Limbaugh's new digs, and suggested a website (as did Weigel).

In other coverage, Greenwald dug up more examples of people praising Fadlallah, Andrew Napolitano called for the indictment of Cheney and Bush, and Nick Kristof confessed to constructing a "Western savior" narrative. Pot-blogging here. A reader joined Andrew Sprung in tackling Social Security reform and another sympathized with cops. Ryan Avent undercut the mythologizing of manufacturing, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman claimed the decline of creativity, Dan Ariely explained behavioral economic, Wilkinson shouted a libertarian solution to healthcare, and Patrick talked rhetoric. Some final installments on the monogamy thread here and here.

Cool ad here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. A particularly fun window contest here. 

Monday on the Dish we welcomed our two guest-bloggers for the week: David Frum and Dave Weigel. 

Weigel honored Nate Henn, the American who died in the World Cup bombing (and who happened to grow up with Weigel in Delaware). He also filed a dispatch from Anchorage, featured a new profile on John McCain, undermined a right-wing myth about the New Black Panthers and Obama's DOJ, gave a platform to a conservative critic of the GOP's fiscal record, and dug up a bit of trivia about a popular Weekly Standard cover.

Frum highlighted the dire financial markets, talked inflation and deflation, noted welfare reform in Australia, showed how Obama is ignoring a Supreme Court uproar in his hometown, bristled at the president for bringing up his middle name to explain Israeli mistrust, invoked his grandfather in a post on Christian Zionism, summed up the controversy between a FrumForum blogger and NewsRealBlog, pointed out the success of aggregators, and took a jab at the publishing industry.

In Palin news, her path to the nomination got much clearer (though she floundered on "The Factor" for the second time). San Francisco tried to ban the sale of pets. DOMA update here. Mariah Blake's expose on the medical supply industry is a must see.

In assorted commentary, Dayo Olopade celebrated the progress Africa displayed this World Cup, Nate Silver slammed the Pentagon for surveying servicemembers on gaydar, William Galston was gloomy about the Dems prospects this fall, Bernstein assessed Palin's chances in '12, and Larison compared her to Giuliani. Beinart thought Obama was no FDR, TNC tackled the fear felt by cops, Joe Keohane explained how our biases shape the facts we receive, Felix Salmon defended minimum wage laws, and Patrick circled back to one of his pet topics, the kidney trade. A comprehensive update on Social Security reform here. Recession view here. A great case of journalism here.

Creepy ad here. A quick laugh here and a longer one here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

-- C.B.

by David Frum

By far the most frequent objection to my proposed mission statement however was to its inclusion of the phrase "peaceful American-led world order."

Plaintively in some cases, ferociously in others, people asked: why should American world leadership be a goal of any kind of conservative politics?

My answer: consider the alternatives. For 60 years, the democratic countries have known ever-rising levels of affluence and security. This benign system of collective security and free trade has extended outward to encompass more and more countries: beyond western Europe to include central and eastern Europe, beyond Japan to reach the small countries of the Pacific Rim. We have not done so well in Latin America and the Middle East, but Chile at least has joined the system and Brazil likely soon will. 

This construct is the work of no one country, but it ultimately rests upon the reassuring fact of American power. As Murray Kempton said of Dwight Eisenhower, it is the great tortoise on whose broad shell the world sat in sublime disregard of the source of its peace and security.

Just as even the most self-equilibriating markets need a lender of last resort, so even the most stable international system needs a security guarantor of last resort. Some describe the post-1945 system as a "democratic peace." But democracy alone did not suffice to keep the peace after 1918. It's an American-sustained peace, and should the day come when America loses the power or will to sustain it, the international system that will follow will be not only more dangerous but also less hospitable to liberal values in the broadest sense of the word liberal. 

If I am certain of any one belief, I am certain of that.

And with that credo, it's time to express my thanks for this week of hospitality at AndrewSullivan.com. First to Andrew himself, speaking of liberal in the broadest sense, for opening his floor to some very divergent perspectives indeed - although I realize now I never did around to posting those links to Zionist summer camps.

Next to Andrew's never-resting colleagues Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner, who make the blogs run on time. 

And finally to you, the thoughtful and challenging readers of this remarkable place in cyberspace. I hope we can extend these discussions in the weeks ahead at my usual lemonade stand, FrumForum.com. 

by Chris Bodenner

Participants wrestle during the 13th Annual Boryeong Mud Festival at Daecheon Beach on July 17, 2010 in Boryeong, South Korea. The festival features mud wrestling, mud sliding, and a mud king contest. By Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images.

by David Frum

Another fundamental objection to my proposed mission statement for conservative reform is that it is not libertarian enough. One reader offered this alternative statement:

Conservatives believe our central purpose is to promote freedom; we do this by promoting individual liberty, supporting the division of powers through Federalism, reducing government to the lowest level necessary, and supporting free markets while keeping taxes low.

No question: conservatives do believe those things. I believe them too, and they are at the core of my draft mission statement. But they cannot be all we believe, or else we end up turning our backs on questions of vital concern to fellow-citizens, from the environment to terrorism.

Two other things need to be considered as well:

1) In a globalizing economy, the free market distributes rewards increasingly unequally. I wrote about this in an article published two summers ago:

Inequality within nations is rising in large part because inequality is declining among nations. A generation ago, even a poor American was still better off than most people in China. Today the lifestyles of middle-class Chinese increasingly approximate those of middle-class Americans, while the lifestyles of upper and lower America increasingly diverge. Less-skilled Americans now face hundreds of millions of new wage competitors, while highly skilled Americans can sell their services in a worldwide market.

Those potential losers from a globalized free market are voters too. If they get the idea that freedom is not delivering for them, then freedom's political basis becomes shaky.

2) This divide between winners and losers may explain something otherwise baffling about the way conservatives talk about freedom. The United States is a vastly freer country in 2010 than it was a generation ago. Yet when you talk to libertarian-minded people, and with the rare exceptions of a Brink Lindsey or a Virginia Postrel, what you usually hear is a lament for a vanished better past.

You can argue that they are wrong, remind them that we used to have a draft and airline regulations and bans on private ownership of gold. Or you can listen for the truth underneath the mistake - and understand that while people want government limited, they also want society to work. And if they feel their society used to work better, it's cold consolation to tell them that at least the government now does less.

Christchurch, New Zealand, 11.30 am

by Patrick Appel

Todd May returns to the subject:

Several comments insisted that one would never become friends with someone unless there was something to be gained. This is certainly true. Close friendships are not simply exercises in altruism. Friendships that come to resemble relationships between donors and recipients begin to fray. Eventually they come to look like something other than friendships. The non-economic character of friendship does not lie in its altruism, but in its lack of accounting.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I think your reader typifies the kind of paranoia regarding Iran that seems to be driving us toward war.  Iran doesn't begin to compare to Japan of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Japanese had already occupied huge chunks of China in the 1930s; the Iranians could barely hold off the semi-competent army of Sadam Hussein in a war of attrition that lasted a decade.

The Japanese had an industrial base that could build aircraft carriers and first-class fighter aircraft.  With this, they built blue-water navy  that was able to sail across the Pacific to decimate the U.S. Pacific fleet. They equipped and trained marines that swept the U.S. and the British out of the Pacific, and came close to conquering Australia.

Seriously.

Another reader:

Graffiti Proposal from PR!MO on Vimeo.

by David Frum

As mentioned below, some readers raised more fundamental objections to my suggested mission statement for a reformed conservatism:

A reality-based, culturally modern, socially inclusive and environmentally responsible politics that supports free markets, limited government and a peaceful American-led world order.

The first of the fundamental objections bristled at the phrase "culturally modern." Was this code for jettisoning social conservatives from the Republican party?

Two answers.

First, "culturally modern" refers to a lot more than just the abortion/stem cells/same-sex marriage cluster of issues.

A culturally modern party is one comfortable with science and technology, with women's equality, and with a globalized economy. It's a party that regards New York City and Silicon Valley as just as much "real America" as Kentucky and South Dakota.

But as to those hot-button issues ... if the Democrats can accommodate both investment bankers and unionists, the GOP should be able to find room for differing views on issues pertaining to sexuality. We always say we're a "big tent." But when was the last time we allowed a pro-choice Republican a slot on a national ticket? 1976, that's when. One reason we got stuck with Sarah Palin for VP in 2008 was that when McCain (wisely) decided he wanted a woman running mate, he bumped into this constraint: all the other Republican female senators and governors were pro-choice, and therefore were excluded from consideration from the start.

Yet it is a fact that many Republicans and (yes!) many conservatives are prochoice. Many more favor stem-cell research. Many again were appalled by the Terri Schiavo episode. Younger Republicans and conservatives, like younger Americans generally, are moving to acceptance of same-sex marriage.

These Republicans and conservatives deserve better than to be dismissed as "Republicans in Name Only." They are not an after-thought within the party and the movement, to be accepted on sufferance so long as they defer to the leadership of others.

To be a patriot, we must love our country as it is, not as it was - or as we imagine it was. A wise conservatism does not resist change. Such a conservatism would be doomed before it started. A wise conservatism manages change.

That's the kind of conservatism I think we need more of - and that my phrase "culturally modern" attempts to describe.

by David Frum

Yesterday I posted a bleg asking readers of AndrewSullivan.com and FrumForum.com for help writing a one-sentence description of a modernized, reformed conservatism. We've had a stunning response: almost 200 suggestions, via email from AndrewSullivan readers and in the comments section at FrumForum. They are enormously helpful, and I am very grateful. Let me share some of these ideas, and then offer a response.

To remind: here is my first draft, for which I asked for improvements:

A reality-based, culturally modern, socially inclusive and environmentally responsible politics that supports free markets, limited government and a peaceful American-led world order.

Some readers offered alternatives that - while superbly concise - were just too general: they describe the professed world view of almost all American political groupings within the ultra-socialist and ultra-libertarian extremes:

Meritocracy tempered by compassion.

Free markets with a referee to ensure fair play.

Others focused too much on what we're trying to reject, not on what we're trying to accomplish.

Restoring sanity to the Republican party.

Some just made me laugh:

We want the country promised to us by our grade-school social studies textbooks.

Killing bad Muslims with upper-class tax cuts.

Not just for white people any more, we promise!

Some offered very helpful line-edits for greater precision.

My phrase "socially inclusive" is clumsy. I wanted to find a way to stress that Republicans and conservatives needed to pay more attention to the economic interests of the less affluent. But enough of you were baffled by the term that clearly some other phrasing is called for.

Two readers objected to the phrase "reality-based" as snarky. It was not intended as such, but I agree that "evidence-based" is better.

Some readers raised more fundamental criticisms. I'll turn to those in a second post. 

by Chris Bodenner

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. Country first, then city and/or state. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to VFYWcontest@theatlantic.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book. Have at it.

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Cockburn reviews Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon:

Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq who resigned in 1998 in protest at what he called the ‘genocidal’ sanctions regime, described at that time its more insidious effects on Iraqi society. An entire generation of young people had grown up in isolation from the outside world. He compared them, ominously, to the orphans of the Russian war in Afghanistan who later formed the Taliban. ‘What should be of concern is the possibility at least of more fundamentalist Islamic thinking developing,’ Halliday warned. ‘It is not well understood as a possible spin-off of the sanctions regime. We are pushing people to take extreme positions.’ This was the society US and British armies confronted in 2003: impoverished, extremist and angry. As they count the losses they have sustained from roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the West should think carefully before once again deploying the ‘perfect instrument’ of a blockade.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The male reader who wrote this angers me for some reason.  First of all, if he has been sleeping with his male friend for years, then he is not "straight" - he is obviously bi-sexual. 

This guy gets to have his cake and eat it, too. To the outside world he is a married heterosexual, but he is secretly engaged in an intimate relationship with his male friend, thereby never suffering the stigma of being gay/bi or whatever he calls himself.   He is basically a coward.  If he's gay/bi, he should be proud of it - don't hide behind a 'wife' who is little more than a roommate.  And the fact that his wife would condone this relationship is amazing.  I can't, for the life of me, imagine my fiance/husband telling me he sleeps with his best friend (of either sex) and my being cool and intrigued about it.  His stuff would be outside on the sidewalk so fast his head would spin.  For reasons that are her own, his wife has endured a farce of a marriage while her husband has had the best of both worlds.  "Bless her heart", indeed.

Another writes:

I have read with some interest the many letters concerning the monogamy and bisexual debate, and I am still convinced that those who claim the bisexual label do so to avoid the stigma of gay. I make this claim based on my many years behind the bar of a gay bar and talking to dozens of men - after a few Jack and cokes - about their sexual orientation.

by Patrick Appel

Claude Fischer reviews The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger:

If inequality does, to some degree, cause social problems, why? Wilkinson and Pickett emphasize that the mechanism here is social psychological: inequality creates anxiety about status and feelings of unfairness that eat at people. In the words of a chapter title, “inequality gets under the skin.” Unlike the volume of studies on the correlation between inequality and health, there is little research that directly tests this proposition. The authors collect a variety of suggestive evidence, such as laboratory studies on how people react to being put in low-status positions and primate studies on what happens when rankings among apes are messed with. But a lot of the case is built by argumentation and inferential stretch.

by Chris Bodenner

The latest drama between boys being girls and girls being boys:

by Patrick Appel

Mike Konczal picks up on an important contradiction.

by Dave Weigel

I'm signing off now and heading back into scenes like the one you see above you. It's been a fun week, and I want to thank Andrew for letting me into his habitat again. I also want to thank David Frum for joining me, and Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner from ascending from the underblogverse to keep everything humming. That included churning out their own posts, keeping me alerted to commentary on what I'd written, and helping me put things online in those frequent moments when Haystack let Unalaska wireless customers down. (I did learn from former mayor Frank Welty today that there's discussion of running fiberoptic cables over to the island from Kodiak, which would be nice, although it hadn't happened as of 3:06 p.m. local time.)

What did we learn this week? I don't know, but we asked plenty of questions. Will 2012 coverage be as silly as 2008 coverage, and if so, what does that mean for the Snow Empress of the Mama Grizzlies? How is Politico like a liberal blog? When did we elect President Jim Bunning? Isn't it time to stop obsessing over Trig? And isn't it time for Megyn Kelly to close down the minstrel show? Think it all over and I'll see you around.

by Dave Weigel

Charles Krauthammer tells it like it is:

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over" -- and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo -- the list is long. The critics don't understand the big picture. Obama's transformational agenda is a play in two acts.

There's a popular spin among conservatives now that portrays Obama as a new Jimmy Carter. Just as an incompetent Carter made the Reagan revolution possible, Obama will fill the next Congress with Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios and make possible the ascent of the most conservative president ever -- possibly one named Sarah. But if we've learned anything in the past two years, it's that even overpowering ideological control of Congress has its limits. A GOP Senate caucus of 40 members, the lowest since the 1970s, stopped card check. How exactly does a Democratic caucus of 52 (in 2011) or 45 (in 2013) members, in the best case scenarios for Republicans, fail to block a repeal of health care reform?

by Chris Bodenner

Palestinian boys taunt Israeli soldiers during a protest in the West Bank town of Nabi saleh, near Ramallah, on July 16, 2010 against the expropriation of Palestinian land to expand the nearby Jewish settlement of Halmish. By Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Image.

by Dave Weigel

Seth Schiesel has my favorite review of the week, if only for the line "the actor Fred Backus deserves praise for his performance as the deliciously rapacious Pac-Man." It's for "Theater of the Arcade," which is exactly what it sounds like. Let the creators explain:

“We would have these parties in junior high school and all the guys would be playing Street Fighter and most of the girls would be off doing their own thing, but I was pretty good at Street Fighter and definitely beat a lot of the guys,” said Gyda Arber, 30, the festival’s executive producer. Ms. Arber, who also directed “Theater of the Arcade” (written by Jeff Lewonczyk), said that she was halfway through Final Fantasy XIII on the PlayStation 3 and that she and her boyfriend recently played through Sony’s noir thriller Heavy Rain not once but twice as they explored that game’s impressive narrative depth.

There's a fun field of "I weep for my culture" criticism, perfected by Steve Sailer, which asks how much talent has been squandered by smart people turning their talents to video game development instead of, let's assume, the perfection of cold fusion or sequels to "Ulysses." I don't like this criticism because it reminds me of the hours I spent beating Final Fantasies II through VII (American titling) and the relaxation hours I now devote to "Call of Duty" and "Rock Band." (Hello there, David Hajdu.) How do I know this time wouldn't have been spent, in another era, by playing poker or Monopoly? How do we know that the developers of the game would have been successful at some other, less suited arts or sciences? Screw it. Enjoy the games or enjoy being a scold out of touch with the culture.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

You write:

"Iran is a proud country with an ancient history; trying to bend it to America's will through force alone is unlikely to succeed. It sees itself as an equal, as a superpower – or at least a regional superpower – in the making. However far-fetched that may seem to Americans, treating the nation like a donkey, to be controlled with carrots and sticks, is insulting to many Iranians and politically strengthens anti-American forces inside the Iranian government."

Another way of looking at this statement, at least for those who think that the causes of WWII were not entirely rooted in anachronistic dynamics and issues with no relevance beyond their original applications, is that Iran has a lot in common with Japan of the 1930's. Ancient and highly advanced (albeit barbaric in many respects) culture? Check. Justification for seeing itself as rightful leader of it's sphere of influence? Check. Arrogance? Check. Might America have bended Imperial Japan to its will had we taken a less bellicose approach?

by Patrick Appel

Manzi tallies points in his recent climate change to-and-fro with Bradford Plumer et al. I missed Mike Konczal's contribution until just now. He notes that Nordhaus tried to calculate non-GDP consequences of global warming by comparing how much the population enjoys skiing (which warming will decrease) and camping (which warming will increase):

There’s something kind of oddly endearing to framing the future of how much carbon we are willing to put in the air and how much warming we are willing to experience as a population based on camping versus skiing time surveys from 1981. For this cost-benefit analysis to work, we need to quantify everything, and the moment we step outside the world of the welfare of international industrial production to the world of our bodies and our lives the methods break down.

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews Christopher Nolan's latest:

[I]n this end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precision engineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has always been a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded such technical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken the form of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structural ingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies of the past 25 years. His last movie, The Dark Knight, was also his messiest, with flaws that included a collapsing final act. Yet it, too, perhaps in part thanks to that messiness, found unexpected grandeur and gravity in its subject.

For all its elegant construction, Inception is a film in which nothing feels comparably at stake. (In this it resembles Nolan's The Prestige, another admirably heady tale of perception and reality that never quite found a hearty emotional grip.)

by Dave Weigel

Ta-Nahesi Coates pushes back on my "NAACP tea party resolution backfires" theory:

To the extent that the NAACP has, as Dave says, "failed," it is because the arbiters of facts have ceded ground, and reporters and writers dutifully, and uncritically, dispense the notion that an organization which helped birth modern America has "a long history of...racism." But it also fails because there is very little pushback on this notion from "sensible" liberal writers. (I don't include Dave among them, mind you.) Instead we're getting calls for the president to condemn the NAACP, essentially, for being the NAACP. 

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they're wrong for making it. But they're only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

You know, I don't disagree with this. Coates and I are writing from different places. I don't think the way that the NAACP's resolution was covered was good at all. I don't think any racial issues are covered well, least of all "debates" like this where the press creates a point-counterpoint between Ben Jealous on one end and Mark Williams on the other. It was with that assumption that I said this would "backfire."

In the long run, will it backfire? I don't know. Conservatives who disagree with the NAACP have no tolerance whatsoever for being called racists or supporters of racism. Past NAACP attempts to shift the debate by using tough rhetoric -- I am thinking of Julian Bond calling some conservatives the "American Taliban" -- are remembered today not as things that shifted the debate, but things that torqued off conservatives and justified their suspicions about the NAACP. This doesn't seem fair to them. How is it fair that bringing up the 2000 election's result reveals them as bitter conspiracy theorists, while Tim Pawlenty intimating that Sen. Al Franken may have been elected by felons is just proof that he's a smart pol looking at 2012? It's not fair. I guess I'm more a defeatist than Coates is.

by Patrick Appel

Noah Millman wonders whether economics should remain the primary focus of Libertarian politics:

I would argue that, over the past thirty years, there has been a vast increase in appreciation of the importance of free markets across the political spectrum. Yes, government spending has spiked way up in the past two years as a consequence of the financial crisis and the recession (TARP, ARRA) – but discretionary non-defense spending is still much lower as a percentage of GDP than it was in 1980. The health care reform passed in this congress reflected a move to the “left” by the country – but it reflected a move to the “right” by the “left” inasmuch as it reflected conservative criticisms of past left-wing health care overhaul plans such as President Clinton’s failed first-term effort.

by Dave Weigel

It's just a happy coincidence, I guess, that he publishes this as I get ready to polish off a week of blog posts.

[T]here are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as "a subspecies of goat."

Fortunately, this new system enjoys the services of tens of thousands of fact-checking "citizen journalists" who write "comments." They will read the Uzbekistan story and instantly alert everyone that BARACK OBAMA IS A LIEING PIECE OF CRAP.

I basically like "comments," though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots.

Buy his new anthology when it comes out in September.

by Dave Weigel

Ed Barnes has the lede of the day, if only by accident: 

The chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party called Thursday for a massive, eleventh-hour investigation into allegations of illegal voting by felons in the state's bitterly contested 2008 Senate election.

OK, somebody help me with this. "Eleventh-hour" means, basically, in the final stages of something. The shot clock is ticking down. The egg timer is about to ring. The video is almost done buffering. And so on. So how do you do an eleventh-hour investigation into something that happened 20 months ago? This is a yoga backbend by a reporter who needs to pretend that the the story he's writing makes sense. I mean, here's Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.)'s comment on a conservative group's report -- which everyone admits is flawed and undoubtedly includes false positives.

Referring to Minnesota Majority, which conducted the voting study, Pawlenty said: “They seem to have found credible evidence that many felons who are not supposed to be voting actually voted in the Franken-Coleman election. I suspect they favored Al Franken. I don’t know that, but if that turned out to be true, they may have flipped the election.”

They "may have," says the governor who watched a three-stage legal process unfold over eight months and signed the Democratic winner's certificate of election. Come on, this is hackery unbecoming of a potential president of the United States. You don't let an ideological group play games with the rule of law, no matter how much you dislike the fact that the Duluth Answer Man is now a U.S. senator.

by Patrick Appel

Ferris Bueller + Fight Club = Genius:

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I hope the couple who are struggling with their sex life after using the NuVa ring have gotten off of hormone-based birth control altogether. Many women experience a nosedive in desire when they are on that stuff. The real way hormonal forms of birth control work (for many) is by making the woman not want to have sex. Some reading on this.

Another writes:

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the note from the fellow whose wife has pain with intercourse. This is for him or can be posted as a public service announcement. Or neither.

I’m going to guess that his wife has vulvar vestiblitis. I, unfortunately, know a lot about this condition because I was born with it. It can absolutely mess with your head, especially when you discuss with doctors (as I did) and they suggest it’s mental and suggest psychotherapy. At my worst, I thought I was frigid and should let my husband go.

by Dave Weigel

The heart-achingly moronic "spat" between Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney tells us how. The rundown, if you can stand it:

THURSDAY: Anonymous aides to Mitt Romney tell Mark Halperin that Palin is "not a serious human being" and will be in trouble in a debate where the "answers are more than 15 seconds long."

FRIDAY, 6:47 a.m.: Politico's Andy Barr publishes comments from "a longtime Palin aide," who gets eight paragraphs to unload on Romney and pump up his/her boss: "She’s not a finger-in-the-wind kind of leader."

FRIDAY, 10-something a.m.: Romney's Twitter account (written by him? written by someone else?) friendly-fires on the first aides as "anonymous numbskulls."

How many people were directly quoted in this spat? None, unless you count the Romney Twitter account. Andy Bar hustled in getting those quotes from Mysterious Palin Aide of the Deep, but his talent is wasted when he plays kid who whispers the gossip about the popular kids to the less popular kids. It's stuff like this that informs my dark, dark suspicion that 2012 will be more about nonsense than policy, and that people who think Palin needs to bone up on policy don't get this.

by Patrick Appel

The first reader quoted in this post e-mails again:

I agree that it would be better if the bureaucracy had some incentive to save money, and being allowed to keep saved money, to use for some other need in another year, is vastly better than flushing money near the end of the budget year. When I was in my Master of Public Administration program a few years ago, I learned about how the city of San Diego had taken that approach, and it does work. Whether it works in a time when budgets are tight and people are looking for money that would otherwise be available but isn't due to tax receipts being lower than expected  (this is at the state level, not national, where Congress can just borrow money) remains to be seen.
 
Also, consider your suggestions in the context we all live in.

by Chris Bodenner

TNC rounds up examples of ugly and often racist rhetoric from the right since Obama took office:

Perhaps you could argue that some of these instances aren't about race. Certainly, you could note that many of them are about race plus several other factors. But even granting those points as caveats, what you have is disturbing pattern among the GOP that sometimes floats up to the top. Black writers working in the mainstream, and even at liberal publications, are in a constant dialogue with white audiences. It is utterly useless, and to some extend brand-damaging, to repeatedly call on conservatives to repudiate racism in their midst. What many of us chose to do instead is to try to extend some sympathy, and get into the head of the offending party, in hopes of building a bridge.

I think, for those who are skeptical of the NAACP, something of a turn-about is in order. If you were black what would you think, faced with this pattern? If you were the NAACP what would you to say to this? The downside of the Obama approach, one that I still embrace, is that it tacitly supports Chait's notion that conservative opposition to Obama has "generally lacked much in the way of racial animus." I just don't think the facts bear that conclusion out--at all.

Ta-Nehisi also tackles Weigel's latest on the Tea Party backlash. John McWhorter - an even stronger NAACP critic than TNC in the past - sides with the group in this case as well. The more I read about the controversy and see how leaders in the TPM are making an ass of themselves, the more I side with my colleague and McWhorter.

by Patrick Appel

Chris Blattman flags a new paper:

Among young women, who experienced the greatest decline in HIV prevalence, the most important component was delaying sexual debut, accounting for 57 percent of the drop in HIV prevalence. Condom use by high risk males and to a lesser extent death (of older males) also played a significant role, accounting for 30 and 16 percent respectively. However, for older women, the trend is reversed, with death being more important than abstinence or condom usage.

by Patrick Appel

Howard Gleckman joins the retirement age debate:

While it is tough for older workers to find employment in today’s soft economy, we are talking about Social Security changes that won’t take effect for decades. By then, younger people will make up a much smaller share of the workforce, and there may be far more jobs available for seniors. In addition, older workers are likely to be healthier and better educated even as work continues to be less physically demanding. Still, Monique is right that there will be many 60-somethings who can’t work. And we are obliged to help them out. But the solution should be to reform the Social Security disability program for those who need it, not to allow everyone else to retire early.

by Patrick Appel

Timothy Lee makes some smart points in response to Julian Sanchez:

I agree with Julian’s take on this: political alliances are built by concrete actions toward shared goals, not by abstract statements of philosophical agreement. But I think his point can be made stronger with some specific examples.

In 2005, I was a founding employee of the Show-Me Institute, a “free market” think tank. What we meant by “free market” is that the organization devoted itself exclusively to those issues where conservatives and libertarians agreed. We wrote about taxes, school choice, property rights, health care policy, and so forth. We had an explicit policy that we didn’t do work on “social issues,” which in practice meant any issue where libertarians sided with liberals. So we avoided writing about immigration, gay rights, free speech, abortion, drug prohibition, prayer in schools, the death penalty, and the like.

And the Show-Me Institute is hardly unique. There’s a nationwide network of think tanks called the State Policy Network, with member organizations in almost every state, that are built on this same premise. 

He later gets into why there is no liberal-libertarian equivalent.

by Dave Weigel

Mark Halperin writes the 153,893th paean to Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" video (if an alien civilization just began observing Earth, it would think she invented YouTube) in a manner calculated to irritate liberals.

A new TIME poll shows Palin losing to Obama 55% to 34%, a lopsided margin that leads some Republican strategists to predict a wipeout if Palin is eventually chosen as the party's nominee. But that might not matter... Her candidacy would require almost none of the usual time sinks that force politicians to jump in early: power-broker schmoozing, schedule-intensive fundraising, competitive recruitment of experienced strategists, careful policy development. She would have immediate access to cash, with even small Internet donations likely bringing in millions.

You read that if you're a liberal who cannot stand this woman (but clicks on every article about her), you wonder what the hell Halperin is talking about. Really, even conservatives think it's a problem that a Palin 2012 bid would not include "careful policy development." How long have they been saying she's in a unique position to talk about energy and offshore drilling? How many unlettered appearances have we seen from her now, discussing that topic?

by David Frum

Ezra Klein highlights this chart from the Brookings Institution showing that at present rates of job growth it will take years to "close the jobs gap." Brookings explains:

The "job gap" underlying these numbers is daunting. In recent months, on this blog, we described the job gap -- the number of jobs it would take to return to employment levels from before the Great Recession, while also accounting for the 125,000 people who enter the labor force in a typical month. After today's employment numbers, the job gap stands at almost 11.3 million jobs.

How long will it take to erase this gap? If future job growth continues at a rate of roughly 208,000 jobs per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year for job creation in the 2000s, it would take 136 months (more than 11 years). In a more optimistic scenario, with 321,000 jobs created per month, the average monthly job creation for the best year in the 1990s, it would take over 57 months (almost 5 years).

But here's a crucial fact that Brookings omits: that 125,000 per month increase in the US labor force is not a law of nature. In fact, during the Bush years, more than half the growth in the US labor force was due to the arrival of immigrant labor. 

Immigrants now make up some 15% of the US labor force. They are concentrated in the less skilled portion of the labor force and in industries hardest hit, especially construction.

 If immigration levels were curtailed, the job gap would be a lot smaller. And if illegal immigrants returned home, rather than being put on a "path to citizenship," the problem of putting the unemployed back to work would be smaller and easier. 

Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 4 pm

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I’ve noticed the posts about ‘non-monogamy’ with passing interest. Folks are too hung-up on sex, but that’s nothing new. I’ll relate my experience to illustrate behaviors that may be more common than many believe. And I’m curious to know whether other readers might have similar stories.

I’m a ‘straight’ male. When I married my wife many years ago, she was aware of a long-standing relationship I had with another man. (So, does that make me straight or maybe bisexual? Just to clarify, I am strongly attracted to beautiful women, and generally quite intimidated by the thought of sex with most men.) Rather than disapprove, she was intrigued and has always accepted and even encouraged the relationship, to the point where she values my male friend near as much as I do. The understanding and acceptance that she and I reached at an early point in our relationship was an important factor in establishing the trust we needed to agree that marriage was right for the two of us.

by Dave Weigel

My post on Megyn Kelly's one-woman-and-a-network war against the Obama DOJ over the New Black Panthers has inspired some smart criticism, led by David Freddoso.

I am surprised at the apparent lack of self-awareness in Dave’s post. I’m not going to say I haven’t enjoyed his wall-to-wall coverage of the “birther” movement, but tell me: Just how is it different from this? There are superficial differences. For example, surely fewer Americans share the Black Panther ideology than remain muddle-headed about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. But the last time I checked, Orly Taitz hadn’t threatened to kill anyone on camera, tried to scare anyone away from a polling place, or received preferential treatment from Barack Obama’s (or anyone else’s) Department of Justice.

Actually, I dealt with this issue, or tried to, in an earlier post about why not to indulge conspiracy theories about Trig Palin. I don't want to quote myself, but Birtherism is a fairly popular conspiracy theory at this point, advanced at times by popular conservative voices like G. Gordon Liddy and Frank Gaffney, and advanced to convince critics of President Obama that their commander-in-chief is illegitimate. Taitz has represented a soldier who declined to serve under President Obama because he claimed that the commander-in-chief was not a citizen, and both the lawyer and the soldier worked to spread this myth. And we live in a weird media world now, where people can pick a news diet of stuff like Alex Jones and WorldNetDaily, and become certain that the media is hiding the real truth about their president's legitimacy. It's a problem -- Mark Levin and Glenn Beck refuse to let "birthers" on their shows for that reason.

To answer Freddoso's last three points:

by David Frum

Karl Rove offers an interesting reflection on his White House career in this AM's WSJ. His biggest mistake, he said, was failing to fight back harder against the "Bush lied, people died" slur:

At the time, we in the Bush White House discussed responding but decided not to relitigate the past. That was wrong and my mistake: I should have insisted to the president that this was a dagger aimed at his administration's heart. What Democrats started seven years ago left us less united as a nation to confront foreign challenges and overcome America's enemies.

I have a different take on what went wrong in the Rove years, published in 2007 in the NY Times.

As a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question. The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center? The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?

by Chris Bodenner

GREENSPAN: I should say [Congress] should follow the law and let [the Bush tax cuts] lapse.

Q: Meaning what happens?

GREENSPAN: Taxes go up. The problem is, unless we start to come to grips with this long-term outlook, we are going to have major problems. I think we misunderstand the momentum of this deficit going forward.

by Patrick Appel

Greenwald's take:

It's worthwhile now and then to take stock of the vast disparity between how we like to think of ourselves and reality.  When a country with Argentina's history and background becomes but the latest country to legally recognize same-sex marriage -- largely as the result of a population which demanded it -- that disparity becomes quite clear.

by Chris Bodenner

Copyranter:

Hmm. Maybe showing a dancing bikini-hottie engulfed in Photoshoppy flames is not such a prudent move to promote nightlife in such an explode-y city. Just. Sayin'.

by Patrick Appel

Felix Salmon's two cents:

Consider an issue with two possible lines of attack: a cheap behavioral-economics solution, B, and a more expensive and politically-fraught substantive solution, S. Does implementing B make implementing S less likely? If B didn’t exist, would S be more likely to come about? Surely there are cases where the answer to both questions is yes — and where therefore behavioral economics is a bad thing, not a good thing. The ability to cover up issues with a behavioral band-aid is often just a way of doing as little as possible while appearing to tackle the issue at hand.

That said, in a lot of cases S would never happen anyway, and in those cases B is better than nothing.

by Patrick Appel

I'm still trying to make sense of the bill, but I've pasted together some thoughts from around the web in the meantime. James Surowiecki:

The bill has been subject to considerable criticism because it doesn’t break up the country’s biggest banks, with people saying that this leaves our Too Big to Fail policy in place. But while the bill doesn’t do much, if anything, about the “Too Big” part, what it does do, at least in theory, is make it possible for even too-big institutions to fail, by creating a mechanism that will allow the government to, in effect, place failing institutions under conservatorship, and wind them down over time, thereby avoiding both the chaos of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on the one hand, and the need to give troubled banks government-subsidized handouts on the other.

Clive Crook:

The bill leaves multiple regulators with wide discretion across a range of critical issues. The argument over precisely what the new rules will be is barely getting started. Some of the most important questions -- such as the amount of capital financial firms will have to set aside -- are scarcely even addressed. Again and again, the bill calls for studies to be undertaken. No matter how these open issues are resolved, unintended consequences will come thick and fast. The whole thing is unfinished work with a vengeance. Nonetheless, better this than nothing.

Dave Schuler:

Had the measures in Dodds-Frank been in place in 2007 would it have prevented the financial crisis? Since the crisis seems to have been caused by borrowers taking on excessive debt, lenders taking on excessive risk, and the failure of any of a handful of financial institutions posing unacceptable risk to the entire financial system, the answer would appear to be no. Dodds-Frank does little if anything about any of these matters.

Yglesias:

by Dave Weigel

The backlash to the NAACP's resolution calling for the tea party movement to renounce racism ended pretty much as I expected -- with the tea partiers grabbing back the megaphone as the NAACP decided not to press the issue. (Indeed, the organization isn't making the full text of the resolution public.) Mark Williams, a former spokesman for the Tea Party Express whose string of extreme statements about the president (he calls him a Muslim) only stopped being a problem when he quit to run for office, calls the NAACP a "racist organization." Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots -- the latter was named one of the "Time 100" this year -- go a bit further.

The NAACP has long history of liberalism and racism. If you are a conservative — including a conservative African-American — there is no room for you at the NAACP. If you have opinions that differ from the NAACP and the liberal establishment, and if you are African-American, you are an “Uncle Tom,” a “negro,” “not black enough” and “against our people.”

When I said the NAACP's move would backfire, I meant things like this would happen. I didn't mean they were wrong to go down that road. It's just that they should know that calling out a group for "racism" is pointless -- whoever's been targeted will simply claim to have been attacked unfairly and had his free speech threatened. Remember what happened when Eric Holder said that America had been a "nation of cowards" in discussing race. Boom: Backlash. Anger. Debate over why he said it, but not what he meant. A year and change later we have a ridiculous national debate over whether Holder's department hates white people because it won't draw and quarter the New Black Panther Party. This stuff is what he meant, of course. But saying it isn't actually starting the debate. It's pretty obvious that the NAACP failed here.

by Chris Bodenner

An authoritative list.

by Patrick Appel

Joe Klein reports that it is actively being considered:

One other factor has brought the military option to a low boil: Iran's Sunni neighbors really want the U.S. to do it...It is also possible that this low-key saber-rattling is simply a message the U.S. is trying to send the Iranians: it's time to deal. There have been rumblings from Tehran about resuming negotiations, although the regime has very little credibility right now. The assumption — shared even by some of Iran's former friends, like the Russians — is that any Iranian offer to talk is really an offer to stall. A specific, plausible Iranian concession may be needed to get the process back on track. But it is also possible that the saber-rattling is not a bluff, that the U.S. really won't tolerate a nuclear Iran and is prepared to do something awful to stop it.

I'm reading a review copy of Hooman Majd's forthcoming book on the Iranian elections and on Iranian-American relations. Regardless what you happen to to think of Majd's political analysis (I happen to mostly agree with it), he has the most detailed and gripping reporting of the Iranian elections to date. I'll likely have more to say on the book when its release date nears, but for now I'll note that Majd convincingly argues that saber-rattling will not bring Iranians around. There was a brief moment at the beginning of the Iraq war when Iran thought the US might actually invade, and threats of military action might have won concessions at that point, but now that we are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan those threats are mostly toothless and the Iranians know it.

Iran is a proud country with an ancient history; trying to bend it to America's will through force alone is unlikely to succeed. It sees itself as an equal, as a superpower – or at least a regional superpower – in the making. However far-fetched that may seem to Americans, treating the nation like a donkey, to be controlled with carrots and sticks, is insulting to many Iranians and politically strengthens anti-American forces inside the Iranian government.

Negotiations have suffered from tone-deafness on both sides. I encourage the White House to get a copy of Majd's book. And for Dish readers to pre-order it.