More on TARP

Will Wilkinson at the Economist's DIA.

U.S. Senate social graph

Click the fullscreen button...



(via DIA)

"Twenty words you can't say in Alabama"

From the Economist's peerless Democracy in America blog:

Every politician says something he has to walk back once in a while. In the case of Bradley Byrne, a Republican candidate for governor of Alabama, it was

I think there are parts of the Bible that are meant to be literally true and parts that are not.

Mr Byrne was battered by so much criticism that he quickly trudged to a Piggly Wiggly grocery store to hold a press conference and recant. Claiming he had been misquoted, he said

I believe the Bible is true. Every word of it.

Mr Byrne's momentary hesitation about the literal truth of every word of the Bible makes him the religious hippie in the Republican field. James Potts, another runner, thinks that public property should be allowed to display monuments to every faith—except Islam: "Either you accept our way of life or you go back to another country that is Muslim." All supported voluntary school prayer. All but one thought that public-school teachers should be allowed to teach from the Bible.

The one dissenter on that last question? Roy Moore, the judge famously stripped of his job as the state's chief justice for installing, then refusing to remove, a 5,200-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments in his courthouse. Yes, nearly all of the Republican candidates are running to Mr Moore's right on the role of Christianity in public life. Mr Moore's reason for not wanting to teach from the Bible in school was not, of course, because the Bible isn't perfect. He argued that government teaching of scripture could ruin it. Good to see that anti-government orthodoxy can still, sometimes, trump religious orthodoxy, in today's GOP.

Link blag

Ezra Klein defends the individual mandate.

He also says to stop worrying about inflation; Krugman agrees.

DIA's New York correspondent looks at criticisms of the torture trials and finds them wanting.

Pictures of libraries.

Ironic oil ad from the sixties.

Danish advocacy group encourages you to "hit the bitch" as part of their campaign to end domestic violence.

Statuary rape.

AT&T rep has a soul.

Comical dog exercise.

Who cools their coffee in a saucer, anyway?

DIA advocates abolishing the Senate.

Link blag

DIA: The fierce urgency of whatever

NYT: It's a fork, it's a spoon, it's a...weapon?

ABC: Tennessee woman arrested for poking someone over Facebook

WSJ: Reagan's secretary of state says the drug war is not working

Cato: Paul Krugman continues to be wrong

And the award of "best headline for something I skipped reading" goes to:
"Will Stimulating Nominal Aggregate Demand Solve our Problems?"

94% abstinence-only in Texas

Staggering:

[W]hen it comes to teenage births, the United States is backsliding. Between 1991 and 2005 the teenage birth rate declined by 34%, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. Between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, it crept up 5%.

[..] Consider Texas. The state requires only that public schools emphasise abstinence, not that they forsake all other approaches. Any district could choose to be more comprehensive. But few do. Last year the Texas Freedom Network, a religious-freedom watchdog, gathered curricular materials from the state’s public-school districts. Their findings, published earlier this year, are disturbing. Fully 94% of the districts took the abstinence-only approach. Those pamphlets and brochures that bothered to discuss contraceptives were often full of errors, or deliberately misleading.

The materials also traded on shame and fear. Across the state teenagers were warned that premarital sex could lead to divorce, suicide, poverty and a disappointed God. One district staged a skit about a young couple on their honeymoon. The husband presented his bride with a beautiful wrapped present that he had been saving for years. Her gift for him was in tatters.

This approach does not seem to be working.

How not to do propaganda

DIA:

Apparently Masa, a programme funded by the Israeli government that tries to build Zionism among young diaspora Jews bringing them to Israel for a year, is about to release a set of new ads in America warning of the dangers of intermarriage. The ads use a missing-persons theme, depicting Jews who marry gentiles as having disappeared or been abducted. By extension, the gentiles they have married are presumably analogised to kidnappers, murderers, terrorists, or perhaps (to take a charitable interpretation) natural disasters.

Pretty damn offensive... someone should re-introduce these folk to the Book of Ruth.

Quote of the day

DIA:

"I don't recall ever having a sitting president addressing schoolchildren. For major events, maybe, but not the first day of school. The whole thing makes me angry as an American."

—Andrew Palomo, the parent of a student at Barrington Middle School in Illinois, panicking about the president's planned address to schoolchildren on September 8th. George H.W. Bush actually addressed schoolchildren in a national broadcast 18 years ago. It's odd what makes people angry these days.

More flawed and more influential than his brothers

DIA with a good Kennedy retrospective.

Moderate is the new liberal, or we're all socialists now.

DIA ponders the reform kerfuffle.

Stat of the day

DIA highlights:

Traces of cocaine taint up to 90 percent of paper money in the United States, a new study finds.

I'd heard this before, but apparently that's a new study confirming it.

For fun, DIA asks which American city has the lowest levels of cocaine in their bills. I guessed right. (answer in the article)

Why the Right's foreign policy sucks

I'll let DIA explain:

JOHN BOLTON is probably the only person curmudgeonly enough to frown on the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Mr Bolton is no fool in general, but in calling this a "classic case of rewarding bad behaviour", his analysis is just plain wrong. It depends on a mistaken, and dangerous, assumption made again and again during the Bush administration, and these days still by Republicans out of power. This is the idea that negotiations themselves are some kind of reward for bad regimes, and until they lay down their arms and promise America everything it wants, they should be utterly shunned.

According to my simple quick think through history, George W. Bush may be the only postwar president never to have met with an adversarial leader (unless perhaps you count Vladimir Putin, which I wouldn't). This is no Democratic weakness, appeasing baddies. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and the first George Bush all made major diplomatic breakthroughs by dealing with unfriendly states, because they weren't afraid that a photo-op was a concession. Mr Bolton remains terrified that it is, even though neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama have conceded anything (publicly) more than a few photographs for the release of two young women.

If America had a shadow foreign secretary as Britain has, Mr Bolton would probably be it. He is ceaselessly sought out for the conservative view on the foreign policy of the day. It's a shame. The right needs to get past bluster as policy—or at least stop fetishising Ronald Reagan.

Bolton is hardly the only one, though. Krauthammer: "It was a hostage ransom. No question at all," He says he doesn't know if money or goods were promised or exchanged.

Naming SUPERCARRIERS

Yglesias complains. I'm with DIA's suggestions.

Children of the revolution

DIA examines the disenchantment of "process-oriented moderate liberals" Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias.

I'm with Conor, who prefers it slow and steady.

Dancing on the grave of the F-22

DIA celebrates:

WE QUICKLY noted the defeat of funding for construction of new F-22 stealth fighter planes yesterday, but Fred Kaplan argues that the 58-40 vote was the start of a "new phase in defense politics". For decades, contractors had kept up funding for such boondoggles by making it politically impossible to kill them. "The Air Force shrewdly spread the plane's contracts to firms in 46 states," Mr Kaplan explains, "thus giving a solid majority of senators—and a lot of House members, too—a financial (and, therefore, electoral) stake in the program's survival." Hence we created the phrase "non-defence discretionary spending", in order to separate the cuttable parts of the budget from that most sacrosanct form of spending.

But with contractors seemingly giving up the fight on the F-22, senators have done the politically impossible and killed a wasteful defence programme. They have overcome the contracting schemes and accepted the inevitable political heat (cue Zell Miller). Perhaps only a Republican defence secretary and a Democratic Congress could've made it happen. Perhaps Robert Gates, respected by Democrats and Republicans alike, was the key factor. In other words, perhaps this feat will not be repeated by future congresses. But let's be optimistic. If this is a new era for defence spending, it's a new era for government spending, period.

Happy days ahead for moderates?

Writes DIA:

If Republicans really run the table next year, they'll hold open seats in Florida, New Hampshire and Ohio; they'll save endangered seats in Kentucky and North Carolina; and they'll win Democratic seats in Illinois, Delaware, Arkansas and Connecticut. Right now, that's as good as they could do, and it would leave them at 44 Senate seats. Several of those seats would likely be filled by the sort of moderate Republicans who got wiped out in 2006 and 2008. Both Mike Castle and Mark Kirk, the Republicans who are favoured to run in Delaware and Illinois, voted for the Democrats' cap-and-trade bill. The party's candidates in Florida and New Hampshire are more moderate than the incumbents they'd be replacing.

If the party nabbed seats in Arkansas and Connecticut it would move the Senate to the right, but incrementally so. The Senate of 2011 would be a pundit's dream—half a dozen moderate Republicans working across the aisle with moderate Democrats—and a progressive's nightmare.

Arab reactions

Some representative op-eds and editorial cartoons from arabic-speaking countries. My favorites:

The New American Cowboy

Attempting to Repair the Rift between West and East

Pro-Israel subtext

(ht DIA)

Voice of experience

"I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools."

—Karl Rove, arguing that Obama';s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor may "not necessarily" be smart.

DIA notes:

Mr Rove is most famous for managing the two gubernatorial and two presidential campaigns of George W Bush, who graduated from Yale University (1968) and Harvard Business School (1975).

What are Israelis thinking?

DIA:

The percentage of Israelis who think Barack Obama is "pro-Israel": 31%

The percentage of Israelis who called Mr Obama's predecessor "pro-Israel": 88%

Barack Obama's overtures to Arab nations have come with a price. So far it's been just enough to deal with.