Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2543

Mitch Daniels, Reality-Based Conservative, Ctd

Tim Heffernan compares the Midwestern governor to the celebrities surrounding him:

Politico reports thatMitch Daniels is now openly laying the groundwork for a presidentialrun. This is not the coy bid for "optics" routinely pulled by presumedcandidates Palin, Romney, and Gingrich — not a trip to Iowa or NewHampshire to meet the demos, not a shiny new book full of apple pie and empty promises. It's a sit-down with a dozen of the Republican party's machers. It's as serious as a heart attack...

The View From Your Window

Pasadena, California, 2.38 pm

California - United States - Southern California - Los Angeles - Montana

The Senate Race For The 302

Dave Weigel hails from Delaware, a state with a single area code. He insists that the Tea Party candidate who stole its Republican primary doesn't have a chance in the general election:

I see a lot of conservatives arguing tonight that Christine O'Donnell's victory shows that she can upset the establishment and win this seat. These conservatives are not from Delaware. O'Donnell won a slim majority in a race with around 58,000 Republican voters. She won Kent and Sussex counties, the...

2 + 2 = Middle East Peace?

Building off Ezra Klein's column on the recent American Political Science Association meeting, Steven Hayward suggests that political science shouldn't endeavor to be economics:

The real problem with academic political science is its insistence onattempting to emulate the empiricism of economics and other socialsciences, such that the multiple regression analysis is consideredabout the only legitimate tool of the trade. Some regressions surelyilluminate, or more often confound, a popular...

American Non-Exceptionalism, Ctd

Jack Ewing checks in on global inequality:

The United States remains by far the nation with the most
with 101,762 euros ($130,764) per person in stocks, bank accounts
insurance, Allianz researchers said Tuesday. Some 39 percent of
world's wealth belongs to Americans, while Western Europe accounts
another 31 percent.

But American dominance of the world's financial assets is slipping.United States wealth has plunged 12 percent since 2007, as Americans'stock portfolios lost...

A United Front

Bradford Plumer noted yesterday that "only one of the 37 Republican candidates for Senate supports climate action - Mike Castle in Delaware." And Castle lost his primary last night:

Odds are ... climate legislation will be pulseless for the next two years. In the House, Joe Barton may well reclaim the chair of the energy and commerce committee. Barton, recall, is the guy who apologized to BP in the wake of the oil spill, and the last time he ran the House energy committee, in 2005, he helped...

Neo Slapstick

James Parker reviews the new Jackass movie and the genre:

Viewed critically and retrospectively, the show'sgenius stroke was to connect skater humor, which is violently lowbrowand absurdist (skaters love watching other skaters wipe out), to aslapstick tradition that went back to the rougher end of vaudeville, toJoe Keaton—Buster's father—doing his act "The Man With the Table" atHuber's Museum in New York City: crashing into the table, flying offthe table, fervently and bodily intervening in...

Where's Dubya? Ctd

A reader writes:

I've read a lot of these posts suggesting that George Bush could calm down the anti-Islamic hysteria by speaking out much as he did in the months and years after September 11th, but I'm pretty doubtful. It seems to me that the angry right has already moved on from Bush. Maybe others have a better read on the pulse of conservatives than I do, but I imagine that if Bush spoke out in favor of the Cordoba house, thereby taking a public stance against Palin and the official FOX...

Chart Of The Day

What people are buying online.

(Hat tip: Derek)

Business - Relationships - Kurt Warner - Derek Anderson - Derek Lam

Dynamic Duos

Joshua Wolf Shenk applauds creative pairs. One reason we focus on lone geniuses:

The custom of hidden partners is often industry standard: Tenure
committees insist on judging individual work, even though
collaborations are core to academic culture. CEOs have become like
synecdoches for their companies, though their effectiveness depends on
partners and teams. (Could Steve Jobs have reinvented Apple without his
design guru Jonathan Ive?)

Apple - Steve Jobs - Jonathan Ive - Chief ...