Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2722

Journo-list And Selective Editing

A reader writes:

I don't see how you can be disgusted with Breitbart for what he did on one hand, while at the same time calling out people on the Journo-List because of some selectively edited emails posted on the Daily Caller. (Tucker Carlson has told Greg Sargent he won't publish the full emails.) You're not making sense here. I know you say this is about liberal group think, but you don't know what was discussed on the list. You're drawing conclusions based on nothing but some selectively...

Not An Onion Headline

Kate Gosselin, Sarah Palin will allegedly go camping together. What's next: a Martini summit with Danielle? But this I had to love:

Sarah Palin has even reportedly said that she will "teach Kate how to avoid bears" during the visit.

Sarah Palin - Kate Gosselin - United States - Politics - Republican

The Other Timeline In Iraq

Joel Wing explains the diplomatic withdrawal:

The U.S. currently has a series of branch embassy offices throughoutIraq that would be closed down by 2014. The State Department is alsodue to take over the police training program in Iraq from the military,and that too will come to end in 3-5 years. The 16 ProvincialReconstruction Teams (PRTs) would also be consolidated into threeoffices and two consulates, before being phased out as well. After fiveyears then, the U.S. diplomatic presence in...

Britain's "Startling Growth"

A big boom in construction and services has taken experts by surprise. Unlike the US, almost all the growth came from the private sector. The buoyancy makes the looming austerity less troubling, it seems to me.
















Private sector - Economic - Construction - Social Sciences - Forecasting and Consulting

DOMA In Real Life

A new video on Social Security inequality by Shawn Nee:

Thank You For Your Call from Shawn Nee / discarted on Vimeo.

Vimeo - Social Security - Business - Multimedia - Development Frameworks

Sarah Palin vs The Mosque, Ctd

Noah Millman says it well:

Some of "them" are "us." There are American Muslims. There is an –there are various – American Islam(s). That's just a fact. There arecertainly Muslims (mostly non-American) who deny that fact – who wantto argue that Muslims in America can have no true loyalty to America,but must be loyal to some imaginary global Islamic communal interest.And there are certainly non-Muslims who would deny that fact in similarterms. But a fact it is. The problem with this Republican...

The Cognitive Surplus, Ctd

A reader writes:

That graphic is interesting, but it seems a bit misleading. 100 million hours may have been spent creating Wikipedia -- but a great many articles are based off the fact that people spent 200 million hours watching TV, updating pages on LOST, updating pages on The Golden Girls, writing biographies for M*A*S*H actors, etc.  And I wrote some of my finest theological writing last year because I'd spent 50 hours watching Battlestar Galactica and doing some reflection in response...

Where Do Agendas Come From?

Brendan Nyhan counters Matt Bai:

What Bai doesn't seem to realize is that elections do not ever indicatethe will of the people in some well-defined sense (there is a vasttechnical literature on this point). The best political scienceresearch to date convincingly arguesthat mandates should be viewed as a social construction. Moreover, it'snot clear that presidents enact legislation intended to make them morepopular. Contemporary presidents tend to pursue the agenda of their party, not the...

Chart Of The Day

Jacob Hacker et al project that economic insecurity is reaching news highs. Drum summarizes:

Basically, [the Economic Security Index:] measures the number of people who have experienced a
major loss in income (25% or more) — either due to a decline in income
or large out-of-pocket medical expenses or both — and who lack adequate
financial wealth to buffer the drop. By their projection, the number of
Americans in this category is now over 20%, far higher than in any
previous recession.

...

Wages In China

From a reader in Shenzhen, a Chinese export hub:

There's two issues with that China "wage" graph. The first is that it compares wages using PPP, purchasing power parity, which is a number adjusted for cost of living. While this is a fine chart to show the relative average buying power of Chinese vs. Vietnamese, it doesn't do anything to show the actual GDP per capita, which could potentially tell you something about wages ($3678 for China, $1060 for Vietnam). Why not just compare real wages...