Today on the Dish, Andrew challenged Niall Ferguson on whether McCain or intervention could help America's cause or the well-being of people in the Middle East. We tracked Tehran's heavy clashes and escalated repression, and Joel Wing traced Iraq's protests back to the Day of Rage. Richard Florida assembled the index of political unrest, Qaddafi was the sort of dictator to hang students in a university's main square, and according to the military, a no-fly zone would be a military operation. Egypt and Tunisia could learn from Asian revolutions and the small window of democratic opportunity that followed, Facebook mattered, and Egypt's military crafted their media campaigns.

Andrew demolished Huckabee's insane birther gaffe, Palin was still making Andrew nervous, and the Palestinian Prime Minister was following her Facebook model. Julian Assange pulled a Helen Thomas, and John Galliano pulled a Mel Gibson. Andrew still had problems with teachers' concessions as part of a larger union problem, even as they were winning the debate. Mickey commended MoveOn as the new union model, Wilkinson debated Ezra Klein on whether big labor is green, others argued public sector unions may be headed for the door, while Drum sounded the alarm for the GOP. Serwer called out Newt the culture warrior, Seth Masket argued you can't run government like a business, evangelicals wanted to cut spending for the poor, and the rich vote like rich people. Economists could be the new climatologists, and Noah Millman pondered American aversion to inflation.

Musical chairs continued at the NYT, Alexis unmasked Twitter's MayorEmanuel, and the publisher could die at the hands of a 26-year-old self-publishing author. CEOs with daughters paid female employees more, child brides had lower literacy rates, and Carol Joynt confessed how breast cancer is a swim in quicksand. Dish readers loved cock and boner too much to go along with the new rules, while Beast readers bemoaned Andrew's loyalty to the Pope. Bush gave the original King's Speech, people should write like they talk, and beards were mysterious and practical. 

Hewitt award here, quote for the day here, FOTD here, MHB here, VFYW here, and VFYW contest winner #39 here.

--Z.P.

Andrew Gelman rejects overconfidence in punditry:

[O]f course it makes sense that different people have different views about foreign policy. What stuns me (although I know it shouldn't anymore) is that these pundits seem so clueless, so unaware that not everyone agrees with their premises. If Prell and Hitchens could just sit in a room for a few minutes together, talk about how much they hate Obama, and then discuss the Middle East, maybe they'd each realize, just a little bit, that their views are not so universally accepted. Prell would learn that at least one wholesome Obama-hater does not think that Mubarak is such a good [long-term] deal for the Middle East, and Hitchens would learn that you don't have to be a European-style softie to be skeptical of faraway regime changes.

Those are the words of Nadia, a young female activist fighting for democracy in Egypt, three years before Mubarak was forced from office. For more on the roots of the Facebook revolution, check out Frontline's excellent supplement to its recent episode:

Back in July 2008, Australian television profiled Egypt's young democracy activists and their savvy use of social media. The film included the April 6 Movement's Ahmed Maher and blogger Wael Abbas, both featured in FRONTLINE's Revolution in Cairo. Several activists, who just got out of prison, were reluctant to appear on camera; much of the film, reported by Sophie McNeill, was recorded in secret.

It's coming - if this becomes more common:

Amanda Hocking is 26 years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published.

Exum seconds General Jim Mattis's comments on the difficulty of establishing a no-fly zone:

I have been working under the suspicion that most of the good-natured people clamoring for a no-fly zone in Libya have not thought very hard about what, exactly, that might entail. Most of the people insisting the United States DO SOMETHING are either ignorant about the risks and complexities of contemporary military operations or gloss over those risks and complexities. [For more on no-fly zones, read this informative piece by my old colleague Michael Knights.]

Some anti-Qaddafi rebels are now mulling requesting a possible UN-sponsored bombing raid on some of Qaddafi's military installations. That isn't a no-fly zone. But even that limited amount of foreign intervention is controversial in Libya:

The anti-government protesters in Libya, like their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt, have drawn broad popular support — and great pride — from their status as homegrown movements that toppled autocrats without outside help. An intervention, even one with the imprimatur of the United Nations, could play into the hands of Colonel Qaddafi, who has called the uprising a foreign plot by Western powers seeking to occupy Libya.

Dan Savage asks it.

Julian Assange goes all Helen Thomas on us. Who you gonna call? Goldbuster!

He's now withdrawn the statement that Obama grew up in Kenya and says he meant Indonesia. Here's the original quote:

"One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American ... his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British are a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

Well, how do you get a view of the Mau Mau revolution in Indonesia? So I don't buy the mis-spoke explanation. And Obama did not "grow up with" a Kenyan father and grandfather. Seriously, how can you have any understanding of Obama without knowing he yearned for his absent father and was brought up largely by his white mom and white grandparents? He also returned the Churchill bust to the Brits when the unique loan to a single president after 9/11 expired. Lincoln replaced him. The British Embassy stated: ""It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the President was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009."

Then Huck's spokesman denies that Huckabee indulged in birtherism. Via Ben Smith:

“When the Governor mentioned he wanted to know more about the President, he wasn’t talking about the President’s place of birth – the Governor believes the President was born in Hawaii. The Governor would however like to know more about where President Obama’s liberal policies come from and what else the President plans to do to this country – as do most Americans.”

Here's the quote of the exchange:

MALZBERG: Don't you think it's fair also to ask him, I know your stance on this. How come we don't have a health record, we don't have a college record, we don't have a birth cer - why Mr. Obama did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to defend against having to present a birth certificate. It's one thing to say, I've -- you've seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don't you think we deserve to know more about this man?

HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough ...

Why not deny this empirically disproven nonsense right there and then? And later on:

MALZBERG: Would you say to him, or at least ask him in a debate, why did you go to court and spend millions of dollars on lawyers to prevent from having to show your birth certificate. If you have one and it's there, why not show it?

HUCKABEE: The only reason I'm not as confident that there's something about the birth certificate, Steve, is because I know the Clintons [inaudible] and believe me, they have lots of investigators out on him, and I'm convinced if there was anything that they could have found on that, they would have found it, and I promise they would have used it. 

My italics. So Huckabee does not believe the State of Hawaii or the birth certificate on record. And he remains a Birther - only a not-so-confident one. And only the fact that the Clintons didn't use this non-issue is salient data for him. As for not knowing what Obama will "do to this country," Huckabee could have followed the last election campaign; or Obama's multiple speeches; or his actions of the last couple years. But nah. There's something we don't yet know about that really motivates him. This is D'Souza-Kurtz loopiness regurgitated. The same D'Souza nonsense that Gingrich immediately endorsed.

And as a Brit, I have to say I find it remarkable to hear Americans of all people deny that the British Empire was, in fact, imperialist. Well, wasn't it? I mean: how else would you describe British rule in Kenya? Enhanced occupation techniques?

Huckabee always seems a pleasant fellow. But then you hear him on gays or on Israel/Palestine or on this kind of issue, and you realize just how extreme this affable man actually is.

[Update: the first version of this got the details about the Churchill bust wrong. It was not moved to the White House residence but to the residence of the British ambassador. Apologies.]

(Photo: Former Arkansas Gov. and possible Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee speaks during a corner stone dedication ceremony for a new Jewish settlement on January 31, 2011 at Beit Orot, between Mount Scopus and Mount of Olives, in East Jerusalem, Israel. According to reports, Huckabee compared attempts at preventing Jewish settlers to building in east Jerusalem to racism and apartheid. By Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Richard Florida has assembled "statistics from 152 nations and sorted them according to eight key variables: human capital levels in combination with percent of the workforce in the creative class, life satisfaction, GDP per capita, perceptions about local labor market conditions, Internet access, freedom, tolerance, and honesty in elections:"

Andrew Koppelman takes aim at them:

Frederick Schauer ... showed over 25 years ago that any slippery slope argument depends on a prediction that doing the right thing in the instant case will in fact increase the likelihood of doing the wrong thing in the danger case. If there is in fact no danger, then the fact that there logically could be has no weight. For instance, the federal taxing power theoretically empowers the government to tax incomes at 100%, thereby wrecking the economy. But there’s no slippery slope, because there is no incentive to do this, so it won’t happen.

Austin Frakt agrees:

A reader writes:

I just looked over last week's Wieseltier and Kristol pieces (remarkably similar in their perspective) and now view them as wrong in their factual assumptions about what the Obama team was up to as well. They charge Obama and Clinton with being weak-willed and slow to move. I think they're right that Obama could have been more resolute in his official remarks. But with what's now come out about the row at the Security Council, it turns out that Wieseltier and Kristol were just wrong on the facts.

Drum uses PPP's poll to downgrade the GOP's 2012 chances:

Scott Walker's brand of hardball might easily bump up the Democratic share of the union vote to 70% or more in 2012, and that represents a gain of nearly two percentage points in the overall popular vote. Unless Republicans can somehow contrive an anti-union message that wins that back among non-union independents, their chances next year have suddenly gotten a whole lot longer.

Scott Lucas captions:

A new poster featuring the pictures of Iran's political prisoners, including recent detainees Mir Hossein Mousavi (second row, right), his wife Zahra Rahnavard (top row, right), and Fatemeh and Mehdi Karroubi (top and second rows, second from right):

James Mattis, the general in charge of US Central Command, tells a Senate committee that establishing a NFZ "would be challenging":

You would have to remove the air defence capability in order to establish a no-fly zone - so no illusions here - it would be a military operation, it wouldn’t simply be telling people not to fly airplanes.

Dish discussion of the possibility here, here and here.

Eric Trager reports from Cairo on the actions of Egypt's military:

“I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. ... If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” - Mike Huckabee.

A classic meme that never tires:

Erica Silverman analyzes Fatah Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's recent embrace of Facebook:

Fayyad, with his eye on the presidency, is looking to demonstrate that he is a reformist who can deliver between Fatah and Hamas. His new online presence is a nod toward transparency from a government that many see as corrupt and unaccountable. Fayyad also clearly prefers for Palestinians to vent their frustrations on Facebook rather than on the streets.

And we all know who led the way: Queen Esther of Alaska.

The always vivacious Carol Joynt began her blog yesterday with the following words:

It took a few days to come to terms with the words that lead this post: I. Have. Breast. Cancer. At first, I allowed them in my head in only a whisper: I have breast cancer. Soon I had to speak to them to myself. I have breast cancer.  And now, I have to learn to say them to others. "I have breast cancer." To my son. To our dearest friends. To people I'm acquainted with who matter to me. And here, too, on  this blog. I have to own them, let them in. I thought long and hard about posting them here--should I? shouldn't I?''-- but realized it's happening not only to me, its happening to one in six women, and it's real;  it is the very core of "swimming in quicksand." If breast cancer isn't a swim in quicksand then what is? A doctor said, "you are in a large sisterhood."

You don't see it coming. One day life is normal, and the next its off the cliffside.

A reader, inspired by this post, writes:

I'm lucky enough to take a week off work each February or March and take my family to Utah for some skiing.  For the last several years I've stopped shaving just after Christmas so that I have a beard by the time we get to the mountains.  I always used to tell myself (or anyone who asked about the extra facial hair) that it was good warmth and protection for my face while skiing, but that was mostly speculation on my part.  This year it was proven correct.

The week we were in Utah we got a little over four feet of new snow and had some pretty windy days.  Not being used to so much powder, I ate snow all week. But unlike my companions, I was quite comfortable after resurrecting myself from an epic wipeout.  When coupled with a pair of goggles, I probably didn't have more than a square inch of exposed skin on my cheeks.  (Plus, it looks freaky cool when you get a half inch layer of frozen snow and breath over the lower half of your face.)

Joshua Kurlantzick lists what Egypt and Tunisia should learn from Asia's revolutions in the 1980s and 1990s:

Much of the future of Asia's emerging democracies was determined within a year after popular protest appeared to end authoritarian rule. In the Philippines, the inability to erase the influence of the country's handful of massive landowners--including the Aquino clan--meant that the country remained mired in a kind of oligarchic politics--and today, without a popular revolution, it will be hard to change that trend. In Thailand, the refusal in the early democratic period of the 1990s to use constitutional change to reexamine the role of the monarchy and its institutions led to the continuation of undemocratic power wielded by the trinity of bureaucracy, military, and palace.

The video is here. In vino veritas. Makes Carlos Estevez look subtle.

Lisa Miller analyzed a Pew report on the fiscal conservatism of evangelicals. Chait deflates my wishful thinking:

[I]f you look at programs that make up the bulk of the federal budget -- Medicare, Social Security, defense, and homeland security -- evangelicals support for spending cuts ranges from the low teens to the low twenties. Compared to other Americans, evangelicals are very slightly more likely to favor Medicare cuts (but still far less than 20% do), no more likely to favor Social Security cuts, and less likely to favor cuts to defense and homeland security.

I guess I was responding to the rhetoric, not the underlying practical reality. Christianists favor the biggest cuts in spending on the poor and unemployed and the smallest cuts in the military-industrial complex. Now you know a little why I find using the term "Christian" to describe this political ideology a little difficult. Bernstein nods and chips in his two cents:

Fadel Lamen recounts his harrowing experiences with the autocrat:

While I attended Tripoli University (al-Fateh) in 1980, Gaddafi ordered the college militarized. Along with other student leaders, I rejected this order. In response, he sent in his revolutionary guards militia.

Numerous students were hanged in the university's main square. The security forces also attacked a local mosque, which they believed was encouraging the disobedience. Several worshippers were arrested, and tortured to death; the imam, meanwhile, was taken to a wooden area outside Tripoli, shot, and buried.

(Photo: Prime Minister Tony Blair embraces Colonel Moammar Gadhafi after a meeting on May 29, 2007 in Sirte, Libya. Blair is on a five day visit to meet with African leaders as he prepares to stand down as Britain's Prime Minister on June 27. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I often find it funny to read historians that are mindful to point out specific contexts in history that we should be mindful of, while they ignore the current environment in which this historical analogy is playing out. For example, Niall Ferguson tells us that the people in Libya are close (in education and financial wherewithal) to the sans-culottes commoner occupying the back streets of Paris. Perhaps. But a salient point regarding the current Middle East events is to recognize that they're going on NOW, not back in 1848, and are thus able to view the outside modernized world through the window of the Internet.

"Most people are a thousand times more interesting when they’re talking than when they’re writing. Why is this? Because people panic when they start writing. People instantly revert to memories of 10th grade English class, and memories of No. 2 pencils, and lined notebooks. And then they freak out and tense up. Don’t tense up. Just relax. Seriously."

Other tips here.

Enduring America is tracking today's dramatic developments in Iran:

1254 GMT: RAHANA sums up the current situation in Tehran poignantly: "Tehran has once again become a barracks."

1535 GMT: Rah-e-Sabz reports at least 10 people arrested in Mashhad. BBC Persian reports shots fired near Vanak Square in Tehran. Tehran witness says protesters are chanting "Death to Dictator" near Azadi & Enghelab Avenues.

1605 GMT: Mardomak reports that rallies are trying to form in Tabriz and Shiraz, but are being blocked by security forces. A witness is reporting "mass arrests" in Tehran.

1616 GMT: Saham News is reporting --- but now as "unconfirmed" --- that two security vans were set on fire by protestors at Enghelab Square.

1724 GMT: A Journalist, speaking to Kaleme, reported that he was "spattered in blood" after security fired shots into the crowd. Kaleme is calling today's security presence in Tehran, and the resulting violence, "unprecidented." We have not yet verified these reports.

Tehran Bureau has more:

Lots of feedback in the blogosphere here, here, here and here. My favorite comment here:

Sorry to learn of Sullivan... His loyalty to the Pope makes me cringe.

A plea from a Libyan fighting Qaddafi. He's fine with a no-fly zone - but no foreign troops on the ground.

"Rumsfeld's memoir is one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others - including President Bush - distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away. It is a travesty, and I think the rewrite job won't wash," - Bob Woodward, guest-blogging for Tom Ricks.

It's a must-read because it reveals not only lies of omission, but downright, well, lies. He'll deny something to your face insistently until he's proven wrong, and then he'll concede.

I remember once challenging him on why the Pentagon was firing so many Arab translators at a time when intelligence was vital - just because they were gay. He denied any Arabic translators, gay or straight, had been fired at all. This was just not true. At the end of our spirited but good-natured interaction, he said he'd look into it. I wonder if he ever did.

A reader writes:

Brest, France? Just a wild guess, since I can't see any clues at all in this thing.

Another writes:

The bin, the railings, the green doors, the sky and the wet ground tell me that I know this place well. I think it could be in Dublin, Ireland, maybe outside the Convention Centre at Spencer Dock. Probably wrong, but I still think I'll know the place well.

Another:

I am going to guess that this somewhere on the edges of Canary Wharf, London. The late-'80s corporate style matches, as does the waterfront location. However, these elements must exist in any number of other developments of that era - I have checked Vancouver, Seattle, and Dublin without apparent success. The main reason I am unhappy with my guess is the white colonnaded tower in the top right quarter of the photo - nowhere I've looked has that feature.

Another:

Ok, I haven't got the slightest idea where this is. That would appear to be a river, not an ocean, so there's no point in searching coastlines, I've got no real idea what the triangle things are on the left, there's a phantom triangle that might be a mountain just above the blue temporary wall, and no one can read the plaque on the near railing. There's a Roman-style cupola or steeple visible in the upper right if you use various Photoshop-like techniques, but that just means there's a town hall somewhere nearby.

In short, the photo has a North American quality to it, the building looks like it was made between the 20s and the 40s or thereabouts, and beyond that, you just plain haven't given us enough clues. Such is life. Ottawa is as good a guess as any.

Another:

Venice, Italy?  Specifically, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal. That's the first thing I thought when I saw the photo. The fact that I thought of an answer so quickly suggests I'm probably way off.

Another:

I don't know where it is, but it's too fucking clean to be Venice.

Another:

Hollywood fights back:

Alexis reveals the identity of Twitter star @MayorEmanuel:

There is no doubt that [the Twitter account] is a cultural work of some kind. And at 1,942 tweets and probably 30,000 words, it's a piece of writing with some heft and depth.

In his article yesterday, mentioned here, Niall Ferguson claimed that "the correct strategy" in the Middle East would have been pursued if John McCain had been elected president:

The correct strategy—which, incidentally, John McCain would have actively pursued had he been elected in 2008—was twofold. First, we should have tried to repeat the successes of the pre-1989 period, when we practiced what we preached in Central and Eastern Europe by actively supporting those individuals and movements who aspired to replace the communist puppet regimes with democracies. ... The second part of our strategy should have been to exploit the divisions within the Islamist movement.

Larison's eyes widen:

Only the hopelessly naive (or the desperately opportunistic partisan) would believe that a little more McCain-sponsored Western support for, say, Ayman Nour would have dramatically altered the political landscape in Egypt in just a few years’ time. If “the best organized, most radical, and most ruthless elements” will be able to exploit the situation in Egypt now, they would have been able to do so even if the U.S. had followed all of the democracy promotion advocates’ advice.

There is also a pretty massive difference between Eastern and Central Europe in 1989 and the Arab world today. Much of central Europe had been occupied by the Soviets and their dictatorships were enabled by such a power. The US was that power's global enemy. And so decades of pro-Americanism had prepared the way for the moral credibility of American intervention.

The opposite is the case in the Arab and Muslim Mediterranean and Middle East. For decades, the West - following Kissingerian logic - propped up these monsters and tyrants. When we invaded Iraq, we copied thir methods of rule - with mass arrests and torture - before finding a way to construct an Iraqracy that would enable us to save face enough to leave.

In Libya right now, Niall is arguing for armed intervention because of the ghastly fact of possibly thousands of murdered Libyans. I don't doubt his sincerity or motives. But when the US occupied and was responsible for security in Iraq, over a hundred thousand people were murdered in sectarian warfare. If carnage is your metric, how on earth can the West preach now about humanitarian values? Paul Wolfowitz - yes a man who served in the Defense Department under which so many were slaughtered in the streets of Iraq and so many tortured by US soldiers and CIA agents - worries that America's "moral credibility" will be shaken by not intervening in Libya. Is he out of his fucking mind?

Whatever moral credibility America hs ever had in the Middle East was destroyed by Wolfowitz and his crew. McCain particularly has none, especially after he signed off on the very same torture techniques once used on him. I totally accept the fear that revolutions can result in worse tyrannies than they replaced. I also see the benefit of exploiting intra-Muslim splits when and where we can if necessary. But the danger there is the US becoming involved in a sectarian struggle between Sunni and Shiite. It's not as if we need to remind the Arab world why the brutal regime of the King of Jordan is scared to death of Iran - as well as bigoted toward Shiites in general. Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs/Persians are already divided. There may be some tactical opportunities to protect our interests, but a strategy? God help us.

On collective bargaining it appears they are, both nationally and in Wisconsin. Ed Morrissey questions the NYT poll's sample here.

It's a little meta - did a review quote a parody of a roman a clef about Obama? - but a good question. I kinda dismissed the notion that Mark Salter wrote the apparently dreadful anonymous novel "O". Salter, I figured was a great fiction writer. And his greatest fictional character came to be John McCain.

A reader writes:

No. I will not pronounce Koch "Cock." I will not pronounce Boehner "Boner." I like those two things too much.

Yglesias hopes it's going to get easier:

Good news: “Responding to criticism that tenure gives even poor teachers a job for life, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, announced a plan Thursday to overhaul how teachers are evaluated and dismissed. It would give tenured teachers who are rated unsatisfactory by their principals a maximum of one school year to improve. If they did not, they could be fired within 100 days.”

Okay. Now do this thought experiment and try and simulate it in a private sector context. Say there's a teacher who is cited by his principal in February for dismal performance. If he's still a terrible teacher in April, no problem. Come May, he needn't have improved. In June, he can send his underprepared students on to the next grade, enjoy his summer vacation, and return in September to a new class, educating them poorly too. In fact, those kids will keep falling behind in October, November, December and January. Finally, February rolls around again. A year later, the teacher hasn't improved a bit. Can he be fired?

No, the principal then must wait 100 days. And that's the concession. My own view is that if unions did less protection of mediocrity and more protection of wages and benefits, their general image would improve drastically. But they cannot expect to continue their bad old ways and win public support in recessionary America.

One thing to remind people about New York Magazine's coup in wooing Frank Rich away from the NYT is that Rich and Adam Moss are not just friends, but creative colleagues going back for ever. Together they also were pioneers in the coverage of gay issues long before that was regarded as part of understanding the world. Maybe Rich will also write again on theater or film. But it's a big blow to the NYT.

Rich Lowry sounds nervous sizing up 2012:

Mickey wonders if we haven't already glimpsed institutions that make unions' political role redundant:

Port of Spain, Trinidad, 4.30 pm

Eric Barker excerpts a new study:

We observe that when a daughter was born to a male CEO, wages paid to the CEO's female employees rose relative to the wages paid to male employees. The effect was stronger for the first daughter, and stronger still if the first daughter was also the first child.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen is willing "to accept the consensus view of specialists in most fields" barring "real evidence of systematic bias or incompetence." He asks:

Why don’t we accord the same level of deference to economists? Shouldn’t the pro-free trade consensus within the field of economics be as bullet-proof as belief in global warming? It’s not a partisan issue – in my opinion, the best introduction to the benefits of international trade was written by Paul Krugman. And the strength of the pro-free trade consensus in economics is at least as robust as the consensus view among climatologists. There are a few high profile dissenters, but those exist in every field, including climatology.

Ezra Klein asserts that unions "push back on business models that they don’t consider sustainable for their workers or, increasingly, for the environment." Wilkinson counters:

Private-sector unions and big business come to blows over a cutting-the-cake problem. But the interests of labour and capital are aligned when it comes to the size of the shared cake. ... I think you'll find that unionised coal miners are as unenthusiastic as the coal companies they work for about regulations that would restrict the growth of mining operations or reduce demand for coal.

The Economist looks at the latest numbers:

According to a UNICEF report, most child marriages take place between the ages of 15 and 18, but in three countries, Niger, Chad and Bangladesh, more than a third of women aged 20-24 were already married by the age of 15. Such practices often flout the law: whilst the legal age of marriage in India is 18 around half of the Indian women surveyed were already married by that age. One negative effect of early marriage is the exclusion of women from education in favour of domestic work and child rearing. So countries with a high prevalence of child marriages also tend to have low literacy rates for young women.

(Photo: Innat Edison, 15, stands inside her mother's cramped, dingy house in Chiringani village, southwestern Malawi, nursing her 2-month-old baby, Crispin. Her former fiance refuses to acknowledge their child as his own. In isolated villages and crumbling cities across the most destitute continent, girls younger than 14 are finding boyfriends and getting married in a bid to escape the empty bellies, numbing work and overwhelming tedium of poverty. By Obed Zilwa/AP)

Seth Masket says it's not possible:

There's nothing wrong with the idea that governments should be run more efficiently or with better customer service, and if that's what people mean, they should say that. But to say that governments should be run like businesses is to reveal ignorance about what either governments or businesses -- or both -- are.

Andrew Gelman revisits an old hobbyhorse:

Wealthier people tend to be more economically conservative; lower-income people are more likely to support taxes on the rich. This is no surprise: of course it makes sense that if you have more money you’ll have more sympathy with the argument that people should keep what they earn, and if you have less you’ll be more likely to favor redistribution. The correlation between income level and economic ideology is weak (we have graphs in Red State, Blue State making this point), but it’s not zero. Nor would you expect it to be.

Serwer tackles Gingrich for lying about Obama's DOMA decision:

Now that Gingrich appears poised to announce a presidential exploratory committee (his odd history with them nonwithstanding), it's time to stop pretending that he's somehow more policy oriented or less extreme than the other candidates. Gingrich is just as likely as Sarah Palin to offer culture war demagoguery in place of substantive policy arguments, the only difference is that he's more successful at framing culture war red meat in pseudo-intellectual terms. 

Walter Russell Mead argues that the "alliance between public sector labor unions and Democratic politicians is much more feeble than it looks." With Democrats increasingly unable to fullfill union demands, he expects "union dues will stop looking like a good investment and start looking like an unnecessary expense":

Currently, 36 percent of the country’s government employees belong to a union — about where private sector unions were at their 1953 peak.  In 2010 for the first time more union members worked for the government than worked in the private sector.  That isn’t going to last ...