We Are In Agreement

Happy Birthday to Meg

We had a party. People came. It was nice.

Matt Drudge is dumb

This (on Drudge) was a screaming headline yesterday, it's since been relegated to the lower columns, but the sentiment is the same:

It's a tragic story of two tourists murdered in Sarasota. 

Drudge is, I guess, criticizing Obama for his silence over this event (in light of the President's remarks on the Treyvon Martin slaying). From the linked story:

They spoke out as teenager Shawn Tyson began a life sentence after being found guilty of the murder of James Cooper and James Kouzaris last April.

The killer, Shawn Tyson, was caught, tried, and convicted. 

Careful analysis will reveal the differences between these murders and the Martin killing.

Massachusetts is a good place to live

The MA senate race is so goddamn wholesome it's loosening my stool; he's painting her as a Hah-vahd smarty-pants, she's painting him as a mimbo whose insufficiently supportive of women's rights (though still a decent guy!)

It's a Gilmore Girls episode.

Charles Pierce

I can totally see why we want to invade Iran

New York Times (link below):

Today, as suspicions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions have provoked tough sanctions and threats of military confrontation, top administration officials have said that Iran still has not decided to pursue a weapon, reflecting the intelligence community’s secret analysis.

[...]

Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, agrees with the American intelligence assessments, even while Israeli political leaders have been pushing for quick, aggressive action to block Iran from becoming what they describe as an existential threat to the Jewish state.

So just to recap: US intelligence doesn't think Iran is building nuclear weapons, Israeli intelligence agrees.

NYT

This is a reasonable parking policy

NYT But San Francisco is trying to shorten the hunt with an ambitious experiment that aims to make sure that there is always at least one empty parking spot available on every block that has meters.

The program, which uses new technology and the law of supply and demand, raises the price of parking on the city’s most crowded blocks and lowers it on its emptiest blocks. While the new prices are still being phased in — the most expensive spots have risen to $4.50 an hour, but could reach $6 — preliminary data suggests that the change may be having a positive effect in some areas.

Of course, I'm also for a London-style excise on city-drivers, so this is still just small step forward.

I'd love to get my hands on a copy of The Truax

The Lorax, on the other hand, has a more complicated political history. Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, wrote the book explicitly as a warning about excessive industrialization. This sparked controversy; as Daniel Horgan wrote in USA Today a few years ago, the book “was banned in a California school district,” and “several timber industry groups underwrote a book called The Truax with a pro-tree-cutting hero.” Truax is a logger, and his antagonist in the book (which you can read online) is Guardbark, an ugly woodland monster and rabid, unreasonable environmentalist.

Sounds pretty awesome.

Slate

This is what I was thinking but was unable to articulate

TPM's analysis of Mitt's sitch

Second, and a bit more intangibly,[Mitt Romney] running around the country in a long twilight struggle with Rick Santorum is just ... how to put it? inherently demeaning and diminishing. It's like struggling to land a one pound fish or searching for the way out of a paper bag. People see you doing that and you just look weak and feckless, even pitiful.

Santorum getting the nomination? Nate Silver hedges

To have a chance at winning in the delegate count, he will need to supplant Mr. Gingrich as Mr. Romney’s major rival in the South. The results in Missouri, a borderline Southern state where Mr. Santorum beat Mr. Romney by 30 points without Mr. Gingrich on the ballot, suggest that he could run strongly if Mr. Gingrich were to bow out.

It is certainly not a straightforward path, but nor is Mr. Romney’s at this point. And so far in this Republican race, betting on the underdog has yielded dividends.

538 via Sullivan

Heaven. Hidden right here in Los Angeles

The corner of Santa Monica and Highland

Obama slowing it down a little bit, for the ladies

From WaPo

Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.

Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama’s victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the “Obama Independents” — the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory — are, as Ryan Lizza put it, “disproportionately young, female and secular.”

This is starting to come into a sharper focus: