Robert Wright, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, says Sen. Jon Kyl is hysterical on START:
Kyl was complaining that the treaty deals only with strategic nuclear weapons (on long-range bombers, submarines or intercontinental missiles) and not with tactical nukes (the typically lower-yield, shorter-range warheads used to aid conventional forces in battle). One reason this is troubling, according to Kyl, is that Russia is so trigger-happy; whereas America views its nukes as a deterrent, he said, “to the Russians, tactical nuclear weapons are a battlefield weapon, just like artillery.”
Now, if Russia really did see tactical nuclear weapons as “just like artillery,” then sometime during the 1980s Afghanistan would have become a 250,000-square-mile expanse of warm glass.
Catherine A. Traywick says we need a deportation moratorium right now.
Meredith Attwell Baker, a Republican member of the FCC, wants the government to keep its "hands off tomorrow's Internet":
Discouragingly, the FCC is intervening to regulate the Internet because it wants to, not because it needs to. Preserving the openness and freedom of the Internet is non-negotiable; it is a bedrock principle shared by all in the Internet economy. No government action is necessary to preserve it. Acting only on speculative concerns about network operators and contrary to a decade of industry practice, the FCC is moving forward aggressively without real evidence of systemic competitive harms to cure, markets to fix or consumers to help.
Debra J. Saunders claims Obama is doing what Bush did.
Derrick Jackson writes that a Stanford Law Review study showing an increasing disparity in prison terms meted out since the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional is not necessarily the bad consequence the study's lead author claims it is.
Gary Younge offers advice on how to be President in a fact-free America.
Julie Burchill asks to be spared from the "pampered protesters" who she says are merely defending privilege to have people who don't go to university pay the tab for those who do.
Doyle McManus evaluates the Afghanistan "war's real report card":
The United States and NATO have embraced Karzai's target of turning over principal responsibility for the war to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, but that goal is only "aspirational," a Pentagon spokesman has said. (Moreover, he added, "It's the end of 2014, so effectively that's 2015.") And handing off to the Afghans won't mean a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops; officials have estimated that at least 35,000 would stay behind as advisors, even under a best-case scenario.
Stephanie Fairyington:
Dan Savage, the popular sex and relationship columnist, launched It Gets Better, a suicide prevention project for gay teens. Savage’s campaign includes a series of Web videos of queer and straight adults touting the message that life after middle and high school gets, well, better.
These are all noble and necessary efforts, but they aren't enough. Few queer youths on the brink of suicide are going to be soothed by the notion that at some unforeseeable time in the distant future their lives will improve. While we can’t immediately eradicate social contempt for homosexuality, we can and should help queer kids feel the power and pleasure in their otherness — right now.
David Limbaugh enlists in keyboard war against the "war on Christmas."