Dana Milbank wonders if Israel has seen its last democratic election.
Eleven years ago, I carried my infant daughter into a synagogue basement and plunged her tiny body, head to toe, underwater. ... Making sure she is Jewish in the eyes of the Jewish state gives me peace of mind. If the Gestapo ever comes again, she and her descendants will have a place to go. Just in case.
Israel, the Jewish state, is the antidote to this fear. The Law of Return, enacted by David Ben-Gurion’s government in 1950, guarantees Israeli citizenship to all Jews who move to Israel. This was meant to guarantee that Israel would remain Jewish (Palestinians, controversially, are not granted this right) but it also meant that, after the Holocaust, and thousands of years of wandering, there was finally a place to which all Jews could go, and defend ourselves, if nowhere else was safe.
This is why Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions on the eve of this week’s Israeli elections were so monstrous. In a successful bid to take votes from far-right parties, the prime minister vowed that there would be no Palestinian state as long as he’s in charge. It was an unmasking of sorts, revealing what many suspected all along: He had no interest in a two-state solution.
Netanyahu backed off that position after the election, assuring American news outlets NBC, NPR and Fox on Thursday that he still backs a two-state solution, in theory. His backtracking seemed nominal and insincere, but even that gesture is reassuring, for abandoning the idea of a Palestinian state will destroy the Jewish state just as surely, if not as swiftly, as an Iranian nuclear bomb.
This is a matter not of ideology but of arithmetic. Without a Palestinian state, Israel can be either a Jewish state or a democracy but not both. If it annexes the Palestinian territories and remains democratic, it will be split roughly evenly between Jews and Arabs; if it annexes the territories and suppresses the rights of Arabs, it ceases to be democratic.
After last week, it's hard to imagine that Israel can continue to ride the same knife's edge it's been on for decades.
Read the rest, then come on in...
Seth Davidowitz looks at the land of the free nepotism.
How bad is America’s nepotism problem? Can data science help us gauge its depth? It can — and what the data shows is that something has gone haywire.
Let’s start with the presidency. Thirteen sons of presidents were born during America’s baby boom. One of the 13 became president himself, of course, and Jeb would make a second. ... in our era a son of a president was roughly 1.4 million times more likely to become president than his supposed peers.
The presidency is obviously a small sample. But the same calculations can be done for other political positions. ... there were about 250 baby boomer males born to governors. Five of them became governors themselves, about one in 50. This is 6,000 times the rate of the average American. The same methodology suggests that sons of senators had an 8,500 times higher chance of becoming a senator than an average American male boomer.
Those of you planning a political career need to see if you can do something about your parents. I'd suggest you either employ a flying Delorean time machine, or see if John McCain is interested in adoption.
Paul Krugman looks at the best way to improve the economy.
Everyone in the Republican Party knows that Reagan presided over an economy that has never been equalled, before or since. When I was on TV with Rand Paul, he confidently declared
When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan …
Of course, it’s not true:
There was an even bigger job boom under Clinton than under Reagan, and Obama has now presided over three years of fairly rapid job growth, with the most recent year the fastest since the 90s.
And yet polls will go on showing that people trust Republicans more with the economy.
Mark Bittman searches for a world in which automation benefits everyone, instead of just those who own it.
Some quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics on this, do you?) is the biggest social challenge facing us. (Let’s call climate change, which has the potential to be apocalyptic rather than just awful, a scientific challenge.) And since wealthy people don’t spend nearly as high a percentage of their incomes as poor people do, much wealth is sitting around not doing its job.
The result is that we’re looking at fewer jobs that pay the equivalent of what an autoworker or a teacher made in the ’60s and ’70s. All but a lucky few will either have the kind of service jobs that are now paying around $9 an hour, or be worse off.
If we don't address the AI problem, we might as well abandon the idea of "good jobs—if not the idea of jobs.
Ross Douthat frets that it might not be J. E. Bush.
I wouldn’t fool myself with the notion that Jeb’s biggest problem in the primary season is his policy positions. His stances on immigration and Common Core will hurt him with conservatives, and his record in Florida will help him, but his biggest problem right now is identification, not ideology. There just aren’t that many Republican voters who want to vote for a dynastic heir in 2016, and it isn’t clear yet if they’ll decide that they ought to vote for Bush in spite of that reluctance.
Voting for president is a political act, but it’s also a relational one. As the presidency increasingly dominates our politics, people want a nominee who will somehow personally represent all the virtues that they associate with their country, their political coalition and their worldview. They want an archetype, an inspiration, a figure who can somehow personify liberalism, or conservatism, or America itself.
The son of a president, brother of a president, ultimate scion of a family that's been wealthy for generations, a man whose very name isn't actually his name but just a bit of frat house humor... are we sure that Bush isn't the very model of a modern true Republican.
Leonard Pitts supports Ashley Judd's fight with sexist trolls.
I guess this is a fan letter, though it is not written in praise of your work in movies like Insurgent, Divergent or Tooth Fairy. Rather, it’s in response to the headlines you made last week when you called out Internet trolls who defamed you as a “bitch,” a “whore,” and a “c---” and threatened you with rape after you tweeted an opinion about an SEC basketball tournament.
Specifically, you accused the University of Arkansas Razorbacks of playing dirty against your University of Kentucky Wildcats and suggested they kiss your team’s backside.
Not particularly polite, no, but not out of bounds, either. Male fans shout and tweet much worse about pretty much every sporting contest down to and including church league bowling. Indeed, male sports fans are the reason foam bricks were invented. Yet we are allowed to scream for the home team without being called vile names, much less threatened. So I was glad to see you use your Twitter account and media access to highlight this misogyny — and your intention to press charges.
Ruth Marcus starts off as if she is actually going to hold Republicans responsible for poisoning an admirable bill.
As if more proof were needed about congressional dysfunction, witness the spectacle of the past two weeks, in which the Senate managed to grind itself to a halt over a human-trafficking bill that both sides want to pass.
The bill would create a fund to compensate trafficking victims, paid for by fines on offenders. The snag, as often happens, comes in the form of abortion politics, specifically a provision that would prevent the money from being used to pay for abortion except in cases of rape, incest or danger to the life of the mother.
Then immediately goes to
Democrats balked at allowing the measure to move forward with the provision in place. Senate Republicans refused to strip it. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) then pettily upped the ante by saying there would be no vote on Loretta Lynch, whose nomination for attorney general has been languishing for an unconscionable four-plus months, while the trafficking bill was stalled.
This is all so maddening, with blame to spare on both sides.
Why do Democrats share equally in the blame? Because they trusted Republicans about changes to the bill. An argument so #%!?!& stupid, it may earn an automatic trip to the Will / Dowd list of idiots who I will no longer read on Sundays.