Friday opinion, with a hint of fact.
NY Times:
"The don’t ask, don’t tell act infringes the fundamental rights of United States service members in many ways," she wrote. "In order to justify the encroachment on these rights, defendants faced the burden at trial of showing the don’t ask, don’t tell act was necessary to significantly further the government’s important interests in military readiness and unit cohesion. Defendants failed to meet that burden."
The rule, she wrote in an 86-page opinion, has a "direct and deleterious effect" on the armed services.
More discussion in shayera's diary.
Margie Omero on Gallup's fluctuating generic poll (now tied, was a 10 point R lead):
It's hard to know exactly what is causing the fluctuation--whether it's simple poll fluctuation, or "real" movement. But looking at Gallup's breakout of the generic by party, we see most of the movement comes from Democrats consolidating the base. In the current poll, 93% of self-identified Democrats say they are voting for the Democratic candidate, up from 88% in the previous wave. Republican support for the Republican candidate dropped just slightly (96% to 93%). The difference in base consolidation is now even, for the first time in a month. The chart below shows this metric since Gallup began nightly tracking in March.
Democrats will come home. But what about indies?
Paul Krugman:
A decade ago, Japan was a byword for failed economic policies: years after its real estate bubble burst, it was still suffering from chronic deflation and slow growth. Then America had its own bubble, bust and crisis. And these days, Japan’s record doesn’t look that bad to an American eye.
Why not? For all its flaws, Japanese policy limited and contained the damage from a financial bust. And the question in America now is whether we’ll do the same — or whether we will take a hard right turn into economic disaster.
Eugene Robinson:
Just how corrupt is the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan? It should be clear by now that President Hamid Karzai doesn't want us to know. He'd prefer that we just keep sending our troops and our dollars, and not ask too many questions.
Karzai's government announced this week that American and allied advisers, dispatched to Kabul to help investigate massive and endemic graft, will no longer be allowed to do any actual investigating. Karzai's chief of staff told The Post that the government is still determined to eliminate corruption, but intends to do so "within an Afghan framework."
Edward Schumaker-Matos:
In the country's 30 largest cities, meanwhile, more than half of all public school students were the children of immigrants. They were three-fourths in New York.
This history is forgotten in the angry debate over the cost to taxpayers of unauthorized immigrants and their children today. My recent column reporting that unauthorized immigrants were making unexpectedly large contributions to Social Security, for example, led to denunciations that I was being misleading by not looking at the total fiscal picture.
The truth is that unauthorized immigrants are probably a net burden on taxpayers in the short term, but only if you consider education as a cost and not as an investment in the nation's future, as it was seen a century ago.
