so says Harry Reid:

“My faith and political beliefs are deeply intertwined. I am a Democrat because I am a Mormon, not in spite of it,” he told a gathering of more than 4,000 at the Marriott Center.

But Nevada’s senior senator says he also hopes votes for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney are “determined by his political stands, and not his religion.”

Reid said people often question how he can be a Democrat and a Mormon, but called the social responsibility Democrats espouse a good fit with the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

via Andrew Sullivan, who is himself hated.

Geez.

I agree: I’m not sure sports should be our end in life, but I believe they’re critically important both for our bodies and for our social selves.

I like articles like this, and I think they’re useful–again, to a point.  My problem with them is when they oversimplify all human interaction as genetic–I’m not accusing this article of doing that, but such biological determinism is an extremely common reading.

I would say yes.  Free speech is critical, and if people want to hurt you because of that, you ought to be protected.

And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West. The test is this: Are prominent, articulate critics of radical Islam, critics who happen to be citizens of European countries or the United States, entitled to the same free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens of European countries and the United States?

Legally, of course, they are. In practice, they can say what they want—and then they can be murdered for doing so. That means that Western governments have a special and unusual responsibility to them, as many have long acknowledged. It is no accident that the writer Salman Rushdie, upon whom Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Feb. 14, 1989, is still very much alive. Though details are not publicized, it is assumed that Rushdie remains, one way or another, under the protection of the British police and secret services, both in Britain and abroad. This protection is completely uncontroversial—in June, the queen even gave Rushdie a knighthood—and as a result the fatwa has not prevented him from speaking, writing, publishing, even divorcing and remarrying several times over the past 18 years.

More here and here.

is that people know they’re being measured. It makes for a flawed sample, because people know, say, they’re taking the placebo instead of the pain-killer. Or whatever.

Anyone who has worked in a gov’t institution or a publicly-traded company, or just seen a few episodes of the Wire knows that stats and numbers are more important than “reality” and that these numbers are often quite removed from whatever it is that actually exists.

Especially if your future is dependent on those numbers. So, should we trust testing? Heck no!

“Measuring,” said President Bush, in a discussion of his No Child Left Behind law, “is the gateway to success.”

Not only has high-stakes testing largely failed to magically swing open the gates to successful learning, it is questionable in many cases whether the tests themselves are anything more than a shell game.

Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me in a recent interview that it’s important to ask “whether you can trust improvements in test scores when you are holding people accountable for the tests.”

The short answer, he said, is no.

Care about someone?  WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT SOMEONE?  What kind of stupid thought is that?

From The Corner, in response to Bill Kristol (shockingly) suggesting military action in response to Burma:

Burma’s irrelevant to the world economy, exports no oil, isn’t in a strategically important location. I eagerly anticipate the day when Burma’s long-suffering people rise up and lynch the criminals who oppress them, but, really, what’s it to us?

If a kid can draw it, does that make her a genuis?  Or does that mean modern art is fake?

Or does that mean the kid’s a fake?

A great story.

In Switzerland now: it’s a mess.

More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss.

As part of its platform, the SVP party has begun a campaign seeking the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to let judges deport foreigners after they serve prison sentences for serious crimes. The measure also calls for the deportation of the entire family if the convicted criminal is a minor.

Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes.

The party’s political campaign has a much broader agenda than simply fighting crime. Its subliminal message is that the influx of foreigners has somehow polluted Swiss society, straining the social welfare system and threatening the very identity of the country.

Unlike the situation in France, where the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned for president in the spring alongside black and ethnic Arab supporters, the SVP has taken a much cruder us-against-them approach.