Stirring up a Reaction

Rabid anti-gay remarks during committee hearings have flipped one Maryland state senator from nay to yay on a bill to legalize gay marriage.

I am going to vote for gay marriage," [Jim] Brochin [D] said. "I'm going to vote for gay marriage because the stumbling block with the word 'marriage' is my stumbling block, and it's my problem."

"I'm not going to be part of the vilification of gays on the senate floor," Brochin said. "I'm uncomfortable with the word 'marriage' but I am much more uncomfortable with the vilification of gays and homosexuality."

What delicious irony. And, I should say, great credit to Senator Brochin, for looking deep into what's going on and deciding to not let his own inner conflict align him with merchants of hate and discrimination.

The measure now has 21 of the 24 votes it needs to pass; there are at least 5 members still undecided.

Any law would likely be subject to an attempt by opponents to reverse it via referendum -- a move which has been the bane of democratically-passed gay marriage laws in the past.

First Time for Everything

Linking to this column, Conor Friedersdorf labels Dennis Prager as one of the more "thoughtful" right-wing commentators. Which is ironic, because I once labeled Prager "most likely to piss me the hell off."  

This column, on the benefits of global travel is admittedly better than normal, although foolishness hardly is absent ("After visits to about a dozen African countries, I came to realize that the spread of Christianity holds the best hope for that sad continent. If anyone can name a better solution, this Jew would be interested in hearing it." Jesus Christ, why doesn't he start worshiping Jesus Christ already?). But that marks a first for me, as until now the universal quality that linked all my exposure to Dennis Prager was breath-taking ignorance. Let's canvass some of my favorites: 

•  There aren't many Black people at Tea Party rallies because Black people aren't rational. 
• Keith Ellison swearing his oath of office on the Koran "undermines American civilization." 
• A constant trend of conflating Judaism and Christianity. 
• Giving the totally-not-self-serving marital advice that women should have sex with their husbands, even if they don't want to.

Library Grape offers some examples of his own. The point being, one column that manages to get a toehold on "mediocre" notwithstanding, Dennis Prager pretty much represents the bottom of the barrel -- and, since his hallmark is trying to pretend like Judaism is indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christianity, I have a personal Jew-to-Jew gripe with him as well.

Godless Heathens

Article title: Atheists head for high schools with new clubs for Godless teens.

Additional info link at the bottom: "See photos of: Judaism."

Uhh ... recognizing that there are atheist Jews (one was mentioned in the article), and fully supporting the equal rights of Atheists to organize student groups around the country in opposition to the rampant social prejudice they still face, I still think that might not be quite right.

It's My Party and I'll Fly If I Want To

Flying to DC today, in part to celebrate my birthday, in part because Jill is working at a conference there and I'm tagging along (which mines means [UPDATE: It never ends with me, does it?] my hotel expenses are paid for by Teach for America).

"I'm Here" Roundup

Long story.

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Great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding his experience when his partner got pregnant.

Leon Wieseltier on the pro-Israel community's conflicted feelings regarding the fall of Egyptian autocracy and the rise of a new democratic order: "Jews should not rely on Pharaohs."

Conservative depressed to find out "judicial activism" is a two-way street. "Striking down democratically-enacted legislation" has the key advantage of being measurable. "Decisions that are wrong" is simply a way of muscling your way past the fact that "what the constitution commands" is precisely what's being disputed. (Via).

Cool story about a benefit dinner hosted by New York's Chinese immigrant community for Jews victimized by a Russian pogrom at the turn of the 20th century.

The What is it like being a woman in philosophy blog is harrowing, but worth reading.

Phoebe's got two good posts up on how "anti-Semitism" is and isn't part of our collective discourse -- I feel compelled to note that I really do think they're quite good, as I quarreled with a side-point she made in the comments I left over there.

Distaste for his presidency as a whole notwithstanding, one of the few areas George W. Bush was on the right path was in his views on immigration. He's recently expressed his concern that America is suffering a relapse into "nativism".

Bias in Bias

Writing in the NYT, John Tierney takes note of new efforts within the social psychology fields to explore bias against conservatives in academia. In doing so, he takes a bunch of gratutious shots at explorations of implicit bias in other fields that I think are wildly out of line.

As a liberal who has been flagging the issue of anti-conservative bias in academia as a serious problem that should be addressed for well over a half decade, I think I have credibility to speak on this issue. I absolutely agree with Mr. Tierney that this is something that colleges and universities should work to redress, including via affirmative action policies where appropriate -- that was my position six years ago, and that's my position today.

But what I don't get, and think is exceptionally difficult to justify, is Tierney's claim that the bulk of the social psychology evidence indicates that implicit bias and other structural barriers against women are gone.

Similarly, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, was ostracized in 2005 for wondering publicly whether the preponderance of male professors in some top math and science departments might be due partly to the larger variance in I.Q. scores among men (meaning there are more men at the very high and very low ends). “This was not a permissible hypothesis,” Dr. Haidt said. “It blamed the victims rather than the powerful. The outrage ultimately led to his resignation. We psychologists should have been outraged by the outrage. We should have defended his right to think freely.”

Instead, the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias. But that assumption has been repeatedly contradicted, most recently in a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by two Cornell psychologists, Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams. After reviewing two decades of research, they report that a woman in academic science typically fares as well as, if not better than, a comparable man when it comes to being interviewed, hired, promoted, financed and published.

“Thus,” they conclude, “the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort. Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past.” Instead of presuming discrimination in science or expecting the sexes to show equal interest in every discipline, the Cornell researchers say, universities should make it easier for women in any field to combine scholarship with family responsibilities.

That's just not an accurate summary of the state of the literature. To talk as if all the social science research explodes the myth that bias continues to exert sex-differentiated impacts, and the theory simply carries on via blind political correctness, is wrong. (see, for example, the research on stereotype threat). Ceci and Williams' study is interesting, but it is nowhere near as robust as Tierney (or even the authors themselves, though they're more circumspect about it) claims.

Most notably, the authors concede the existence of sex-bias in math intensive fields. And in general, they attribute much sex-differentiation to the "resources" available to the academics, which encompasses their position (junior or senior, or non-tenure track), teaching loads, and the prestige of the institution they teach at. But their hard delineation that differences in who gets these positions are attributable to "personal choices" (they agree that these choices might be "constrained", and their policy suggestions are centered around removing these constraints by, for example, improving work/life balance concerns) is difficult to warrant -- after all, that women are channeled to adopt social roles which are, at the very least, partially home-based may itself be attributable to implicit bias. And, once marginal candidates are filtered out, we might expect that the remaining women -- who are the most committed and probably the most talented (if we expect that exceptionally talented candidates are likely to face pressure to "stay in the game") -- should outperform their male peers, at least by a little bit. It's a bit weird to recognize that women are systematically ending up in low ranked position, but reject a hypothesis that implicit bias might play a role because the women who survive the gauntlet do slightly better than men at the final stage.

I also have no idea what Tierney even means in the following passage: "the taboo against discussing sex differences was reinforced, so universities and the National Science Foundation went on spending tens of millions of dollars on research and programs based on the assumption that female scientists faced discrimination and various forms of unconscious bias."

What work is "based on the assumption" doing here? If it simply means that the research seeks to take that theory and put it to an empirical test, Tierney can't have an objection -- that covers the Ceci and Williams study as well. That we have a well-developed theory explaining sex difference (implicit bias) is an excellent reason for running studies based on that theoretical orientation. Obviously, if the studies consistently were disproving the thesis, we shouldn't beat a dead horse, but the problem is that Tierney is flatly inaccurate if he thinks that's what is going on. If the claim is that we're doing research that presupposes implicit bias to exist, and uses that presumption as some sort of assumed-but-unproven axiom in another study, that'd be more problematic (except for the fact that, contra Tierney, there is a substantial amount of literature backing up implicit bias' existence), but I also can't think of any sort of research that takes that approach. The objection strikes me as incoherent.

I certainly understand the frustration some conservatives feel that the question of implicit bias against them in the academy is not given full hearing. I've been an acolyte of long-standing of the theory that implicit bias is a problem worthy of correction, and it very quickly became evident to me that, if I were to consider my position in any way principled, I couldn't discount potential anti-conservative bias in the structures I work in. But my frustration is that everyone seems to be using the concept opportunistically -- if liberals are dismissive of anti-conservative bias, conservatives are dismissive of the prospect of racist or sexist bias. The red flags (Daniel Patrick Monyihan! Taboos! Larry Summers!) are all here, and it's very difficult to take Tierney's complaint as a serious one insofar as he immediately turns around and starts deriding the very same field as political correctness run-amok in other contexts.

One or the Other

From a Baltimore Sun article detailing how "red light cameras" are pissing off cops, who no longer can escape speeding tickets through "professional courtesy" (they also argue that the cameras sometimes catch on-duty cops who have a reason to speed but also a reason not to turn on their siren -- for example, arriving at a burglary where they don't want to alert the criminal to their imminent arrival):

Some officers appear to have come up with creative ways to stay red-light-camera-shy. Last year, city police accused two officers of putting stolen license plates on their unmarked cars. The investigation continues, but police sources said at the time that the officers either wanted to prevent drug dealers from recognizing their cars or wanted to avoid getting tickets from the cameras.

Those two possibilities do seem to capture the poles of potential justifiability, don't they?

The (Potential) Harm in Harmon Resigning

Longtime California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman has announced she is resigning from Congress to lead the think tank. Her District is pretty firmly "D" territory, so the big question is which Democrats will run to replace her.

DKos floats some names, and at the top is 2008 and 2010 primary challenger Marcy Winograd. You may recall Winograd -- she's the one who opposes Israel's very existence as a Jewish state and basically accused Henry Waxman of possessing dual loyalties. And beyond that, she sounds like an all-purpose nutcase. So not exactly someone I want to rise into any level of prominence.

On the other hand, SSP's recitation of potential candidates doesn't seem to take Winograd very seriously (Dave Weigel is checking into whether she's running at all). So hopefully that means she's on the outs, and a solid progressive Democrat will be in.

Snow (Hey Oh!) Roundup

We're fine over here in the wake of the Snowpocalypse. School was canceled yesterday and today, but folks are finally starting to dig out, and we'll be back to normal tomorrow.

* * *

Utah State Rep. wants to ban gay families from participation in all public programs.

Republicans drop "forcible rape" language from their new anti-abortion bill.

Republican presidential candidates graphed on basis of their sanity and their Mormonism.

Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore measures Jon Huntsman's 2012 chances, and finds them severely wanting. He's like Romney, but even easier to call a conservative apostate.

An interview with Dos Equis' World's Most Interesting Man.

Behavioral economists, poor people, and the broken social safety net.

Max Boot chides his fellow right-wingers for pretending there's a viable alternative to ElBaradei.

The Liberalizing Effect of International Military Interchange Programs

One of the key inflection points in any revolution is the ultimate decision by the armed forces as to whether they will fire on the protesters. Generally, any decently-entrenched regime with a powerful military can survive street protests if the military continues to back it. If the military decides to stand down, however, things get a lot more interesting. This is one of the key differences between Egypt in 2011, and Iran in 2009. Iranian military and paramilitary forces were effectively deployed against the protesters, and demonstrated a willingness to crush the demonstrations. Moreover, Iran had a layer of redundancy built in -- even if the army wavered, the army had to fear the Revolutionary Guard, which is fanatically loyal to the existing regime.

So what is it that made the Egyptian army different? Though not as tied into the state apparatus as the IRC is in Iran, it certainly was known as relatively loyal to President Mubarak. Enter a really interesting argument by Mark Thompson:

Ever since the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, promising Egyptian military officers have come to U.S. military schools, including the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., the Army’s Command General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Inculcated there with U.S. ideals on lawful civilian control of military, such an education has helped act as a “safety” on the firepower of the Egyptian streets now massing in Cairo and in other cities.

“This new generation of Egyptian officers has been exposed to the American military and has had a very favorable impression of not just the way we fight our wars but also about the relationship between the military and society,” says Robert Scales, a retired Army major general who served as commandant of the Army War College where he launched the international fellows program. “One of the reasons for the army’s reluctance to follow Mubarak’s intent and squeeze the population in Cairo has to do with the Egyptian military’s exposure to the U.S. military.”

A little self-serving, perhaps -- particularly given the less than stellar record regarding human rights such interchange programs have assembled in the not-so-distant past. Nonetheless, there is some broader empirical research finding such a liberalizing effect correlated to U.S. military-to-military contacts. So it certainly isn't out of the question.

Definitely an interesting dynamic, if true. H/T: LGM.

From the River to the Sea

I oppose all radical clerics who advocate a "one-state" solution in Israel. Mike Huckabee is no exception.

As Jon Chait observes, Huckabee's objection in principle to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank is a position not even taken by the Likud Party (indeed, it's not even taken by Avigdor Lieberman's extreme-right Yisrael Beiteinu party). Virtually the only folks who share Huckabee's views are those who expressly advocate Israel's dissolution, or the fringe-of-the-fringe settlers who likewise have expressly stated that they care not whether Israel lives or dies. Just so we know his bedmates.

Barbara Bush Comes Out in Favor of Gay Marriage

Barbara Bush (Dubya's daughter, not his mother) has just appeared in an HRC video spot promoting marriage equality in New York.

In terms of Bush's actually influence, this isn't all that important -- Bush is only a political figure because of who she's related to; she's expressed little interest in entering the public sphere on her own terms (even less than, say, Meghan McCain -- another gay marriage supporter). But what it does demonstrate is that, even among Republicans, the youth are just gone on this issue. Support for marriage discrimination is nearly solely the province of older Americans. It's barely even a partisan issue amongst the young. I'm dubious that the leaders of the "Christian right" can arrest the inevitable here -- I'm wondering if even they are beginning to feel some fatalism on the subject.

In any event, it's only a matter of time.

PPACA Bump Roundup

The decision by a federal district judge to strike down the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the big, if ultimately irrelevant (this law is going to be decided at 1 First Street), news of the day. But other stuff happened too! Let's round it up.

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Eric Alterman gives a solid memoriam of Marty Peretz's tenure at the helm of the The New Republic.

Who would have guessed that the lead Democratic co-sponsor of the GOP there's rape and then there's rape bill would be
Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL)? I can't quite figure out how he avoids a primary defeat each year -- he really is among my least favorite congressional Democrats.

Okay, a quick foray into PPACA: Brian Galle has an interesting, brief paper up on the constitutionality of PPACA under Congress' taxation powers.

The Realistic Dove has a good appraisal of how Israelis are reacting to the democratic revolution in Egypt. Their putative opposition has been greatly overread -- while a few pro-Israel voices in the US have been acting like dicks, by and large it is better to describe them as "anxious" than hostile. Turmoil inside a country that is now one of your few regional allies but with which you've fought three wars against in living memory will do that to a country.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an interesting post on the development of stereotypes with respect to Blacks and Jews in athletics. I want to be nicknamed "the intellectual assassin" one day.

Given the awful argument being made by, most prominently, ex-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) that Black people like President Obama are traitors to their racial heritage and the abolitionist movement insofar as they don't necessarily oppose abortion rights, this post, which actually examines the role abortion played amongst enslaved Black women in the American South, is a desperately needed corrective.

Huntsman '12?

Former Utah Governor, current ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (R) may be gearing up for a 2012 presidential run. At the very least, he's not shooting down rumors that his ambitions lie in that direction.

I've previously identified Huntsman as a leader of the "not insane" wing of the Republican Party -- possibly its last man standing, with the immolation of Charlie Crist. So I have a lot of respect for him. But I can't fathom how the Socialist Kenyan regime's ambassador to the Socialist Chinese regime plans on getting through a Republican primary. I'm baffled as to why Huntsman -- who will only be 56 in 2016 -- wouldn't wait until then for what I'd imagine to be a much cleaner shot at the White House.

Eat Less Chikin

It's a shame that Chick-fil-A is so closely tied with anti-gay forces. They make delicious fast food.

The CPMAJO Stooges

An incredible cheap shot by Malcolm Hoenlein on former IAEA head and Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei. He calls him a "stooge" for Iran. Regardless of how one evaluates ElBaradei's tenure as head of the IAEA, there is zero support for that accusation. ElBaradei pushed for inspections of Iran's nuclear program, albeit not as aggressively as some might have liked, and was a vociferous opponent of military confrontation with the state, which certain more hawkish sorts very much did not like. But even taken to their fullest, these are policy differences, and should remain such. Acting as if ElBaradei in his role as leader of a unified Egyptian opposition is simple a front man (or useful idiot) for Iran is deeply offensive, and beneath the dignity of the CPMAJO or any other organization.

What we have is a simple slander against the most promising secular leader of the Egyptian opposition. Let's call a spade a spade -- it's one that likely flows from Hoenlein's fear that an Egypt not led by an autocratic thug like Mubarak will be an Egypt less amenable to Israel and America's interests. Which is a descriptively legitimate fear (while many of the same pressures which keep Egypt in America's camp will still be present in any new regime, they'll be countered by a newly salient need for democratic accountability toward a populace deeply -- though not blindly -- suspicious of both nations) -- but not one that normatively justifies kneecapping the Egyptian quest for self-governance, much less slandering the man who may prove pivotal in bringing democracy to the nation.

GOP Conference Chairman Comes Out in Favor of Mubarak

There's a fair critique to be made that the Obama administration's response to the street revolution in Egypt has been a bit muddled. There's a fair excuse for that too -- we're in a tough spot, between the fact that Mubarak is an autocrat who has consistently stymied democratic reform in his country, and the fact that he's our autocrat and has managed to keep an uneasy peace with its neighbor to the east. The devil you know and all that. Still, there is little evidence that these protests have been driven by Islamist forces. And ultimately, the US will suffer far more if the Egyptian people believe that, when the chips were down, the United States wasn't there for them when they took to the streets and demanded their legitimate rights to democratic self-governance. And so, while there might have been a bit more hedging than I'd prefer, I was heartened to see Obama strongly back the rights of the Egyptian protesters and call for desperately needed reforms in the country. At the same time, folks who claim they haven't been nearly clear enough have a point.

In any event, whatever failings of clarity Obama may have had, there is no such ambiguity in the position of Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), GOP Conference chairman. He's loud and clear: the US needs to back Mubarak and make sure these protests are crushed. Presumably, he will then wonder why American credibility regarding democracy is shot to hell.

There's Rape and Then There's Rape

If you know what I mean. And House Republicans sure do:

For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the "No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act," a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.

With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to "forcible rape." This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion. (Smith's spokesman did not respond to a call and an email requesting comment.)

Of course, there is a well-known tension between the idea of abortion being about murder (as opposed to the regulation and punishment of non-reproductive female sexuality), and an exception for pregnancies caused by rape. If the idea is that the unborn child is innocent, then the idea of a rape exception makes no sense. If the idea is that rape renders the mother innocent, then it does -- but that just goes back to the notion of abortion regulation being about judging women for having sex.

But in any event: to the extent we are saying that the massive trauma of being raped cannot be ethically reconciled with forcing the victim to give birth to her rapist's child, this law is incredibly insensitive to the wellbeing of rape victims whose rapists didn't use (physical) force -- as in the case of many statutory and date rape cases. Basically, it's back to the old days of that not really being rape.

Via LGM.

Interview with Gadi Taub

Very cool interview by Michael Weiss with the left-wing Israeli Zionist and polymath Gadi Taub, who has a new book out: The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale UP). Taub is of the opinion (and I agree) that the religious-nationalist settlement movement is Israel's largest homegrown threat to Israel's status as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people (not unrelatedly, as embarrassing as the McCarthyist Knesset inquiry into leftist NGOs is, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that the Kahanist-linked, terrorist-sympathizing Michael Ben Ari of all people will be the man in charge of the panel).

But anyway, back to Taub, who, if Ben Ari represents Israel's worst, represents Israel's best. And the best of the best excerpt:

MW: One of the more interesting points you make in your settlements book is that settlers seem to be echoing the sentiments of the anti-Zionist left in calling for a binational state. You quote Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Shlomo Aviner and others who make it plain that they’d rather see Greater Israel with an Arab majority than any division of land. That the intelligentsia of the Yesha Council more and more resembles the collective wisdom of the London Review of Books might be taken for a sign of how just marginalised and discredited the settlement project is.

GT: I think that’s very true. Which is why recently some on the right have been arguing for annexation which will include full citizenship to all residents of the territories.

I have very little respect for that solution when it comes from them, just as I have little respect for it when it comes from anti-Zionists.

A look at Gaza, where the differences between Hamas and Fatah were settled by the use of arms, should help us all wake up from imaginary schemes of peaceful bi-nationalism. I don’t see how Gaza would have turned into a liberal democracy if only there was a Jewish faction added to the mix. What the one-statists are promoting is going to be a chronic Lebanon style civil war. And the odd thing is, how little the London Review has drifted from old colonial habits of mind. The natives – we Jews and Arabs – aspire to national self-determination. But the good ol’ Brits, never tired of carrying the White Man’s Burden, know that the natives are too barbaric to understand what the right form of self-determination should be for them. So until they grow up, we, Western intellectuals, will serve as their political parents, and impose on them the state we know they should want. Because it is Western and enlightened, of course.

Anyone who can, in such short space, make the accurate conflation of "left" and "right", "pro-Israel" and "pro-Palestine" one-staters, defend two-states, and nail British pseudo-anti-colonialists for so unabashedly taking back up "the White Man's Burden" is an automatic winner in my book. And the whole interview is excellent. He makes no apologies for anti-Semitism or denying Israel's right to exist, but notes the fundamental fact that Israel -- as a matter of basic national self-preservation -- has to extract itself from the occupation. It may not be fair that this burden falls upon Israel, even though the conditions of occupation and the lack of peaceful two-state solution are not entirely (primarily, whatever -- I'm not interested in hashing over degrees of fault) Israel's fault. Life isn't fair. Get over it, and do what needs to be done. Everything else (including, frankly, a comprehensive peace treaty -- even in a state of formal war like that which exists between Israel and Syria, I think the IDF is strong enough to keep Israel safe from any military threat from a Palestinian state with or without the occupation. Cast Lead, more or less, proves that) can come later.

Meanwhile, with respect to Taub's point about externally-imposed solutions, it's worth noting that, while I haven't seen immediately-recent polling out of Palestine, the most recent numbers I recall reading, from about two years ago, had a two-states for two-peoples solution as the clear consensus choice amongst Palestinians, taking 53% of those polled (32% want solely a Palestinian state on all the land, while only 15% preferred what is forwarded as the classic "one-state", binational solution).

OMG DID YOU SEE WHO LISA'S GOING WITH?!!?

While I understand the impetus for mixed-party seating at the State of the Union after Tuscon, and I even think it is, all told, sweet, I do think that the "statement" it makes regard a new era of bipartisan cooperation is, well, overstated. Hence, I was amused to read this statement by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on the event:

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, asked reporters covering Tuesday's State of the Union address not to spend too much time focusing on prom-like questions about where Republicans and Democrats are sitting, but instead to concentrate on the content of President Obama's speech.

"It's like going to the prom and who's wearing what dress," Murkowski said. "And to a certain extent this has been a little bit of a dating show. You know, who are you going with? Reminds me a little of 8th grade."

That is, in fact, exactly what it reminds me of, and I thank Senator Murkowski for giving words to my inchoate senses on the subject.