Robert Wright

More than 20 interviews conducted in Yemen by the Post--with government officials, tribal leaders, and others--revealed "a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network's most active wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP." Since 2009, when Obama is first known to have authorized drone strikes in Yemen, the number of core AQAP members has more than doubled, growing from around 300 to at least 700. That's not the direction in which the drone strikes were supposed to move the numbers.

A Yemeni human rights worker described the dynamic at play: "The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes."

The New York Times piece--a long, deeply reported, and somewhat unsettling article about how the Obama administration decides who to kill via drone--concurred with the Post on the value al Qaeda recruiters are getting out of drone strikes, and also answered the riddle this poses: If the strikes have such a big downside, why has President Obama accelerated their use, first in Pakistan, then in Yemen?

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Actually, to say Hayes was "criticized" is to make the blowback sound more cerebral than it was. Ann Coulter tweeted, "Chris Hayes 'Uncomfortable' Calling Fallen Military 'Heroes' -- Marines respond by protecting his right to menstruate." Kurt Schlicter at Breitbart.com said Hayes "sounds like one of my commie grad students trying to impress credulous freshman girls."

Hayes said he was sorry, which was no doubt a wiser course than mounting a defense of his remarks. But I think the point he was making deserves its day in court.

Before I present a (qualified) defense of it, I want to say that my father was a career army officer, so I grew up amid military culture and have true affection for it and great respect for people who make military service their career. If anything I say below seems not to reflect those attitudes, I can only say that my goal is to decrease the number of soldiers who die needlessly in the future.

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An Israeli settler shot and wounded a Palestinian man on Saturday in a clash that began when a group of settlers set fire to fields belonging to a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank, officials said.

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I mean, it's not that I think Mitt Romney really would make John Bolton his Secretary of State. But that serious people are even talking about this is testament to how heavily Romney's foreign policy advisers tilt toward the neocon/uberhawk end of the Republican Party. And note that even Hurlburt, the more skeptical of the two, concedes that it would be awkward if a President Romney couldn't find some high-prestige position for Bolton--a man whom Drezner, who is no lefty, calls "borderline delusional" (a characterization I personally consider too generous by half).

Geez, the next thing you know Romney will be thinking about having a birther speak at the GOP convention!

The primary sticking point, as I anticipated, was relief from sanctions. Iran, it seems, is open to doing what P5+1 wants (halting the production of 20-percent-enriched uranium, surrendering all existing 20-percent-enriched uranium, etc.). But in return, Iran wants significant sanctions relief, and the only relief on offer involved sanctions on spare airplane parts.

Why the P5+1 refusal to budge? I think it lies partly in a mistakenly binary conception of sanctions--the idea that any meaningful sanctions relief at all means giving up most of, or at least much of, the leverage that sanctions offer. In truth, we can proceed more incrementally, giving Iran meaningful sanctions relief while keeping almost all of our powder dry.

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Goldberg worries that the talks won't move fast enough--that when they adjourn (presumably on Thursday), Iran won't have made enough in the way of concrete concessions. He points to a New York Times report about what the P5+1 (the permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany) hopes to get out of Iran this week. According to the Times, we want Iran to quit producing 20-percent-enriched uranium, to surrender what 20-percent-enriched uranium it possesses, and then "down the road" dismantle the Fordow processing plant, which is buried in a mountain and so difficult to attack. Goldberg would like the dismantling to begin sooner than "down the road".

His logic: " 'Down the road' is not an expression that would cause the Israeli prime minister, or the defense minister, to call President Obama and tell him that they are taking the military option off the table. It would actually cause them to think -- not that they don't think this already -- that the Baghdad talks are a charade." And, he adds, if Israel thinks this, then it may "take [military] action, which is a very bad idea."

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Optimism always makes me nervous, and today's news about the offer we plan to put on the table hasn't eased my anxiety.

According to reporting by Laura Rozen and Barbara Slavin, the P5+1 (the permanent Security Council members plus Germany) wants Iran to halt the production of uranium enriched to the 20 percent level--a level that's well below weapons grade (around 90 percent), but is significantly closer to weapons grade than the 3.5 percent enriched uranium that Iran also produces.

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The essential mission of Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank is to protect settlers against Palestinians. The job of protecting Palestinians against settlers falls to a separate Israeli police force that, as it happens, is massively understaffed. This imbalance--ample troops who are de facto allies of the settlers, dinky police force that could in theory help Palestinians but never seems to be around--is a recipe for the harassment of Palestinians and worse.

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Economist Glenn Loury has a gay son, and so does blogger and law professor Ann Althouse. So I wasn't expecting their conversation about gay marriage to take this turn:

If you're wishing Glenn had been matched with someone who disagrees with him, I have good news. Here he presents the other side of the argument, which leads to some interesting thoughts from Ann about the role of religion in progressive moral change:

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Still, that 18 percent rise left Google valued at $28 billion. Today's trading left Facebook valued at around $100 billion. In this sense, the wisdom of the crowd has deemed Facebook a much better bet than it deemed Google eight years ago.

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But you know what? If you're thinking about buying into this week's Facebook IPO, the various transgressions and missteps of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook don't really matter. Facebook has a magical property that insulates it from user discontent. It's a property that other big tech companies--Microsoft, Google, Apple--don't have nearly as much of. And it's the reason I think Facebook is a better long-term bet for investors than any of these companies.

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Let's set the context:

We're in the midst of negotiations with Iran, trying to keep it from building a nuclear bomb. Within Iran there is disagreement about how hard a line to take in the negotiations. Obviously, all other things being equal, it would be good to strengthen moderate voices within Iran and undermine hardliners--particularly hardliners who want the talks to fail altogether so that Iran can proceed to build a bomb.

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Maybe the most predictable of the 11 ways to annoy people is "Tweet about food." Indeed, few things so fill me with ambivalence about following someone on Twitter as when they share the quotidian details of their lives--their food, their kids, their dogs--as if someone other than them cared.

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I have a different takeaway from this poll. I think it shows that these kinds of polls aren't worth much.

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An appreciably abashed John Smith struggled to figure out how his reading habits had become public knowledge. After clicking on the Kardashian headline, he hadn't clicked a Facebook 'recommend' button or anything. So why were all his Facebook friends being informed that while perusing the Huffington Post he'd surrendered to primordial yearnings?

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1) What a radical idea this seemed like at the time. I'm not sure I'd ever heard anyone mention gay marriage, and I'd certainly never seen a written defense of it.

2) How important a single magazine could be in pre-internet days. Mike Kinsley, who for my money is the most amazing editor of his generation, had during the 1980s made the New Republic the magazine in Washington.

The combination of these two things was potent. When you take an off-the-charts idea and unveil it on the most prominent stage in Washington, it gets people talking. Yesterday, when President Obama embraced gay marriage, this was a kind of culmination of the conversation that Andrew, more than any other person, started.

Back then Andrew wasn't officially out of the closet; few prominent gay people were, compared to now. And I remember Mike wondering--with a bit of protective concern, as I recall--whether Andrew realized that, having published this piece, he would have trouble keeping his sexual identity private. Indeed, it was as an openly gay man--and an openly gay Catholic, no less--that Andrew would stay in the middle of the conversation he'd started, helping to push it outward until it enveloped the nation.

In the first paragraph of the piece, Andrew described gay marriage as an idea with both radical and conservative elements, but by the end of the piece he'd made it clear which element he considered essential: "It's one of the richest ironies of our society's blind spot toward gays that essentially conservative social goals should have the appearance of being so radical. But gay marriage is not a radical step." It doesn't seem so now, no. This fact--that radical enlightenment can transpire in the course of a couple of decades--kind of gives you hope.

I don't remember a time when so many topics have become politically unmentionable in one party or the other. Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases. For two consecutive Presidential nomination cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc. Similarly, most Democrats are constrained when talking about such issues as entitlement cuts, tort reform, and trade agreements.

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