Politics Round-Up August 11 2013 Edition

There seems to be an opening in the 2016 Republican presidential primary for the Santorum slot, the candidate of social conservatives who flocked to Santorum in 2012, Huckabee in 2008 and George W Bush in 2000.

Rebecca Cusey of Patheos suggests that Elysium is an inadvertently conservative movie. H/T National Review.

Don’t tell Matt Damon, but something went sideways and he made a conservative manifesto in Elysium. 

It’s pretty much a warning about what will happen to Earth if socialism wins.

Elysium takes place in the near future, after the entire earth suffers under the kind of economic meltdown threatening some of our great cities now. It’s dusty. It’s dirty. It’s unkept. No one has families or cars decent homes or fresh clothes or, apparently, showers. Jobs are dreary and dangerous and unsatisfying, if you can find them at all.

Future Los Angeles. Behold the power of socialism!Basically, it’s Detroit.

Total economic meltdown. Here is a partial list of places where this sort of systematic economic failure has happened or looms:  Detroit.  California. Illinois. The Soviet Union. Cuba. Greece. Spain.

Not, say, Texas or Virginia.

Ron Klain of hthe Post argues that Republicans would benefit from more primary debates on more networks, so a boycott of CNN and NBC affiliates would be disastrous.

Casting for a film on Anthony Weiner’s campaign for mayor made me laugh.

Ross Douthat considers the lessons of abortion in Europe. H/T Daily Dish.

The reason to look at the European experience is not because the continent is somehow an exemplar of exactly the policies that pro-life American conservatives are pushing now, or would put in place if given constitutional license. Rather, it’s because it provides examples of many different approaches to the issue — stringently pro-life with a stronger welfare state (Ireland), expansively pro-choice with a much stronger welfare state (Sweden), more pro-life in law but relatively pro-choice in practice (Spain, until recently), relatively pro-choice in law but more culturally pro-life (Italy, arguably), and so on — that don’t necessarily map on to America’s right vs. left debate at all.

This variation, in turn, gives us more data on the original question that my column asked: What happens to a modern society when abortion is restricted?

Daniel Drezner considers the lessons of Ayn Rand in Putin’s decision to release wealthy Russians from prison as part of a plan to stimulate the economy.

Molly Ball of the Atlantic considers whether seniors are souring on the Republican party. Writing for Salon, Jonathan Bernstein thinks Republicans have become the party of Nixon and Gingrich, opportunists without core principles.

Richard Dawkins is accused of bigotry after his comments about how all the world’s Muslims have more Nobel Prizes than Cambridge University.

Abstrucse Goose takes a fight outside.