Phoebe Connelly went to see Watchmen last night and came away unimpressed with the film. But she’s got impressive thoughts on the critical response to Dr Manhattan’s penis and what it says about the state of gender politics in contemporary culture.

Here’s some Gallup findings that are fun to think about:

Young people, like people who know what they’re talking about, rate Lincoln as Top President. Middle-aged people, meanwhile, are hard-core rightwingers—they put Reagan at the top and have an unusual aversion to FDR. Old people, by contrast, love FDR. The really weird thing here, that you also see in a lot of other polls, is a truly bizarre level of Kennedy-love. If conservatives want to say that Ronald Reagan was a better president than Lincoln or Roosevelt or the oddly underrated George Washington, then we’ll just need to agree to disagree. But I can’t imagine a coherent ideological viewpoint that would justify the high ratings Americans over-35 give to Kennedy.

Now of course if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson” while the good president is called “Kennedy.” That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.

Kevin Drum and Gary Sick both make the case that there’s been more activity, and a more dramatic shift in policy, on Iran than most people realize. I spoke with a senior European official this morning who’s had some involvement in this issue, and I would say that his comments were in line with that assessment. There’s been so much change in part because there’s been continuity. Robert Gates is still at the Pentagon, William Burns is still Undersecretary of State, and David Petraeus is still running CENTCOM. Plug in a President, a Secretary of State, and a National Security Adviser who are broadly sympathetic to what they’re trying to do and things start moving quickly. That said, there’s still some points that need to be ironed out. In particular, the looming Iranian election:

Apparently, the British have one view on the merits of engaging with Iran before the election and the French have a different view. The Americans, meanwhile, disagree with themselves about this. On one level, this is a sort of minor thing to be disagreeing about relative to the big strategic picture. But on another level, it’s hard to get very far with Iran until you make a decision.

Another issue is that I don’t think western governments have had discussions amongst themselves about what to do if diplomacy can’t be made to work. It’s clear if you speak to people outside government that many analysts think a nuclear Iran is something we could live with. But nobody wants any high-level policymakers in any of the key countries to say that, lest it fatally undermine the bargaining posture. One result of that, however, is that there’s no real talk about how you respond if you give it your best shot with the Iranians and they just turn out to really want a nuclear weapon.

Time‘s Karen Tumulty’s spoke to Igor Volsky about a break-out session she attended that featured America’s Health Insurance Plans CEO Karen Ignagni. As Tumulty explains, Ignagni proposed delegating the writing of a plan to some kind of outside commission:

The break-out session that I was just at, in fact, Karen Ignangi made one of the more radical specific proposals, which is to take most of this out of the hands of Congress, set up a commission sort of like the Base Closing Commission, to come up with a plan and present it to Congress on a sort-of take it or leave it basis.

Igor remarks:

Ignagni’s proposal is revealing. With Democrats running the major health reform committees — Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) at Senate Finance, Henry Waxman (D-CA) at Committee on Energy and Commerce — the insurance industry probably believes that it can get a better deal out of (and have more influence over) some kind of commission.

I dunno about that. I mean, at the end of the day if you’re an insurance company why would you be afraid of Max Baucus? A commission seems to me like a perfectly reasonable idea; it’s just not going to happen. Members of congress are busy fighting each other for committee jurisdiction on health care, not fighting to give up jurisdiction and give it to an outside commission. That’s probably why should brought it up. Bringing up reasonable alternatives that have no chance of happening is a time-honored stalling tactic.