ONN presents the cable news version:

A reader writes:

As a long time reader and fan of your blog (since 2001), I'm becoming increasingly annoyed at what appears to be an obsessive focus on showcasing Israel's warts.  I think Goldblog made the argument that Israel has become for you the Sarah Palin of countries.  Indeed.  For instance, what was the point in posting that al Jazeera piece on the Mossad?  Is it really  newsworthy or surprising that the Arab press publishes a story painting Israel in a militaristic and overly nationalistic light?  And, on the substance of the piece, is it really news that 18 year old boys get excited by covert/spy/assassination intrigue?  Or that some Israeli entrepreneur decided to capitalize on it for a short term gain?  As if none of this occurs in this country or every other?

I offer the following from the perspective of someone appalled by the Wieseltier hit piece on you:  when you post items like this, day after day, and nearly all of which focus on everything negative about Israel regardless of context, you give people the impression that you are an Israel-hater, notwithstanding your protestations of love when someone challenges you on it.  And while I cannot, and will not, excuse the accusers, it is inescapable that responsibility for these accusations, to some extent, lies with you. 

Today on the Dish we saw Obama turn up the heat on healthcare reform (and his approach seemed to be working). More on HCR here. We also featured the first legal gay wedding in DC. In foreign policy, Israel flipped Biden the bird, Livni talked sense, and Bernard Avishai pitched for economic peace with Palestine.

Andrew went after Rahm Democrats and reminded the right of his fiscal-conservative cred. Thiessen slithered into the DOJ controversy, an ultra-Republican condemned the McCarthyism, and Greenwald called for congressional condemnation. More here. US waterboarding appeared much worse and McCain sunk lower.

The pope's brother got wrapped up in a sex scandal, an anti-gay state senator came out of the closet, and a US congressman tickled his male interns. Chait, Yglesias, and Nyhan critiqued Beltway journalism. And WaPo could be going broke. Readers debated Mo'Nique's smug level and another dubbed Obama "the closer." Clay Risen received a Von Hoffman nod and South Park geared up for something good.

-- C.B.

A reader writes:

I was watching the “Fired Up” clip you posted this morning and something occurred to me regarding the President; what people seem to fail to grasp, and what Obama does, is that the President is not a legislator.  He is, to borrow a baseball term, “The Closer.”  I think people are having trouble figuring this out because, for the first time in decades, we have a career legislator as the executive. 

Oh, this is getting good.

What's that I hear in the background? Meep, meep.

Matt and Trey up the ante on reality:

People seem to think I have been imagining a contemptuous attitude toward the US by the Israeli government, or that my concerns about its "Go Cheney Yourself" policy on the peace process are somehow a function of obsessiveness or something that isn't anti-Semitism but is somehow even "darker". But I am not imagining these things. They are real and they are dangerous:

Hours after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. vowed unyielding American support for Israel’s security here on Tuesday, Israel’s Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in East Jerusalem. Mr. Biden condemned the move as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.” ...

Eric Massa implodes on Glenn Beck:

"Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe," he said. "I should have never allowed myself to be as familiar with my staff as I was... I own this misbehavior."

Glenn Beck says they're both "standing with hoses." But one gets the feeling that the fire has broken out in both of their houses - and not the White House.

Rocky Galloway (L) and Reggie Stanley (R) hug each other during their wedding on March 9, 2010, the first day same-sex couples are legal to wed in Washington, DC. The couple's two daughters attended the wedding. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.

A live video of the first same-sex marriage in DC - a simple must-see - is here.

"Word has it that Microsoft will feature an immensely powerful search engine in the next generation of Windows, due out by 2006. Not only will it incorporate a Web-search algorithm similar to Google's, it will also be able to search a user's desktop, local area network, and e-mail. ... As a result, Google stands a good chance of becoming not the next Microsoft, but the next Netscape. ... As it did with Internet Explorer, Microsoft is likely to embed its browser directly into its Windows software. Combine that ease of access with the fact that the Microsoft browser will be more functional, and it's tough to see why many Windows users would even bother with Google," - Clay Risen, 2004.

Yglesias shares some wisdom:

I’ve never found speaking to important political figures either on or off the record to be incredibly valuable in terms of actual information. People are generally more willing to make jokes when it’s off the record, so it’s more entertaining to participate in those kind of briefings. On the other hand, it’s much easier to build an item around a direct quote so it’s more professionally valuable to be on the record. But it seems to me that the people who do the real value-adding reporting are mostly talking to lower-level people—nobody ever gets the real scoop from anyone remotely senior.

Ryan Avent reads a report (pdf) on small businesses, which are a major driver of new jobs:

[Small business] owners continued to report that their single-most important problem, by far, is low sales levels (rather than taxes, interest rates, or labour quality). That's worth keeping in mind as conservatives increase the volume at which they argue that high unemployment is due to extensions of government unemployment benefits. The problem is clearly not labour supply. Rather, the economy's principal job creators are seeing too little demand to justify increases in hiring.

Stanley Fish uses one billboard and a Newsweek article to claim Bush is being rehabilitated:

Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

Oy. James Joyner's two cents:

Brendan Nyhan dismisses "an array of silly narratives blaming the tactics of Obama and his staff for the President's current political standing":

[T]his entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start "connecting" and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become.

And Halperin will be right there for the spin then.

McCain and Lieberman have introduced one of the most despotic bills in memory:

The Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act of 2010, a legislative monstrosity produced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, goes further than any Bush-era legislation in abrogating the core principle of Anglo-American justice: that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. While the bill is deplorable in every detail -- it denies terrorist suspects their Miranda rights and codifies indefinite detention without trial -- one particular provision effectively ends the presumption of innocence for all of us. That provision codifies the President's right to define any criteria he chooses to deliver any individual into the legal Twilight Zone defined by the bill.

"Marc Thiessen’s work at the Washington Post looks like the work of a third-rate publicist—promoting the Cheney-Kristol Keep America Safe project. Just what is his relationship with this project? And why does Hiatt let him do this for free from the editorial pages of the Washington Post? Hiatt owes his readers some explanations," - Scott Horton.

Glenn Beck's hero:

The House ethics committee has received allegations that former Rep. Eric Massa groped at least three male staffers and conducted himself improperly with interns as well as full-time aides, a source familiar with the matter tells POLITICO.

One incident allegedly occurred when Massa traveled to San Francisco with an aide for a fundraising trip, a second source said.

Now it's getting closer to home:

The pope's brother said in a newspaper interview published Tuesday that he slapped pupils as punishment after he took over a renowned German boys' choir in the 1960s. He also said he was aware of allegations of physical abuse at an elementary school linked to the choir but did nothing about it.

The Rev. Georg Ratzinger, 86, said he was completely unaware of allegations of sexual abuse at the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir, part of a string of charges of sex abuse by church employees across Europe in recent days.

Ratzinger led the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir for thirty years. He says he knew nothing about the allegations of sex abuse, says they all occurred before his tenure in 1964, but admits he did slap boys in the face repeatedly as punishment.

Brian Cassidy:

Clever short film shot entirely with a flatbed scanner. It's kind if like if The Office was told from the point-of-view of the copy machine.

As this poll of polls shows, if Obama keeps up his performances like yesterday and campaigns like this day after day after day, the first poll - from YouGov/The Economist - showing a clear 53- 47 majority in favor of his reform will become a harbinger of the future. The data is already there that passing this will help the Democrats against the Republicans this fall, if you can get past the Washington bullshit. The last month has been clearly a net positive in public opinion.

An African-American couple; an African-American minister. Two words: must-see. Money vow:

"You are my friend, my partner, my love," Young, 47, told Townsend, 41. "I will love you today, tomorrow and forever."

Yes, I cried. You try not to.

DC, by the way, has the highest percentage of same-sex couples of any of the states that now allow us civil equality.

Kaplan, which provides the lion's share of the Washington Post Company's revenue, has been under inquiry by the Department of Ed since September. Money quote from Barron's:

The Post business desk seemed not to notice any of this, but Post investors might want to.

Much of it is now fixed. Many thanks to the coders. Now, it's time for me to get batty about something else.

Stephen Von Worley pits the country's 12,000 McDonald's restaurants (black) against the 24,000 other major fast-food joints (non-black):

[E]ach individual restaurant location has equal power.  The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe. By far, the largest pocket of resistance is Sonic Drive-In’s south-central stronghold: more than 900 restaurants packed into the state of Texas alone.  Sheer density is the key to victory!

Click here to enlarge. (Hat tip: TDW)

Julian Sanchez makes a strong point:

The central, celebrated cases that have established the boundaries of our most cherished civil liberties often involve bad people who are, in fact, guilty of whatever crime they’re accused of.

Weigel writes up the whole affair. Bill Kristol, who had his shame surgically removed years ago, feigns confusion.

Larison sketches out a possible future:

[O]ne of the last things fledgling democracies in countries with a history of authoritarianism need is a massively oversized military and security apparatus. It is often the case in developing countries that the military can serve as an institution that unites and integrates the nation. This will tend to make it the one institution most of the population trusts and respects. However, with greater prestige and respect comes a willingness to intervene in politics when the elected civilians prove themselves to be incapable of governing effectively and/or relatively honestly.

Bernard Avishai calls for it:

Israel should be inviting, not prohibiting, Palestinian entrepreneurs to come to the West Bank and invest. It should be greatly expanding the number of permits for businesspeople to come to Jerusalem. It should be allowing banks to operate here, thus stopping the city's brain drain to Amman and Dubai.

 
 A reader writes:

Your reader's defense of Mo'Nique was nice but erroneous.  Large black ladies have never been "vilified" in this country.  Made fun of and stereotyped, yes, but not "vilified." 

The notion of the strong Black Mammy is one of the most positive portrayals of Black folk in the US going back to slavery times.  And there was nothing "cringe-worthy" in Hattie McDaniel's portrayal in "Gone With The Wind" -- she was in complete control. In fact, her portrayal was just about the only positive portrayal of Black people in that movie.  And, yes, Mo'Nique's award acceptance speech was extremely self-conscious, self-aware, and self-important.

Another writes:

I don't know about smug and self-righteous, but it certainly made me do a double-take when the first thing she said was that her win was about the performance and not the politics, and then almost everything that followed made her win all about the politics.

Via Matt Steinglass, John Sides applies some simple game theory to the health care muddle:

[If] the representative wants to extract concessions from the Democratic leadership, it’s thus a good idea to signal uncertainty or even opposition to the bill — as many conservative Democrats have done. This raises the possibility, as one friend noted to me, that the prevalence of these signals in news stories may inflate the perceived chance that health care reform will fail in the House.

Along these lines, Stupak is sounding more optimistic.

Another comes out:

State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Calif.), the fierce opponent of gay rights who was arrested last week for drunk driving after leaving a gay nightclub, confirmed in a radio interview Monday that he is gay. "I'm gay," Ashburn told local radio host Inga Barks before returning to the Senate for the first time since his arrest. "Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long."

Here's how broken he is:

In 2005, Ashburn, who is divorced and has four children, co-hosted a "traditional values" rally in support of amending the state constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The proposed amendment's language also likely would have nullified the state's domestic-partnership law.

Ashburn also opposed the state's proclamation of Harvey Milk Day, state laws that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, a resolution supporting repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and a variety of other measures supportive of gay people. He reportedly supported Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure via which voters amended the state constitution to repeal gays' right to marry ...

Will he vote any differently now?

The one thing you always knew about the Clintons and those who were close to them in the 1990s: they always, always reeked of fear. They suspected that white Americans could never vote for a black president; they believed you had to triangulate to the right of the GOP to survive; they believed that health insurance reform was political death; they held that standing up for civil rights for gay people was always stupid. And very few represent that kind of politics more than Jim Carville, Stan Greenberg and, yes, Rahm Emanuel, still traumatized after all these years.

Emanuel has a reputation for feistiness and God knows I'm not one to throw stones in my own glass House. But behind the thuggishness is a pathological fear of the right and a remarkably inept and crude set of human skills. He was hired to handle Congress; and yet his rank failure to pass a health insurance bill with a super-majority in the Senate and a big majority in the House for a full year - and the depth of the distrust between House and Senate that has emerged under his watch - reveals that his brand of cowardly principle and bullying practice is not what it is cracked up to be. Now his stupid posturing is also being used - naked in a shower no less - as a tool for Glenn Beck and the nihilist far right. 

But more disturbing is his classic Clintonian refusal to stand up against the Cheneyite right on critical matters such as national security and American values. No wonder he is so beloved of the Cheneyite rump now installed by Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post. All of which is to say: beware this poll from Greenberg on national security this morning.

Via Massie, Mark Benjamin describes how waterboarding worked in practice:

The CIA's waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. "In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks," the CIA's Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. "Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness."

Remember when we were told that it lasted just a few seconds and provided miraculous, accurate intelligence? And are still told by propagandists like Marc Thiessen and Cliff May that the victims were actually grateful for this and treated it as a religious liberation?

Now imagine what we still don't know about what Cheney and his band of incompetent and weak war criminals got away with.

Barcelona, Spain, 5.01 pm

Just for the record, in November 2003, when Ramesh Ponnuru was defending a travesty of parliamentary procedure to pass a completely-unfunded multi-trillion-dollar, Rove-inspired pre-election bribe to seniors, this far leftist was writing:

We're beginning to realize that GOP has nothing to do with small government or fiscal sobriety. It's a vehicle for massive debt and catering to the worst forms of corporate welfare. Thank God for McCain. Bush should veto this [energy] bill, until it is de-porked. He won't, of course. He has yet to veto a single big-spending bill. He doesn't seem to give a damn about what is happening to the fiscal health of this country.

On the Medicare bill, the Dish was virulently opposed on fiscal grounds, and didn't let the Democrats off either:

“I think the blowback against me, especially the ad hominem attacks, was unfair. And I think that these ad hominem attacks — calling the Department of Justice, where I proudly served, the Department of Jihad — are disgusting," - Charles “Cully” Stimson, former head of detainee policy at the Pentagon who was forced out in 2007 after saying that he was shocked that major law firms were representing Gitmo detainees pro bono.

Isikoff calls Stimson the "most surprising signer" of the Wittes letter.

Greenwald wants action:

There is a real opportunity here to cause that rarest of political events:  namely, having someone's credibility and standing be diminished by virtue of repugnant acts.  Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Andy McCarthy (with whom it originated) have so transparently crossed every line with this ugly smear campaign that they are being condemned across the political spectrum. 

Obama did yesterday what he will do this fall if the Democrats have the common sense to pass the health insurance reform bill. Start watching the video above at 9.30. I love his jab at Washington pundit bullshit. As I wrote in my column last Sunday,

The polling shows the bill isn’t as unpopular as the Republicans insist it is. In the latest poll of polls, about 48% oppose it and about 43% support it. That has been stable since November, as Nate Silver, the blogger, has noted. A Wall Street Journal poll found support at a mere 36%. But when the same sample was told what was in the bill — everyone gets insurance; it does not end when you lose your job; no one gets denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition — the support went up 20 points. Its component parts are far more popular than the total concept — and more easily explained to the public. Just because Obama hasn’t done this so far doesn’t mean he won’t.

And now he has. This is the kind of argument that, in a recovering economy, could shift the dynamic back to the president's party. This is the Obama many of you voted for. Money quote (as inspiring as the campaign):

David Jarman criticizes National Journal's rankings of politicians:

[W]hen Kucinich votes against healthcare reform for not being single-payer, it’s notched as a conservative vote rather than a lefty one. And when Paul votes against military adventurism, it’s recorded as a liberal vote rather than modern-day isolationism. In other words, because they break with their party on principle, National Journal ends up classifying ideologues as centrists.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Writing in the Fred Hiatt chair for Bush-Cheney Mediocrities, Marc Thiessen continues his work as a Cheney mouthpiece, under the preposterous guise of being a journalist. This may win the False Equivalence Award this year:

Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack? Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals "war criminals" and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the "al-Qaeda seven" when a Spanish judge tried to indict the "Bush six"? Philippe Sands, author of the "Torture Team," crowed: "This is the end of these people's professional reputations!" I don't recall anyone accusing him of "shameful" personal attacks.

A small difference. None of these lawyers did commit war crimes, or rigged the plain meaning of the law to allow their political masters to torture anyone they wanted. Friedersdorf and Greenwald pounce.

Time reports:

About a year ago, her partner's father assaulted [Pepe Julian Onziema] when he saw the couple walking down the street together. She ended up bruised and battered, her clothes torn and with a mild concussion. 

In comparison to the open hostility Onziema faces from the outside world, at her and her girlfriend's airy apartment in a Kampala, life is beautifully mundane domesticity. Her partner cooks, and Onziema chimes in that she does too in a way that makes it obvious that she doesn't. They both clean, they have friends over for beers, they watch music videos. Onziema wants more. She bought her girlfriend a ring and hopes to get married. "But if we get married, her dad has to give her away," Onziema says, discouraged by the torn jeans she keeps from the night of the attack.

(Hat tip: BTB)

A tumblr.

(Hat tip: Ezra)

Chait begs pundits to focus their eyes:

[T]he general thrust of elite sentiment has been, as I said, depressingly myopic. It's natural to focus on improving a piece of legislation whose details remain in flux. The problem comes when the desire to improve becomes the sole focus for evaluating it. Nearly any of the great political advances in American history, viewed from ground level, looked like a pastiche of grubby compromises and half measures. At some point the imperative is to take the broader view. If they ever do that-- whether health care reform succeeds or fails -- the critics from the delusional left, the hysterical right and the sullen center will feel ashamed.

My similar feelings here.

Musings On Iraq reads between the news leaks:

Iran is definitely supporting Shiite parties in Iraq’s 2010 parliamentary voting as it always has, and did help put together the National Alliance. That suits its main goal, which is a Shiite run government in Baghdad that will be friendly to Tehran and never become a rival again. After Iraq’s voting is finished on March 7, Iran will likely push for the Alliance and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law to mend fences and form a ruling coalition again. That being said, the regime in Tehran is facing a major internal crisis with its public after its own presidential balloting.

Mudflats highlights an inconvenient truth.

Today on the Dish we focused on the Iraq elections, with analysis from Juan Cole, Marc Lynch, and Musings on Iraq. A view from the Middle Eastern press here. Kristol shared his "expert" opinion. Greg Scoblete and Peter Beinart continued the discussion over empire.

Andrew called out Halperin's BS, lamented the latest string of self-outed officials, tackled the skewed consensus against Obama on Jewish settlements, and finally addressed at length Goldblog's criticisms over Israel. As Goldfarb got starbursts over Liz Cheney, a slew of Republican lawyers and former Bush officials united against her McCarthyism. And Joe Hagan profiled the whole Cheney clan.

The drumbeat to pass the HCR bill continued here and here, with some resistance here. Megan Carpentier built upon Don Peck's Atlantic cover story while Andrew calling Mo'Nique "smug" sparked the day's dissent. Conan was cracking up the Twitterverse. Hypocrisy from the far right here and here. Weekend wrap here. And if you haven't read Andrew's latest take on the state of conservatism, go here.

-- C.B.

[Re-posted from the weekend]

The chattering classes at this moment are declaring the rebirth of conservatism in the energy on the Republican ideological right, the likelihood of major Democratic losses this fall, the success of the Republican party in defining the essentially pragmatic, centrist healthcare reform bill as a product of some left-liberal social engineering project, and on and on. The op-ed pages think in terms of this rubric; cable "news" seems incapable of seeing anything but this rubric. And the creation of a cocooned, conservative, religio-political subculture, complete with a massively lucrative publishing/broadcasting/blogging service industry, reinforces this with a cultural sledge-hammer. Republicans like Bill Kristol see "victory" ahead, have already seen "victory" in Iraq, and urge the intense and constant rallying cry of "Toujours l'audace!"

This narrative is a reflexive and easy one; it echoes the inanity of "Who Won The Day?" Politico-style  analysis; it has turned political journalism into sports journalism; it avoids historical context in favor of constant cultural and political amnesia. It takes the mind of the American people as an etch-a-sketch, shaken anew every electoral cycle. It infects left and right.

Just look at Frank Rich's column today, which like MSNBC to FNC, which is the same dynamic, and the same understanding of politics, and its purposes. In this worldview - which is now the worldview in American political analysis - ideology has infiltrated everything, it has saturated public and private, it has invaded even something sacred like religious faith, in which the mysteries of existence have been distilled in writing or even understanding the churches into a battle between "liberals" and "conservatives."

People accuse me of pedantry or semantics in insisting that all of this - on the right and the left - is in fact a sign of the death of conservatism as a temperament or a politics, rather than its revival. But I have been arguing this for more than a decade. Conservatism, if it means anything, is a resistance to ideology and the world of ideas ideology represents, whether that ideology is a function of the left or the right.

Scott Horton joins the fray:

[T]he incompetent McCarthyites haven’t done their homework. On a list of lawyers in recent government service who have served alleged terrorists, the first name might be Michael Chertoff’s. Chertoff served as counsel to Magdy El-Amir, a man identified as a leading Al Qaeda fundraiser in North America. Chertoff went on to head the criminal division at Justice and then to become secretary of Homeland Security.