Tuesday, February 9, 2010

09 Feb 2010 01:31 pm

Palin's Village

Yesterday, Nate Silver compared Bush and Palin:

Bush was at least smart enough to surround himself with a team of exceptionally competent strategists, advisers and consultants. He was smart enough to recognize that it takes a village to get oneself elected President, and ideally one a bit less isolated and insular than Wasilla. Palin hasn't figured that out yet; her ability to become the Republican nominee and have a fighting chance in the general election will depend on her ability to do so.

She had some total pros in the last campaign - Schmidt, Wallace, et al - and she just couldn't handle any direction. Continetti is still auditioning for one of those roles:

Continue reading "Palin's Village" »

09 Feb 2010 12:55 pm

"Generation Zero"

The maker of the movie emails to say that the Dish's link gave a false impression of the film. Since I haven't seen it myself, I'll try and see a screening when one comes up in DC and report back. But the Daily Beast's Jon Avlon liked it:

There have been highlights to balance out the lowlights at the Tea Party Convention. For all the Obama Derangement Syndrome evidenced, the spark of the movement was a demand to return to fiscal responsibility. These roots were well represented by a special screening of a new documentary about the roots of the fiscal crisis and the reckoning still to come, called Generation Zero. Written and directed by Stephen K. Bannon (Titus) and produced by the now infamous Citizens United, it is not primarily a partisan polemic—instead it is a smart and comprehensible look at the results of fiscal irresponsibility, featuring commentary from Amity Shlaes, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, and Newt Gingrich, among others. It can be difficult to capture the outrage of overspending or to humanize the long-term costs—but Generation Zero succeeds in doing it.

09 Feb 2010 12:27 pm

The Palin Emails II

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

Here are three more emails from March 21 - 23, 2008, which I reproduce because of the Dish's long commitment to providing as much information about the strange stories Sarah Palin has told about her fifth pregnancy and because governor Palin has welcomed such scrutiny, declaring that her life is an open book. They come from this 3,000 email archive from the State of Alaska, requested by MSNBC.

A little over a month after Trig was born, the state sent Governor Palin an email asking for his birth certificate. It's a routine letter, reminding Palin that if the state did not get the certificate within a month, any state benefits for the child would be suspended. Since Trig had special needs, I imagine this would be important in providing support for his rearing. Here's the first email:

 
You can click to enlarge. For some reason, Governor Palin and her staff did not respond to the email about her one-month old baby. Instead, the next day, one of the governor's staffers, Janice Mason, forwarded the email to Todd Palin, marking it "URGENT":

Continue reading "The Palin Emails II" »

09 Feb 2010 11:59 am

A Mother With A Special Needs Child

A reader writes:

I am the mother of a 16 year-old girl with severe intellectual disabilities.  I am disturbed by Mrs Palin's insincere comments when she speaks out for individuals with developmental delays. I watched The Colbert Report last night, and I have never been more proud to call myself a fan of Stephen Colbert. 

But also, as a mother I wonder what is in Trig's future.

Continue reading "A Mother With A Special Needs Child" »

09 Feb 2010 11:20 am

More Empty Threats

Reza Aslan sums up the pro-Green reaction to Ahmadi's "alarming" nuclear rhetoric from Sunday:

These announcements are a joke; they cannot be taken seriously. Not only has Iran thus far barely managed to enrich uranium to 5 percent, it can hardly keep its one enrichment plant in Natanz—which took many years to build—up and running full time. The idea that Iran could build 10 more plants in a year while also figuring out how to enrich uranium to 20 percent is laughable. Ahmadinejad’s announcement is nothing more than a feeble attempt at nuclear brinksmanship, as the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner acknowledged when he called it “blackmail.” Iran’s hope is to return to the negotiations begun in Vienna last October over its nuclear stockpile on more favorable terms.

More than anything else, these announcements were intended for domestic consumption.

Continue reading "More Empty Threats" »

09 Feb 2010 10:56 am

Running Scared

Reihan checks in with the latest McCain campaign:

McCain has scrambled to crush the [J.D. Hayworth] insurgency, raising money and rallying the troops with a robocall from newly minted Republican folk hero Scott Brown. He's even scheduled campaign appearances in March with his former running mate Sarah Palin, the woman some believe made his slim chance at winning the White House even slimmer. Hayworth's flacks are crying foul, telling anyone who'll listen that McCain is being too tough on a man who until recently made his living as a minor-league radio shock jock. Polls aside, it's very clear that McCain is taking Hayworth's candidacy seriously.

The man has been in politics for decades; he's 73; he has run two presidential campaigns; why is he running again - and turning once more to the hardest right - to stay in power? Is politics his entire life? I prefer my politicians to have some kind of perspective, some kind of sense of when it's time to leave the stage with grace. But McCain? No grace. Just bile and hunger for power.

09 Feb 2010 10:20 am

Tomorrow Belongs To Her

Ambers has a devastating and brilliant post on why Palin - "a blend of Nixon and Buchanan", with boobs and a Christianism now fused into Republicanism - is a lethal force in the land. I keep remembering the election of 2004, when people were shocked that the polls were wrong as millions of previously unknown voters flocked to the voting booths to put Bush back into power. But Palin is so, so much more than Bush - so much more charismatic, so much more shameless, so much more prepared to use proto-fascist memes to demonize elites and run rings around a tepid media unable to confront her with her lies. In normal times, she would be a joke. In depression times, as debt mounts, and wars against "the other" at home and abroad fester, as one party openly advocates using the military to snatch "enemy combatants" off the streets and dispatch them to detention and torture sites, such as Gitmo ... well, she is a force to be reckoned with, as I've said from the very start. Money quote:

In Searching for Whitopia, Rich Benjamin defines of a geo-racial balkanization that gives Palin-like candidates a natural base: towns like Coeur d'Alene Idaho, with a "diversified economic base," a pro-business regulatory environment, a commitment to "quality of life" issues, and -- a 95% ethnic homogeneity.  Coeur D'Aleners were migrants from the California of the 1990s; they live now in Colorado and the suburbs of Phoenix and are slowly pushing their way around the Sunbelt.

Continue reading "Tomorrow Belongs To Her" »

09 Feb 2010 10:07 am

"America Is Not Ungovernable"

Jay Cost blames Obama for legislative impasses:

It's easy to blame the Senate for inactivity - but the problem is the House. It has consistently passed legislation that is too far to the left for the Senate and the country. Ultimate responsibility rests with the President, whose expressed indifference toward policy details has allowed the more vigorous House Democrats, led by an extraordinarily vigorous Speaker, to dominate. That the President consistently praised the House and blamed the Senate in his State of the Union address suggests that he remains unaware of this problem.

Has Jay Cost heard of the filibuster that doesn't even filibuster and a legislative strategy of zero cooperation from the GOP from the very first week? Without those, healthcare reform and climate change legislation would be passed by now. But I get the sense that Obama is adjusting fast.

09 Feb 2010 09:52 am

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXVII: Limbaugh, Emanuel and "Retards"

Sargent examines Palin's blatant lie with regard to Limbaugh and Rahm using the word "retard". She claims on Fox News that Limbaugh never used the term in reference to a group of people. He did:

Palin’s latest falsehood is almost laughably easy to debunk, yet she went ahead with it anyway. The point is that if you never subject yourself to any kind of media cross-examination, it gets easier and easier to lie, because there’s simply no downside, or any disincentive of any kind, to lying as much as you want to.

And why has no one asked her if it's true that she calls Trig her "retarded baby" in private? We have an eye-witness account - the father of her grandson. But noooo - exposing her for the total fraud she is is something no one in Washington ever wants to do.

And this is the point: the press is complicit in all this (although I have to say that Chris Wallace was pretty fair).

Continue reading "The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXVII: Limbaugh, Emanuel and "Retards"" »

09 Feb 2010 09:43 am

The Obama Summit

Is Obama maneuvering to get a more conservative health reform bill passed - with his customary calm, bipartisan brand? Sargent wonders what it all means. Ezra notes how many Republican-backed ideas are already in the plan. Marcy Wheeler suspects:

For some time, the White House’s efforts to pass the excise tax barely hid their underlying objective to eliminate tax breaks for employer provided health insurance. So while this is entirely speculative, I do wonder whether Obama is trying to use Republicans to either justify a switch to a different plan, eliminating the tax break, or at the very least, to build pressure for the policy among Democrats.

That might encourage some who are fine with a more moderate bill. I find it all encouraging. I think it shows that Obama is going to keep revealing just how centrist and sensible much of the Senate bill is, move away from ideological histrionics toward specifics and use this process as a way to call Republicans' bluff and Democratic purism in the House as well as explain to the public what is actually in the bill (hint: not socialism).

I should repeat that this is not my ideal health bill; but I do believe that the injustices and cruelties of the current system must not be allowed to continue, that the cost-control measures within it are vital to finding a way to save our fiscal future, and - more importantly - that the blow failure would strike to the entire concept of a workable democratic system would be a boon to cynicism, which rewards the worst and not the best in ourselves.

Continue reading "The Obama Summit" »

09 Feb 2010 09:25 am

The Tea Partiers vs Ron Paul

Yep: that really is illuminating. One might imagine that no one would be able to compete with Ron Paul's small government credentials, his resistance to almost any government spending, and his uniquely consistent fiscal conservatism. But the Dallas Morning News (hat tip: Weigel) reports he has three "Tea Party" primary challengers. Three. Paul, remember, was by some measures the first Tea Partier, raising a vast amount of money for his presidential campaign online on the 234th anniversary of the original Tea-Party.

But he doesn't measure up any more:

Continue reading "The Tea Partiers vs Ron Paul" »

09 Feb 2010 09:13 am

Bonuses Helped Cause The Crash?

That is what Dan Ariely's research suggests:

We've recently gathered evidence suggesting that dangling exorbitant sums of money in front of workers doesn't improve performance. If anything, it negatively affects it. It could be true that the spectre of windfalls will increase activity. If I offered you a £1 million bonus for exceptional performance, you might work more hours and check Facebook less. But would your input be more thoughtful? More creative? Would you be more likely to tap your full-brain potential? Doing more doesn't equal doing better.

09 Feb 2010 08:47 am

Cap-And-Dividend

The Economist's Lexington highlights a bill:

[Maria Cantwell, the junior senator from Washington state] is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend”. Under her bill, the government would impose a ceiling on carbon emissions each year. Producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy permits. The permits would be auctioned, raising vast sums of money. Most of that money would be divided evenly among all Americans. The bill would raise energy prices, of course, and therefore the price of everything that requires energy to make or distribute. But a family of four would receive perhaps $1000 a year, which would more than make up for it, reckons Ms Cantwell. Cap-and-dividend would set a price on carbon, thus giving Americans a powerful incentive to burn less dirty fuel. It would also raise the rewards for investing in clean energy. And it would leave all but the richest 20% of Americans—who use the most energy—materially better off, she says.

Lexington worries that "a simple bill that doesn't bribe every clamouring interest group is going to have a hard time getting through Congress." That's becoming a universal theme, isn't it, made more obvious rather than less by Obama's first year. Special interests run the Congress which runs the country. The notion of citizens voting for specific goals for the public good and having their representatives debate them in good faith and vote on them ... well, it seems positively surreal, doesn't it?

09 Feb 2010 08:15 am

Chart Of The Day

 Via Economix, a pie chart on where Americans volunteer (click for full size).

09 Feb 2010 07:43 am

In Defense Of Low Expectations

Larison urges the GOP to stay sober:

The danger of overconfidence regarding the midterm results is not just that it can make the GOP complacent, arrogant and deaf to the real concerns of voters. It creates unduly high expectations that will make even an average or decent election result seem more like a defeat. The more the GOP hypes its chances of retaking one or both houses this year, the more devastating the failure to do so will be. After GOP-friendly analysts and pundits have been telling the tale of 1974 or 1994-style losses for the presidential party all year, modest gains will make it feel as if the election is a third straight repudiation of Republicans, because their leaders will have made the election a referendum on their readiness to be in the majority rather than a referendum on the administration.

Monday, February 8, 2010

08 Feb 2010 11:55 pm

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Cohn and others reacted to the news of Obama's HCR summit (just as his support among Independents was slipping). Andrew countered the claim of fiscal conservatism among the tea-partiers, called out the crazy side of the Tea Party movement, and took another look at Palin's convention speech. He also highlighted another bit of odd evidence related to her pregnancy. Frum and DiA scrutinized her speech, NIAC confronted her Iran rhetoric, and Continetti still had starbursts. Samberg pwned Palin and the Dems. Weekend recap here.

In other coverage, Douthat examined Paul Ryan's sensible plan for fiscal reform, Andrew sounded off on the Hoyt-Keller spat over Ethan Bronner, and a reader challenged Totten over The Hurt Locker. Ana Marie Cox took on Rich Lowry over DADT while FNC displayed some admirable opposition to the policy. Jane Mayer, backed by Horton, put the spotlight on Rahm Emmanuel over torture policy. We highlighted the right way to interrogate. And there was a shocking report of an American soldier waterboarding his own daughter.

Green Movement update here. Recession update here. Images from the snowpocalypse here and here. Creepy ad here. Another children's masterpiece from Herzog here.

-- C.B.

08 Feb 2010 09:55 pm

Face Of The Day

On February 8, 2010 a man bathes at one of the many tent cities that have sprung up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The death toll from the Jan. 12 earthquake has reached 212,000 people with 300,000 injured and over one million homeless. By Mario Tama/Getty Images.

08 Feb 2010 09:16 pm

What Sort Of Politician Do You Want?

TNC has one answer. Jonathan Bernstein another:

I want Members of Congress to lose sleep if they think they're doing something that their constituents wouldn't approve of.  I want them to want reelection.  If I was to really pick one thing that might be seriously wrong with the contemporary Congress, it's that the reelection incentive might not be strong enough -- if it was, perhaps Republicans during Bush's second term might have bailed on his unpopular policies.  My guess, however is that the Republicans defeated in 2006 and 2008 (and the Democrats defeated in 1994) are doing just fine for themselves.  Those Republicans may sleep well, but they ran their country into the ditch. 

But one overwhelming reason they did was precisely because they worried about being out-machoed on the Iraq war and torture or pummeled by opposing the Medicare Prescription Drug Act, to name just three. I prefer Edmund Burke's advice myself. It's called representative - and not direct - democracy for a reason.

08 Feb 2010 08:25 pm

Palin Emails I

Check out a very rare piece of third party documentation of governor Palin's long plane-trip back to Alaska, in labor with her fifth child, many hours after her water broke. It's an eye-witness account of her state of mind in an airport lounge. Several readers have noted that the interaction seems to have taken place in the Seattle airport lounge, not Dallas. So she was even closer to giving birth at that moment than I previously believed. Thanks for the eagle eyes. Use them to peruse the rest if you're stuck in the snow like we are.

More contemporaneous emails on this subject from this period in Palin's life to come. Stay tuned.

08 Feb 2010 07:53 pm

Watching The Snow Fall

A time-lapse:

08 Feb 2010 07:52 pm

Palin's Modi Operandi

E.G. at DiA watched Palin's speech:

Politics is intrinsically adversarial and successful politicians have to know how to win an argument. Although Mrs Palin often attacks other politicians and says that her policies would be better than theirs, she doesn't welcome debate, and her preferred oppositional strategy is abrupt withdrawal. Think about the resignation from the Oil & Gas commission and from the statehouse, or her choice to "go rogue" rather than convince the McCain campaign of the merits of her approach. That's how you get 30% of the vote, not 51%. And it goes without saying that it wouldn't be an effective way to govern.

Frum dead-blogged it on YouTube:

Continue reading "Palin's Modi Operandi" »

08 Feb 2010 07:33 pm

The Tebow Ad

It was much tamer than the controversy around it suggested:

Basically a rather touching, funny way for Focus on the Family to airbrush its image. And nothing wrong with that. Amy Davidson reflects on it.

08 Feb 2010 07:10 pm

Why We Tip, Ctd

A reader writes:

I try to tip well, because I have been in the service industry, and often you are getting minimal pay for very busy and sometimes stressful work. I've noticed that friends and family who have put years in the service industry are generally more likely to tip better than those who didn't. This isn't a hard rule cut in stone, it isn't something I've conducted a scientific study on, and I'm likely bringing my own prejudices to the table, but it's how things appear to me. People who haven't worked in the service industry much, or it's decades behind them are more likely to tip less and explain to the party that they are doing so because service didn't meet expectations. I don't use low service to dock a tip (I start off at 18%), since everyone has a bad night and I'd rather not make it worse. I will use good service to increase my tip though.

Some businesses don't even pay minimum wage, at least in Colorado, since the law allows for tips to be rolled into the server's hourly wage.

Continue reading "Why We Tip, Ctd" »

08 Feb 2010 06:55 pm

Green Shoots Of Sanity On The Right, Ctd

E.D. Kain explains:

I don’t think the debate is really between “moderates” and “conservatives” so much as it is between reasonable people and people who are in it entirely to win.

In this sense, the reasonable people may be very conservative – Paul Ryan, for instance, is hardly a “centrist” but he is in every sense of the word a reasonable man whose politics are well grounded in first principles.  Bruce Bartlett has added to the conversation not by being a “moderate” but by coming up with new and relevant ideas.  Conversely, there are those on the right with very little grounding in conservative first principles who take so well to the rightwing populism of the day that no one would ever consider them to be “centrists”, even if philosophically they are anything  but principled conservatives.  A certain former governor of Alaska leaps to mind.

Bruce notices a revealing shift in the WSJ editorial page that begins to drag them back to fiscal sanity as well.

08 Feb 2010 06:34 pm

The View From Your Window

Ellicott City, Maryland, 9.45 am.

The book, The View From Your Window, with 200 of the best window views published by the Dish over the last three years, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk with a foreword by Andrew Sullivan, can be previewed here and ordered here.

08 Feb 2010 06:24 pm

Totten On The Hurt Locker, Ctd

A reader writes:

I have to take issue with Totten’s judgement on "Hurt Locker.” I was in Iraq in 2004, and the movie gets SO MUCH wrong. But most important, it gets things wrong that are timeless, like military culture.  I just watched it, and the essential message is that of “Top Gun.” It’s that military and unite cohesion are boring, and the maverick lead character gets a great deal of praise for channeling his inner Sarah Palin. This, I think, is the main reason its getting slammed by a number of vets and journalists who were there. But the details also shred it:

Continue reading "Totten On The Hurt Locker, Ctd" »

08 Feb 2010 06:02 pm

Force As Slot Machine

From Andrew Bacevich's article in The American Conservative:

An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.

John Quiggin follows up:

Continue reading "Force As Slot Machine" »

08 Feb 2010 05:39 pm

Creepy Ad Watch

(Hat tip: BF)

08 Feb 2010 05:17 pm

The Tea Party's Weimar Tinge

One of the weirdest aspects of TP ideology is that Obama deliberately created and facilitated an economic and financial crisis in order to allow the government to take over the entire economy to turn the US socialist. Bush, of course, did TARP - as any responsible president would have. A stimulus package which even AEI concedes help put a bottom on the economy and a bank bailout during a potential financial crisis that, if allowed to spiral down, could have begun a Second Great Depression: these are obvious, debatable but mainstream measures to cope with crisis. Somehow Tim Geithner does not come off as a Leninist to me. But the invaluable Weigel - a sane libertarian last time I checked - noticed something truly disturbing:

On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues.

Continue reading "The Tea Party's Weimar Tinge" »

08 Feb 2010 04:57 pm

Green Shoots Of Sanity On The Right

Last week Douthat parsed Rep. Paul Ryan's moment in the sun:

[T]he size of Ryan’s proposed voucher could be increased, to accommodate political realities, without doing violence to his overall vision of what government should be doing, and where it could be cut. And that vision is more appealing, I think, than many liberals are giving it credit for. What Ryan is proposing, ultimately, is a comprehensive blueprint for a conservative welfare state.

Continue reading "Green Shoots Of Sanity On The Right" »

08 Feb 2010 04:41 pm

How Americans Interrogate

We all know that the US never tortured prisoners of war before Bush and Cheney adopted Gestapo and Khmer Rouge techniques in secret torture camps, kept from the Red Cross. That doesn't mean legal - and often frightening - ways to get people to talk were not very much part of the tool-kit. From an obit today from the days when America was a beacon of human rights:

Continue reading "How Americans Interrogate" »

08 Feb 2010 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

(Hat tip: Wooster)

08 Feb 2010 03:44 pm

The "President's" Budget

Bruce Bartlett offers a brief history of the budget:

Ironically, the portion of the budget over which Congress actually has meaningful control has fallen sharply over time. In 1970 the discretionary portion of the budget--those programs and operations subject to annual appropriations, was 61.5% of all spending. The rest consists of mandatory programs like Social Security, Medicare and interest on the debt that are not subject to annual appropriations. Their spending is automatic and cannot be reduced just by appropriating less money to them. In 2009 the discretionary portion of the budget was down to just 35.2% of spending.

Continue reading "The "President's" Budget" »

08 Feb 2010 03:17 pm

The Real Cameron?

Johann Hari interviews David Cameron:

David Cameron is a hazy cloud of charm and platitudes: no matter how hard you peer into him, you cannot find anything solid to focus on for long. There are flickers of apparently real pro-gay feeling, but they are soon followed by excuse-making for some of the most anti-gay politicians in Europe. Which is the real Cameron? On this issue, I suspect even he doesn’t know. But over the next four years, we are all going to find out: the beaming lights of power will part this mysterious and contradictory fog.

I'm not so convinced he's going to win a real majority. The electoral math is very, very hard, given the way the constituencies are constructed. I side with WIlliam Hague on guarding against complacency. But read the whole thing. The Dish intends to cover the British election with almost as much scrutiny as an American one. Our British readership keeps growing - and the evolution of the Tory Party toward the pragmatic center might help bring the GOP back from its increasingly deranged brink.

08 Feb 2010 02:56 pm

Palin And Iran: NIAC Reacts

The National Iranian-American Council notes a congruity:

Forgetting for a moment that it is the Congress, not the President, that is empowered with the authority to declare war, this is a pretty brash statement, even for Palin.  It is rare that a public figure would call for military action against Iran so explicity — and to call for such drastic action as a purely political ploy breaks an even stronger taboo in Washington circles. 

So it cannot be a coincidence that Palin’s advice to President Obama comes just days after prominent anti-Islam activist Daniel Pipes wrote nearly the identical thing in the National Review.  “How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran” was the title of the article, which my colleague Jamal picked apart well enough that I don’t have to here.  But I thought it interesting that Palin would so casually align herself on foreign policy issues — by all accounts her political Achilles Heel — with such a divisive figure as Pipes.

Interesting, but not surprising. Palin, however, attributed this idea to Pat Buchanan. Pipes and Buchanan are not exactly buddies. My view is that, until you understand the depths of Palin's Christianism - she explicitly called for "divine intervention" in her Q and A - you can't understand her foreign policy. It's about the End-Times. And how to follow God's will.

08 Feb 2010 02:43 pm

Starbursts Watch

Continetti is still standing on the sinking ship:

"We are the loyal opposition, and we have a vision for the future of our country, too," Palin said. She repeatedly said the Tea Party movement does not need a leader. But is there an American politician who inspires such enthusiasm from her supporters (and her detractors)? And isn't that a unique strength in a polarized age in which the ideological stakes are so high?

Oh, yes, she'll end polarization all right.

08 Feb 2010 02:25 pm

"Like Watching A Public Execution In Slow Motion"

Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel gets the Herzog treatment:

In case you missed Curious George, go here.

08 Feb 2010 02:17 pm

The Christianist Core Of The Tea-Partiers

An important thing to note from the weekend:

While Rick Scarborough was scheduled to host a Friday session titled, "Why Christians Must Engage," at Thursday evening's Tea Party kick-off he conducted the "Organized Prayer Session for the convention & our nation." As Time described it:

By the end of the night, much of the room knelt in prayer - one of the pastors, Rick Scarborough, went after homosexuals several times to choruses of amens -- before watching a Tea Party video.

Then there's Republican candidate for governor and former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore.

More on Moore here. If you're a fiscal conservative rightly outraged at the sending and borrowing binge in DC, know who these people are, and that they have no plans to seriously tackle the debt at all.

08 Feb 2010 02:16 pm

There's An App For That

The XXfactor women debating Grindr, the gay GPS-equipped hook-up app, is oddly fascinating:

If the virtual world has been good for anything besides the spread of grammatically disabled cat photos, it's been forging a new utilitarianism for sexual relations. There are already Web sites for casual hookups and forums for finding someone to play out your sexual fantasies. You don't have to take off your wedding ring at a hotel bar Don Draper-style to have an affair—you can just log on to AshleyMadison.com and find another, no-strings-attached, willing adulterer. When I was 16, a girl in my math class asked me what "blue balls" were. I thought it was an ice-cream brand. (I was thinking of Blue Bell, obvs.) Now teenagers outfitted with iPhones are hardly misinformed about anything anymore. This isn't wholly good, but it's definitely not wholly bad, either. There's going to be a Grindr-esque app for everyone sooner or later, and it's going to rock boatfuls of social-moral milieus. It's just inevitable.

Follow up here.

08 Feb 2010 02:02 pm

Yglesias Award Nominee

"Being brave in the battlefield has nothing to do with how you go to the bathroom or how you have sex. … If you volunteer to serve this great country, we should welcome you, not push you away because of some arcane attitude about sex," - Col. David Hunt, a hawkish FNC military analyst. And the Fox host agrees, calling DADT "absolutely absurd." The whole 3-minute segment is worth watching.

08 Feb 2010 01:47 pm

The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

A reader writes:

I don't have really much to update on my view of the recession (one company did reopen the position I applied for, but they are taking their sweet time to look at my application). That said, Ash Wednesday is soon.  In regards to what I intend to give up for Lent, I decided to stop reading my political blogroll, including your blog.  It's not that I have anything against your blog, especially since you and Chris's and Patrick's work is a testament to the good a blog can do.  But in the recent weeks, as everything is getting drearier, it's becoming more and more of a distraction than anything else. 

And honestly, why should most of these things you report on matter to me anyway?  Or, as my friend put it bluntly in his own case, "Why should I give two shits about healthcare if I don't have a fucking job?"

Continue reading "The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In" »

08 Feb 2010 01:26 pm

The President Makes His Move, Ctd

Andrew Sprung praises the health care summit:

The Feb. 26 date creates a deadline  for Democrats to get their negotiation for a "reconciliation sidecar" the Senate bill finished, while the summit itself sets the stage for them to pass that fix after Obama demonstrates Republican bad faith to the country one more time. It's been increasingly plain that Democrats are not going to pass HCR legislation before then. With the meeting between Obama and House Republicans as template, Obama has structured this "exchange of ideas" as a debate he can't lose. He's going to show that nation that that "plan" Republicans have been waving around is an empty book.

Brendan Nyhan is less sure:

Continue reading "The President Makes His Move, Ctd" »

08 Feb 2010 01:14 pm

Obama Loses Independents

The barrage against "his" debt has gotten through. For a long time I've been arguing that Obama desperately needs to to take on both his own party and the Republicans and propose a serious plan to cut the long-term debt. I think he needs to go on and on and on about this - and mean it - if the Independents are going to come around.

08 Feb 2010 12:51 pm

The Palin Emails I

You may recall that MSNBC managed to get the state of Alaska to release them and they showed a deep enmeshment by Todd Palin in the affairs of state. Dish coverage here. MSNBC story here. And Christian Science Monitor story here. Andrew Halcro gave his interpretation of the role Todd Palin played in state politics here. In the best traditions of the Internet, I invite you to peruse them at will and send me anything interesting you find. I'll post any of salience.

Some, of course, give a glimpse into the Palins' lives around the birth of Trig - about which we have almost no independent confirmation or records. Here's an email that gives an independent glimpse into those hair-raising hours before her trans-continental flight half a day after her water broke. It's from an eye-witness in the waiting lounge for Alaska Airlines as Palin was ready to go back to Alaska because giving birth at world-renowned Dallas Childrens Hospital (with Down Syndrome experts on hand) would have violated her husband's insistence that the child be born in Alaska. You may recall that when the Anchorage Daily News asked Alaska Airlines how they allowed a woman eight months pregnant with a child with special needs get on a trans-continental flight, they got the following response:

Alaska Airlines ... leaves the decision to the woman and her doctor, said spokeswoman Caroline Boren. Palin was very pleasant to the gate agents and flight attendants, as always, Boren said. "The stage of her pregnancy was not apparent by observation. She did not show any signs of distress," Boren said.

My italics. In Going Rogue, she tells us her state of mind as she realized she was in labor earlier that day:

Desperation for this baby overwhelmed me.

Please don't let anything happen to this baby.

It occurred to me, once and for all. I'm so in love with this child, please God protect him! After all my doubts and fears, I had fallen in love with this precious child. The worst thing in the world was that I would lose him.

Her italics. Half a day later, preparing for a long two-plane flight trip all the way back not just to Anchorage but to Wasilla, she was sitting in the Seattle airport lounge in a lay-over when recognized by a fellow passenger. All her earlier anxieties appeared to have disappeared, as she delivered her fate - and Trig's - into God's hands. What an incredibly cool and collected woman - someone with amazing reserves of steel. A day later, the stranger emailed to congratulate her on her birth and amazing composure. This seems to confirm Palin's version of the flight:

It was a calm, relatively restful flight home.

Since I long ago committed to publishing any evidence I could find related to Palin's remarkable pregnancy stories (she steadfastly refuses to provide any), I post it below:

Continue reading "The Palin Emails I" »

08 Feb 2010 12:23 pm

The Revolutionary Guards Prepare For Thursday

One of our Iranian sources writes:

So much is happening in these last days before Feb 11th. The internet is almost not working in much of Tehran or it is so slow that most people cant even open their Gmail or Yahoo. The Greens have announced alternative routs to Azadi sq. if the Gov. blocks all the entrances to the main street. But the Gov. has installed 100s of massive speakers alongside the street of the march so people's chanting cannot be heard. They also have called on Basijis from other cities to come to Tehran and have assigned a major intersection to each group to prevent the Greens from entering the official protest. This video shows city workers taking away the garbage cans to prevent people from blocking the roads with them in case of clashes. The Green girl is explaining how funny it is that the Gov. has started a garbage bin campaign out of fear.  She and her friend laugh at them.

Evgeny Morozov looks closer at the online obstructionism. The LA Times offers a comprehensive view of the run-up to Thursday.

08 Feb 2010 11:40 am

In Defense Of Ethan Bronner

The test of a journalist is his work. I haven't detected a shred of bias in Bronner's pieces from the NYT on Israel and the Middle East, even though his son is now in the IDF. I agree with Goldblog on this for the most part. I do believe, however, that it should have been clearly disclosed without pressure from the outside forcing the NYT into a disclosure that clearly would not have happened without a public editor. Keeping such a potential conflict of interest under wraps - even as questions of war crimes are being debated in a military in which Bronner's son is now fighting - was a clear lapse of ethical judgment on Bill Keller's part, not Bronner's, who rightly informed his editors. 

Hoyt also makes a fair point:

Continue reading "In Defense Of Ethan Bronner" »

08 Feb 2010 11:36 am

Palin's Triumph

Michael Wolff has an insightful piece on Palin's opening campaign speech for 2012 on Saturday night, but seems to misinterpret my analysis. I think it was quite brilliant as a political speech, just as her convention speech was extraordinarily effective.

It was and is pure sophistry - a string of crowd-pleasing slogans with no content whatever, except for an endorsement of a global war on Islam, tax-cuts, populist attacks on Wall Street, a subtle but scary attempt to politicize the military as belonging to one party, cooptation of one religion in America, and, with the exception of nuclear power (I'm with her on that) a desire for more carbon energy, not less (as long as it's developed in the US). She has literally no serious plans commensurate with the health care crisis and no plans to cut spending in any serious way at all.

But she sure can make a speech. It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

Continue reading "Palin's Triumph" »

08 Feb 2010 11:14 am

Rahm Apologizes

08 Feb 2010 10:43 am

In The Bunker

Ana Marie Cox debates Rich Lowry on ending the persecution of gay servicemembers in the military. It's a very pleasant and honest chat. I always learn something from hearing straight people talk about us.

I repeat my firm belief that the day after this ban is fully lifted ... nothing will happen publicly. The closet will not burst open; these many patriots, often from the heartland, have absolutely no desire to inject their sexual orientation into combat or military culture. They want to do their jobs without fear of others targeting them, and to do so with integrity. The big change will happen in the minds and souls of gay servicemembers, who will fight without fear. I ave known countless of these men and women. They are among the best in our community. It pains me deeply for years to see them endure this kind of stress and fear, let alone the incidents of intense cruelty and humiliation when they are outed, sometimes days before they are due pensions for a lifetime of service.

Rich says that it's no big deal to live hiding one's sexual orientation. If you're straight, try it for one day.

Continue reading "In The Bunker" »

08 Feb 2010 10:39 am

Debating A Fantasy

Jane Mayer reports on the heat Eric Holder has taken, the fight over KSM's trial, and the controversy over the handling of the undie-bomber:

Holder told me that he was frustrated by much of the criticism over the handling of Abdulmutallab. “What we did is totally consistent with what has happened in every similar case” since 9/11, he said. “There’s a desire to ignore the facts to try to score political points. It’s a little shocking.” Without exception, he noted, every previous terrorist suspect apprehended inside the country had been handled as a civilian criminal. Even so, critics such as Krauthammer were denouncing Holder for failing to send Abdulmutallab directly to Guantánamo. As a senior national-security official in the White House put it, “It’s a fantasy! Under what alternative legal system can Special Operations Forces fly into Detroit, and take someone away without court oversight?”

Scott Horton praises the article:

The article is essential reading for those who want to understand why the Holder Justice Department has shut down all efforts to secure accountability for serious crimes committed during the war on terror, potentially including homicides. Mayer gives us a step-by-step explanation of the process and the roles played by each. It leaves little doubt that the man in charge is Rahm Emanuel.