Friday, November 20, 2009

20 Nov 2009 04:45 pm

The Price Of Trying KSM

David Feige worries about the consequences:

In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that's where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.

Continue reading "The Price Of Trying KSM" »

20 Nov 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

A reader writes:

This is a video of an ex-MMA fighter from Japan who is now apparently some sort of dance/singing star. I think it fits with what you normally put up.

20 Nov 2009 04:12 pm

Cal Thomas On Palin

A judicious take from a position of support.

20 Nov 2009 04:07 pm

How Quickly They Turn

That's the trouble with populism: the populace can get mad if they don't get all their books signed. My favorite insult yelled at Palin in Indiana: "Quitting on the job right there!":

20 Nov 2009 03:59 pm

The Fundamentalist Era, Ctd

A reader writes:

The day Palin's book came out I wrote the original review on Amazon that you quoted from buzzfeed ("So what if Sarah Palin didn't write this book? Even God used early scribes to write the Bible,"), although someone named "Moe Lang" later came along and quoted me. The scary thing is, I don't know if Moe was being facetious.  I was, but now feel guilty about it.

Continue reading "The Fundamentalist Era, Ctd" »

20 Nov 2009 03:46 pm

If Roe Were Overturned, Ctd

A reader writes:

Continue reading "If Roe Were Overturned, Ctd" »

20 Nov 2009 03:16 pm

Denying Her The Spotlight

Friedersdorf counters Linker and wishes the Dish hadn't gone silent for a day:

Ms. Palin’s political critics can no more deny her the spotlight than they can stop her appearances on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, or demand that Oprah’s producers ignore her, or remove the book displays at Barnes and Noble. Insofar as unfair criticisms of Ms. Palin cause Americans who’d otherwise tune her out to rally around, critics can diminish her influence by refraining from wrongheaded attacks and unfair arguments. But denying her the spotlight wouldn’t be within our power even if we could all coordinate our actions, which we can’t.

Do I think that we should obsess over Ms. Palin? I do not.

Continue reading "Denying Her The Spotlight" »

20 Nov 2009 03:14 pm

Pray For Obama

The coded Christianist messages on various bumper stickers and t-shirts call for Obama's wife to be a widow.

20 Nov 2009 03:05 pm

Reagan and Obama

USA Today's interactive graph of presidential approval ratings over the decades is great fun. What you see is that the president whose early ratings most closely match Obama's is Reagan. Within a few months, Reagan was at 35 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval. (Hat tip: Taegan.)

20 Nov 2009 02:45 pm

Talking About Healthcare, Forevermore

Suderman worries:

Reform won't just mess up our health care system, it will infect our political system; the more our politics and our health care are tied together, the more our political debates will become indistinguishable from our health care debates. They'll become permanently intertwined, going on and on, forever and ever, cable news without end.

Ross adds:

[S]ince the stakes are literally life and death, it stands to reason that the more power the government has to divvy up health care dollars, the more rancorous these debates will get. “Death panels” and “Republicans want you to die quickly” are just the beginning …

I agree.

Continue reading "Talking About Healthcare, Forevermore" »

20 Nov 2009 02:37 pm

Yglesias Award Nominee

"[T]here is no question about the legitimacy of U.S. federal courts to incapacitate terrorists. Many of Holder’s critics appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid; al-Qaeda agent Jose Padilla; “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh; the Lackawanna Six; and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was prosecuted for the same conspiracy for which Mohammed is likely to be charged. Many of these terrorists are locked in a supermax prison in Colorado, never to be seen again," - Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith, deputy attorney general and assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, respectively.

20 Nov 2009 02:33 pm

Chart Of The Day II

Silver analyzes.

20 Nov 2009 02:32 pm

The View From Your Window

Medford, Massachusetts, 2.20 pm

20 Nov 2009 02:22 pm

Fox News' Internal Names For Obama Jpegs

The fair and balanced outfit gets busted yet again:
has its innards exposed

Megan thinks scrutinizing them is a good good thing.

UPDATE: There is, it turns out, a much more innocent explanation for this, as a reader explains:

Continue reading "Fox News' Internal Names For Obama Jpegs" »

20 Nov 2009 02:04 pm

Go Big Or Pull Out?

Tom Ricks reviews David Kilcullen's speech from earlier in the week:

[Kilcullen's] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either tell the Kabul government we are pulling out, or put in enough troops to actually break the cycle of corruption, which he said would be a minimum of about 40,000. “We either put in enough to control, or we get out.” The worst thing we could do, he added, is put in enough troops to get more people killed but not enough to do anything to break change the behavior of corrupt officials. Also, he said, it is more about what you do than the actual number of troops — “If you do it wrong, you could put it a million troops and it wouldn’t make any difference.”

I just don't believe this is doable without a flawless decades-long occupation. And the odds of that are tiny and the cost beyond any rational measurement of costs and benefits. I believe Obama knows this because he is not crazy, but he also knows that withdrawal would be used by the GOP to flay him alive for a war they botched but they insist he must now somehow save.

I'm glad I'm not the president, aren't you?

(Hat tip: Ordinary Gentlemen).

20 Nov 2009 01:46 pm

Nelson Will Vote Yes

On the vote to get the health insurance bill on the floor of the Senate.

20 Nov 2009 01:39 pm

A Ballad For The GOP Base

Cartman's lament - as poignant as Lou Dobbs' hair:

20 Nov 2009 01:37 pm

The Apple Drops Far From The Tree

Rand Paul betrays his father's principles.

20 Nov 2009 01:22 pm

Quote For The Day III

"I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time," - Utah Senator Chris Buttars, explaining his opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.

20 Nov 2009 12:46 pm

Palin's Brain Speaks

Kristol thinks McCain will win re-election:

I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative—a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist—than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth.

Predict? This is obviously a way to prevent the McCain-Palin camps' civil war from escalating so that the full details of the chaotic 2008 campaign remain under wraps.

20 Nov 2009 12:41 pm

The Fundamentalist Era

"So what if Sarah Palin didn't write this book? Even God used early scribes to write the Bible," - Moe Lang, a commenter on Amazon.com.

20 Nov 2009 12:07 pm

The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXV: Ambushing Piper

A key part of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism is her victimization at the hands of the evil librul media. So this part of "Going Rogue" is par for the course. Peter Hanby:

"In one early press conference we noticed that our local reporters were flanked by a couple of reporters from the Lower 48 who'd been hanging out around Juneau in search of material for their own Sarah Palin book," Palin writes. "We never shut our doors to anyone, so people of all kinds attended these press availabilities. But glancing along the side wall, I recognized these particular folks as the same ones who had cornered Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School and talked to her for who knows how long about who knows what."... According to Palin, Piper returned home [after a press conference] and told her mother: "Mom, remember those reporters who came on the campaign plane with us? You know, the ones Nicolle [Wallace] said didn't like us very much? They just interviewed me on the sidewalk." Palin adds after the incident, Piper was no longer allowed to walk to or from school by herself.

Both the reporters (one of whom worked for Fox News in the campaign) and Wallace deny the story outright.

Conroy and Walshe said in a statement Tuesday that in the course of reporting for their book, they conducted 190 interviews, including sit-downs with Palin's parents and her husband Todd.

"We did not, however, interview Piper Palin, nor did we corner her on her way home from school," Conroy and Walshe told CNN in a statement. "Contrary to Governor Palin's recollection of having seen us both at a press conference, Scott has never attended a press conference in Alaska."

Continue reading "The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXXV: Ambushing Piper" »

20 Nov 2009 11:35 am

Palin Witness Fact Check IV

In one part of her work of magical realism, Palin goes off on the press's alleged recklessness and bias in wondering whether her extraordinary stories about her fifth pregnancy were, er, accurate. Here's the passage from Going Rogue:

Formerly reputable outlets like the Atlantic ran with the loony conspiracy theory that I was not Trig's mother - perhaps it was Bristol or Willow, they suggested. Even the Anchorage Daily News reporters, who knew better, couldn't get enough of the story.

I'm not going to go over all this again, but suffice it to say that Palin is right that I certainly thought that the stories in the public record were fantastic and merited probing further and asked the campaign itself to issue some medical records to nip the crazy - but not quite impossible - rumor in the bud. They reacted with outrage that the question was even askable. Alas, the only objective evidence we ever got in the end was a one-page, general statement from her doctor, issued a few hours before polling opened last November. So I'm guilty for treating this as a genuine factual question - rather than as a self-evident absurdity to be dismissed. I'll take my lumps for that (and have). But I haven't "run with" any alternative to the most likely fact that Trig is indeed Sarah's biological child. I just refuse to lie about my own skepticism of everything Palin says without proof. As for Willow being Trig's mother, I have to say that has never occurred to me for an instant and the Dish has no such reference. Maybe Palin is thinking of some other outlet.

But the attack on the Anchorage Daily News is much more unfair. 

Continue reading "Palin Witness Fact Check IV" »

20 Nov 2009 11:28 am

The MSM's Latest Bid For Relevance

The Onion has the scoop.

20 Nov 2009 11:15 am

Just One Republican

The GOP is trying to get voters to forget their fiscal recklessness over the last eight years. And the conservative media - which is sadly far too often just a partisan mouthpiece - is helping the amnesia along. One of the few principled fiscal conservatives in the Bush-Cheney years. Bruce Bartlett, is refusing to forget. He tells a classic tale of one Republican, Trent Franks of Arizona. Here is what Franks is now saying about the health insurance reform in the Congress:

"I would remind my Democratic colleagues that their children, and every generation thereafter, will bear the burden caused by this bill. They will be the ones asked to pay off the incredible debt," Franks declared on Nov. 7.

So what was Franks' position on Medicare D? He voted for it, after some of the most egregious Congressional arm-twisting in memory (so egregious Rove et al extended debate for three hours and turned off the C-Span cameras). What is the difference between Medicare D and the current health insurance proposal? You guessed it:

Continue reading "Just One Republican" »

20 Nov 2009 10:32 am

Heads I Lose, Tails You Win

A few days ago, many Republican bloggers thought KSM didn't deserve a trial. Now they are calling the civilian trial a "show trial" because it is possible that the government could continue to detain KSM in the unlikely instance he gets off. Allahpundit:

Not only will we be right back where we started, it will expose the federal trial as nothing more than a show trial.  Show trials are conducted by despots and dictators to give only a thin veneer of legality to political detentions and executions.  If the state isn’t prepared to abide by the decision of the court, including dismissals and acquittals, then the use of the trial system is worse than useless.  It demeans the federal system needed for Americans to seek unbiased justice.

Drum makes an obvious counter-point:

Continue reading "Heads I Lose, Tails You Win" »

20 Nov 2009 10:06 am

Hockey Mom With A Glass Jaw

Jessica Valenti describes how Palin is trying to have it both ways when it comes to gender:

In her widely watched Oprah appearance, for example, Palin said that she resented people questioning her ability to serve as vice-president while being a mother to five children – something a man would never be asked. But Palin also complained that in her interview with Couric, she thought she would be speaking to the reporter "working mom [to] working mom" and that she was annoyed with "her badgering and questions". In other words, Palin thought that because Couric was a woman, she wouldn't take her job as a journalist seriously. Palin expected a puff piece instead of pesky questions about economics, abortion and Palin's policies – you know, things a "working mom" couldn't possibly be bothered with.

If one started a list of things that Palin wants both ways, it would exceed the list of her 34 documented odd lies.

20 Nov 2009 10:02 am

Quote For The Day II

"It's definitely a HarperCollins tour. Not a Sarah Palin campaign," - Tina Andreadis, HarperCollins publicity director for the "Going Rogue" book tour.

20 Nov 2009 09:53 am

Netanyahu's Gilo Provocation

A reader writes:

Having grown up in Gilo, I have to chime in on all these people expressing the fact that expanding Gilo is not a problem. My mom, who lived there for a while, responded to the article by saying, "When we were growing up, those weren't settlements. Those were just cheap houses."

Does that mean that it's acceptable to expand Gilo? No, it does not.

Continue reading "Netanyahu's Gilo Provocation" »

20 Nov 2009 09:40 am

Will HarperCollins Make A Profit On Palin's Book?

It appears so.

20 Nov 2009 09:32 am

Palin Witness Fact Check III

David Corn makes a cameo in the book. Palin distorts the story to make it fit better with her self-serving story. It's not that big a deal - more selective unfairness than a lie of any sort. Corn's explanation here.

20 Nov 2009 09:21 am

Jobs And The Stimulus

A new poll finds that 51 percent of Americans think canceling the rest of the stimulus would create more jobs. Derek Thompson is slack-jawed:

The idea that canceling the stimulus would create more jobs implies that passing the stimulus has actually killed more jobs than it's created, which is bonkers. Let's say you don't want to consider infrastructure spending or green technology spending or a single job that might have been created in the private sector. If nothing else, the tens of billions we've sent to state budgets have, without question, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, like teachers, that are supported by state taxes. It's just a very basic fact.

They're watching Fox. Facts don't matter.

20 Nov 2009 09:08 am

Quote For The Day

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their seventh grandchild, Sarah Lynne Cheney, Wednesday, November 18, 2009.  She weighed 6 lbs., 14 oz and was born at 8:17 A.M. at Sibley Hospital in Washington,  D.C.  Her parents are the Cheney's daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe.”

Many congratulations to the Cheney family. And congratulations on the word "parents."

20 Nov 2009 09:03 am

Palin Witness Fact Check II

“It is pure fiction. No such discussion took place,” - Nicolle Wallace, disputing yet another passage in Palin's book.

20 Nov 2009 08:45 am

Palin Witness Fact Check I

“That is the most cockamamie bullshit. She didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, and she didn’t know what it was about," - Dave Oesting of Anchorage, lead plaintiff attorney in the private litigants’ civil case against Exxon and its successor, Exxon Mobil Corp.

He was referring to governor Palin's boast in her book that she played a role in "achieving victory" for the victims of the Exxon-Valdez disaster, even when she is on record at the time of the final court decision saying she was "very, very disappointed" and heart-broken with the decision to reduce damages for the victims that she called "not right".

In "Going Rogue," she calls it a "victory".

20 Nov 2009 08:25 am

The Gateway Drug

Another pot-smoker, another loser:

Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum has won the 2009 National League Cy Young Award in a historic and close vote of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Lincecum becomes the first pitcher since the writers created the award in 1956 to win it in each of his first two full seasons in the majors and the first starting pitcher to win with as few as 15 wins in a nonstrike year.

20 Nov 2009 08:04 am

Chart Of The Day

 

Drezner flags a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study:

China will become the world’s largest economy in 2032, and grow to be 20 percent larger than the United States by 2050. Over the next forty years, nearly 60 percent of G20 economic growth will come from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Mexico alone. However, these emerging markets will not rise among the world’s richest countries in per capita terms: their average income in 2050 will still be 40 percent below that of the G7 states today. The end of the decades-old correlation between economic size and per capita income will have profound effects on global economic governance.

20 Nov 2009 07:33 am

Two Seats?

Silver does some Senate handicapping:

I suspect the net gain for either party will not exceed two seats. There are some primaries yet to determine nominees, so it's too early to say either way which party should come out ahead.

20 Nov 2009 07:06 am

So You Don't Have To

Mudflats is blogging the book page by page.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

19 Nov 2009 11:52 pm

The Daily Wrap

It feels like the campaign again on the Dish. Over the past three days, we tried to wrap our heads around the latest media blitz of Sarah Palin.  Andrew ultimately blamed McCain.

Greg Sargent parsed her polling, TNR and Slate indexed her book, Cottle called out her victimization, a reader deconstructed her psyche, Steve Chapman contrasted her with Reagan, Andrew shuddered at her settlement statements (and attracted dissents), Damon Linker chastised her critics, Allahpundit sized up 2012, Nate Silver predicted she'll run, he explained how she could win the nomination, and the Dish tallied another odd lie. Palin blinked when Barbara Walters asked her about Levi. Meanwhile, he held his fire and released some starbursts.

In the other big story of the week - terrorist trials in NYC - Ackerman told us to bring em' on, Josh Marshall calmed fears, Eric Posner cut through the spin, and Andrew praised the president.

In home news, the Daily Dish released its very first print publication, "The View From Your Window." To secure a copy of the book at the 50% discounted price of $16.25, click here. They're going fast.

-- C.B.

19 Nov 2009 11:43 pm

Iraq. Iran. Whatever.

Palin strikes again. Hannity cannot correct her. It would be like correcting the Pope - too confusing for the viewers.

19 Nov 2009 10:48 pm

Fox Rigs The Video Again

After running video of crowds from a September Tea Party rally to make it seem the recent health insurance reform protest was bigger than it was, Fox News has done it again: this time to make Sarah Palin's crowds look bigger, using old footage from the campaign. It's funny, isn't it, that these "errors" never happen to make Democratic crowds look bigger.

19 Nov 2009 10:17 pm

Palin vs Reagan

Steve Chapman notices the stark difference:

Who needs policy? In her world -- and the world of legions of conservatives who revere her -- the persona is the policy. Palin is beloved because she's (supposedly) just like ordinary people, which (supposedly) gives her a profound understanding of their needs.

That attitude used to be associated with the left, which claimed to speak for the ordinary folks who get shafted by the system.

Continue reading "Palin vs Reagan" »

19 Nov 2009 10:01 pm

Deconstructing Sarah, Ctd

A reader writes:

Your last post on her book is the single best review of it I have yet seen. But when you wrote:

"because I just want to know. I want to know what really lies under that facade."

I couldn't help but think that it's a fruitless effort. There's nothing under the facade. She believes her own myths. She is ignorant and foolish enough to accept modern conservative slogans as true and believe that they can guide her life, and should guide everyone's. I grew up in the Assemblies of God, and the only thing that surprises me is that you insist on trying to hold her to some fact based world of objective reality.

That just isn't the world as she experiences it. I think she genuinely is the thing that you call a facade. She's the real facade, if you will. To someone who lives in the Pentacostal world of magical, spiritual reality, the contradictions don't matter. God is the answer to contradictions.

The slogans don't need "meaning." She believes them because she feels their truth. Her faith filters her reality and because she's been born again, she fears no consequences for God is with her.

All of which makes her the natural leader of the fundamentalist religious movement currently known as the Republican party. That she and they have no grip on objective reality makes them ideal for government, if you just loved the last eight years in which deficits didn't matter, there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Iraq war would cost $50 billion, Afghanistan was a success, Republicans balanced the budget, and waterboarding someone 183 times wasn't torture. 

You betcha.

19 Nov 2009 07:41 pm

Quote For The Day II

"I do not want to go over all the successes of the last eight years," - Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

19 Nov 2009 07:07 pm

Sarah Palin, Elephant Hunter

Larison criticizes Robert Stacy McCain's Palin coverage:

What McCain misses in his article is that liberal journalists actually take great delight in the Palin phenomenon. Yes, of course, they don’t want to see her in power, but I think they do want to see her prosper and thrive as the face of the Republican Party. An American right led by or identified with Palin is one that they can very easily ridicule and discredit, and at the same time they can be confident that a Palinized GOP poses no threat to anything they value. Palin is not going to bring the party out of the minority, and were she to lead the party it would more or less guarantee continued Democratic ascendancy for many years to come. Her content-free pseudo-populism ensures that the legitimate political concerns of her constituency remain irrelevant to real policy debates. Media outlets also thrive on controversy and conflict, both real and manufactured, and Palin continues to give them plenty of opportunities for both.

19 Nov 2009 06:28 pm

A Death In Tehran

Frontline produced a documentary on Neda Agha Soltan. Watch the entire thing here.

19 Nov 2009 06:13 pm

No Basis In Reality

52 percent of Republicans think ACORN stole the 2008 election.

19 Nov 2009 05:41 pm

Dissents Of The Day

A reader writes:

After reading your recent comments on Israel's giving "the US the finger again," I want to point you to this Economist article. Granted, what Israel is doing is somewhat inappropriate. However, I think a problem in the negotiations is the definition of "settlement". Asking Israel to leave places like Gilo is asking them to let their country be destroyed. There are lots of settlements which have no reason for existing, and should be given to the Palestinians now. Gilo is not one of them. Israel, I think, is trying to demonstrate that they want a different definition of a settlement. If all land that Israel ever moved onto after 1967 is supposed to be given back to the Palestinians, than Israel will be more than cut in half. And, let's remember, the Israelis have co-existed with the Palestinians in places such as Gilo and East Jerusalem. Can we expect a Palestinain state to even let Israeli's live there? They didn't in between 1948-1967.

Another reader:

Continue reading "Dissents Of The Day" »

19 Nov 2009 05:11 pm

Deconstructing Sarah, Ctd

Well, as promised the Dish is back to normal. I'm not. "Going Rogue" is such a postmodern book that treating it as some kind of factual narrative to check (as I began to), or comparing its version of events with her previous versions of the same events (as I have), and comparing all those versions with what we know is empirical reality (so many lies, so little time) is just a dizzying task. The lies and truths and half-truths and the facts and non-facts are all blurred together in a pious puree of such ghastly prose that, in the end, the book can only really be read as a some kind of chapter in a cheap nineteenth century edition of "Lives of the Saints." But as autobiography.

It is a religious book, full of myths and parables. And yet it is also crafted politically, with every single "detail" of the narrative honed carefully for specific constituencies. It is also some kind of manifesto - but not in the usual sense of a collection of policy proposals. It is a manifesto for the imagined life of an imagined Sarah Palin as a leader for all those who identify with the image and background she relentlessly claims to represent.

In this, the book is emblematic of late degenerate Republicanism, which is based not on actual policies, but on slogans now so exhausted by over-use they retain no real meaning: free enterprise is great, God loves us all, America is fabulous, foreigners are suspect, we need to be tough, we can't dither, we must always cut taxes, government is bad, liberals are socialists, the media hates you, etc etc. 

I tried to write a fair account of Palin's various stories of her incredible fifth pregnancy, labor and delivery and to reconcile all the various facts we know and the various versions of the story she has told. Just for the record and because we have aired the public record on this before. I honestly however cannot make total sense of them in a way that I'm completely convinced by and so simply do not feel comfortable making any judgment on them in any way at this point. That's fair to her, my readers, my colleagues, and the innocent private people caught up in this circus.

I thought there might be some new facts in here that would illuminate my confusion and dispel the whole thing.

Continue reading "Deconstructing Sarah, Ctd" »