A detailed view of the new Ronald McDonald balloon during 'Inflation
Eve', the preparations on November 25, 2009 for the Macy's 83rd Annual
Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. Other new giant helium
character balloons include Pillsbury Doughboy, Sailor Mickey and
Spider-Man. By Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.
I remember the year we celebrated Thanksgiving on a Sunday evening in
October. It was the fall of 2007, the night before my husband, Scott,
left for his seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier. Other
military wives, far more seasoned than I, gave me the idea to whip up
one giant festive dinner to mark all of the holidays, birthdays,
anniversaries, and milestones that my husband would miss while his
squadron was in the Persian Gulf. It was a long list: Thanksgiving,
Hanukkah, Ethan’s fifth birthday, Estee’s third birthday, and our
wedding anniversary, to list just a few.
Today on the Dish, Andrew and a reader studied the president's cool demeanor while Massie and another reader wondered whether Obama is a liberal Reagan. Packer discussed his disappointed supporters.
Just as news broke that Israel is legalizing medicinal pot, David Knowles explored its potential to treat ADHD. Jason Zengerle explained why Palin will never shut up, Ben Smith rolled his eyes at Susteren's latest softballs, and severalreaders debated whether Palin should be used by her enemies.
A reader took Andrew to task over his coverage of the Sparkman scandal, Matt Welch went after the Weekly Standard, a reader revealed the emptiness of the GOP's purity test, and Sully tackled the selective morality of Christianists.
The heritage bird runs very fast around the yard first thing in the
morning, flapping his wings and trilling musically while the
factory-bred girl stands there, calm and blinking. They nuzzle each
other, and when one moves out of sight, the other whimpers. How can I
kill one or even both of them when they're just settling into their
marriage, into their new home? Can't. As I type, it's Nov. 23, I've
spent $75, driven all over northern California, and I still don't have
a damned turkey.
"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything," - Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.
I respectfully disagree with your reader who spells out what they describe as the cynical and political thought process behind the argument in very honest fashion. But that's why I disagree. Palin's entire entree onto the political stage was cynical and poltical. John McCain was a cynical old politician - sure. (And should be drummed from office for risking the country to his jaded ambitions in my personal opinion.) But it was an easy move because Palin herself is a cynical and political stunt who thinks she's a real politician.
But the dangers now are the cynical and political powers that keep her narrative going. The neocon interests, the Armeys and Murdochs, the moneybags who control the MSM, who probably believe that McCain's mistake wasn't in fact his choosing this hackneyed hack - but in not using her effectively. I'd venture from comments she's made that Palin believes that herself. She and they long for a chance to really pull out the stops and get down to dirty business.
If the Democrats need a straw woman or an eejit for the Republicans to throw away their electoral capital on - let them get stuck with someone else. Because with their limitless ability to destroy the democratic process - we could get stuck. With her.
The root problem here is not the eternal perfidy of human nature,
but the fact that we can’t run experiments on history to adjudicate
disputes, which makes this less like chemistry or physics than like
economics or political science.
In human terms, the scandal is
obviously a PR disaster for those who believe that climate
reconstruction is “science” in the sense we normally use the term, but
what it does not change is the basic physics of how CO2 molecules
interact with radiation. As I have always argued, this is the real
basis for rational concern about greenhouse-gas emissions, and is a key
reason that all the major national scientific academies agree that the
greenhouse effect is a real risk. Recognizing this risk, however, does
not entail accepting the political conclusion that we need laws to
radically reduce emissions at enormous cost.
(Photo: Wind turbines spin near the cooling towers at the Jaenschwalde lignite
coal-fired power station, which is owned by Vatenfall, on November 24,
2009 in Janschwalde, Germany. The CO2 emission will be one top of the
agenda and will be discussed at the summit in December in Copenhagen. By Carsten Koall/Getty Images.)
Forget Palin; let's talk about The Weekly
Standard. What kind of journalistic pathology yearns so
nakedly to provide the brainpower to supplement politicians'
animal magnetism? And when are we going to get the mother of all
internal magazine stories, the one that describes just how the
same lot who breathed ideology into an emptyish vessel called
John McCain 10 years ago
turned on their own creation when he finally neared the
finish line and doubled-down instead on the unqualified veep
candidate they
helped foist upon him?
The answer is that they need someone to bring the populist plebs along for the neocon ride. Reagan did it for a while and so did Bush II (until the entire project crashed and burned under its own contradictions). But McCain never had that - so he was a place-holder for the forever war against the Arabs/Muslims. His acknowledgment of climate change, his comfort with Democratic party wonks, his support for campaign finance reform, his visceral discomfort with the holy-rollers: all this made him an imperfect tool.
But Palin? The perfect tool if you think Bush II was a rip-roaring success story. More controllable. Until, of course, she wasn't.
As for Continetti, he wouldn't be the first young man in a hurry in Washington. You'd be amazed at what ambition can get people to write, even in earnest.
The reason for Palin’s staying power will be the same thing that keeps
a celebrity like Richie’s old running partner, Paris Hilton, in the
spotlight. No, not a sex tape, thank God, but something related:
shamelessness.
Conor Friedersdorf recoils from a blogger who views gay unions as "a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment." Rod Dreher agrees with Conor on this point. (It's a garbled version of Robert P. George's and Benedict's attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize sex without reproduction). But Rod's deeper point - and the point of his favored blogger - is not against gays but against Christianists. He finds the Christianist politicization of deep moral questions inconsistent.
What Rod wants to recover, I think, is the pre-modern notion of obedience to religious authority and its interpretation of "nature" as a basis for modern civil society. It's a version of Alasdair Macintyre's hositility to modernity's philosophical incoherence. But Macintyre was smart enough to recognize that modernity was here to stay and to adopt a Benedictine option in response - of retreat from the world rather than an attempt to mold it in ways that simply will not work without coercion and cruelty and excessive government power.
Another viable comparison for Obama is with JFK, and not just for the obvious reasons of youth, attractiveness, charming young family, etc.
I think a great reference for reviewing JFK’s performance in office is Robert Dallek’s book, “An Unfinished Life.” He showed that Kennedy had a great capacity for learning, for encouraging if not demanding honest and open debate and more than enough self-confidence to change his mind. Kennedy was also very pragmatic, which made him slow to act in areas such as civil rights.
But once Kennedy moved, he moved with confidence and usually with an effective, coherent and convincing message.
Consider the Cuban missile crisis.
Yet Kennedy was also somewhat cool and aloof, as I believe is Obama.
Sasha Obama, the daughter of U.S. President Barack Obama, looks at a
turkey named 'Courage' during an event to pardon the 20-week-old and
45-pound turkey at the North Portico of the White House November 25,
2009 in Washington, DC. The Presidential pardon of a turkey has been a
long time Thanksgiving tradition that dates back to the Harry Truman
administration. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.
Overall, it's promising -- as a start. I don't think this will be the
end, not by a long shot. A large number of critics claim that the
health reform bills do "nothing" to control costs. This is not nothing
-- not by a long shot. Whether it will work at all, or whether it will
do enough are open questions. I also find it interesting that the
providers who have been most concerned about the escalation of health
care costs (I'm looking at you, Kevin)
have not weighed in on this element of reform. As a provider, I have
really mixed feelings about the potential for cost containment to
(further) erode physician autonomy and to (further) reduce physician
income. However, no sane person can look at the rate of medical
inflation and not see the burning need for cost containment. I just
worry that too much of it will fall on our shoulders, since reining in
costs any other way is tricky and politically unpopular.
Now that we have the benefit of almost a year of track record,
which you didn't have when you wrote in January, we can say that your
headline, at least, was wrong. Yes, Obama takes a liberal position on
some issues. But he also takes what is, on any reasonable definition of
the term, a conservative approach on other issues. He is, in short, a
moderate.
And that, I suspect, is what really frightens the far-right.
David Knowles investigates the use of marijuana to treat ADHD:
While [Lester] Grinspoon concedes that the evidence of marijuana's effectiveness in treating conditions like ADHD is mostly anecdotal, he believes that practitioners would be wise to start listening to the everyday experiences of their patients. "It has been hard to collect hard data because the federal government has, for so long, said, no, marijuana is not a drug."
[Stephen Hinshaw, professor of psychology at
the University of California at Berkeley] is intrigued by success stories of patients treating ADHD with marijuana, but he cautions against euphoria in the absence of data. "People with ADHD are terrible at self-reporting, that's one of the things that characterizes the condition. Still, this is worth looking into. Any hypothesis that adheres to the proper ethical limits is worth investigating."
A reader notes another drug irony:
Nitro glycerin, the potent explosive, is a common anti-angina med. As Nobel worked on making dynamite, he noticed his chest pain diminished when he handled nitro. Thus one of the most lethal substances became one of the most life preserving.
All we are saying is give research a chance. If that makes me a goddamn hippie, pass the patchouli.
George Packer notices some Obama supporters are feeling down:
The most disappointed people I meet are under thirty, the generation
that made the Obama campaign a movement in its early primary months.
They spent their entire adult lives under the worst President of our
lifetime, they loved Obama because he was new and inspiring, and they
felt that replacing the former with the latter would be a national
deliverance. They weren’t wrong about that, but the ebbing of
grassroots energy once the Obama campaign turned to governing suggests
that some of his most enthusiastic backers saw the election as an end
in itself. The Obama movement was unlike other social movements because
it began and ended with a person, not an issue. And it was unlike
ordinary political coalitions because it didn’t have the organizational
muscle of voting blocs. The difficulty in sustaining its intensity
through the inevitable ups and downs of governing shows the
vulnerability in this model of twenty-first-century, Internet-based
politics.
Yes and no. The decision for change - deep, real change - is always going to be a different thing than implementing change in a deeply sclerotic system at a moment of simultaneous and paralyzing global crises. The former is inevitably more energizing than the latter. I don't think most under-30s saw the election as an end in itself (although it was more cathartic than most). I do think they are depressed and frustrated at how maddeningly difficult real change is.
But to my mind, the difficulty of the change is not a reason to abandon it.
Ben Smith scoffs at the softball "questions" Greta lobbed at Palin last night. It seems to me that Fox is no longer a news channel and no longer an opinion channel. It's a propaganda channel in which the hosts are actual leaders of various Republican party constituencies or mouthpieces for certain Republican politicians (van Susteren long ago abandoned any pretense of not being a p.r. employee for the Palins) and use the channel for political organizing. So we don't even have feisty debates any more. We have cloying propaganda events.
It's a free country and they can do what they want. But Fox News isn't even opinion journalism in any normal sense any more.
Susannah Vila sketched out the meta-narrative of Brownstein's White House-recommended post:
Critics will undoubtedly suggest that this is another sign of Obama
giving preferential treatment to the reporters who are more supportive
of his policies. Or, as one TPMcommenter suggested ,
perhaps this was a carefully crafted ploy by both Brownstein and Obama
to prepare "liberals for the dropping of the public option." On the
other hand, when a president regularly links out as well as getting
linked to, it's also a sign that he gets the "ethic of the link--connecting people to knowledge wherever it is;" he's paying attention, and hopefully responding, to the comments, criticisms and suggestions that are buzzing around the public sphere.
Maureen Dowd's column today hits on something she's been tuning into for a while. Dowd's instincts about human character are foolish to bet against. She has essentially read every recent president correctly from the get-go as types. And she has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much. MoDo worried about that in the campaign as the Clintons brought more raw human emotion to the trail and Obama often seemed to coast too cockily only to right himself, usually with some spell-binding speech or shrewd piece of campaign management. I generally trusted Obama's instincts. In the campaign, MoDo was nearly right (Obama did let the Clintons get back off the mat a few too many times) but in the end, wrong (look who got elected). But in government? The coolness has yet to be proven effective - as Kissinger has noted.
You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has assessed the politics of taking on the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which both Greg Craig and Phil Carter have been dispatched for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises (no, I don't believe the personal reasons line) is chilling in its raw political calculation. Ditto Obama's disciplined refusal to fulfill his campaign pledges on civil rights any time soon. And his rhetorical restraint during the Green Revolution. The determination to figure out the very best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time ... well this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character here.
Since I've always had a soft spot for cold fish in realpolitik - which high Tory (pun fully intended) doesn't get a frisson from Bismarck or Kissinger? - this impresses me. Since I'm also a red-blooded Irishman, eager for a fight and a little romantic about my ideals, this also angers me at times.
The first thing that struck me about these "unity principles" is the fact that they have largely framed themselves in opposition. While I know that a minority party usually takes this sort of stance, it still makes them sound partisan and petty. Seven of the 10 include the word "oppose."
The second is how nonsensical the wording of some of the points comes across. How do you develop/support/have market energy reforms THROUGH opposition to the prevailing option? You have to offer a solution. "Workers'' rights? Why choose this wording, which is classically associated with Communist and socialist movements? I guess it's the populism taking over. I can only hope these are the draft forms of these points, because they are such a cobbled together mess of partisan sniping and minor issues and as someone who used to consider herself conservative. It drives me crazy.
Compare the current commandments with the policies laid out in the '94 Contract with America. It's the difference between a party interested in governing and a party interested in venting.
In every post, I made sure readers knew that the investigation was ongoing and we did not yet know the full facts.
Did you? You said that "we know for certain" that it was "no suicide". Yet the investigators never claimed that; a civilian who witnessed the scene did. Yes, your post indicated that there were still unknowns, but you essentially limited the question to: "Was it drug lords or deranged tea partiers?"
I must admit that Malkin is onto something here. At the very least, you made a definitive claim ("no suicide") which turned out to be untrue. I'm a little surprised that you haven't owned up to that.
"[Obama] reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his
opening in six simultaneous games. But he hasn't
completed a single game and I'd like to see him finish one," - Henry Kissinger.
Suderman thinks that health care reform will drive up insurance premiums:
In 1996,
Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating
and guaranteed issue—that required insurers to take all comers,
and to sell plans to individuals at the same price, regardless of
their individual health status.
For pretty obvious reasons, those sorts of reforms drive up
premium prices tremendously. In New York, for example, similar
reforms have driven up individual insurance premiums enough that
the Manhattan
Institute estimates that premium prices would drop 42 percent
if they were repealed. And going back to AHIP's reports, sure
enough, New York and Massachusetts are the states with the two
most expensive individual market premiums.
Word on the street, courtesy of McClatchy, is that Obama is planning on sending 34,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan. In light of this possibility, and on behalf of all Americans who want some semblance of sane government, can I respectfully request that you lay off of Sarah Palin, including withholding, for the time being, any kind of bombshell that you're putting together? If escalation in Afghanistan is a reality, I am concerned that Obama's base - which has already been battered through the health care fight, the failure to deliver on promises of homosexual rights, the failure to effectively address the financial crisis and a general sense that Obama has 'sold them out' - is going to collapse.
“Is there anything more important than the issue of terrorism?” Bennett
asks in his post. It’s meant as a rhetorical question; the obvious
answer is supposed to be no. And that’s absurd. Lots of things, like hernias,
are more “important,” or at least more deadly, than terrorism in the
United States. But you see where Bennett is going: Hasan’s atrocity was
terrorism. Nothing is more important than terrorism. Any rights
abridged along the way to prevent another act of terrorism must be
justified, because ... nothing’s more important than terrorism. There
is a kind of bright, shining clarity in that, an invitation not to
muddy the waters with too much thinking.
America is not imperial in the traditional sense, of course. We are
not colonists. We have little interest in actually conquering
territory. But we do have an overabundance of faith in the ability of
our military to insure our security and our economic interests across
the globe. Our military foots the bill for the defense of Europe and
our Asian allies, allowing those countries to spend their own tax
revenues on lavish safety nets and top-notch education programs.
Meanwhile, Americans pay for Leviathan. Or at least the Leviathan with
the guns.
[H]istorical comparisons are never exact. Nonetheless, assuming
the economy recovers then you can bet that Democrats will argue that it
was the stimulus what done it and you can further bet that plenty of
voters will be happy to nod and agree with this proposition. And if
health insurance reform passes and if Afghanistan looks less
problematic in a year's time, well, you can see where a second term is
coming from, can't you?
Palin's base confuses "liberal fear" with some kind of populist power,
by ignoring the fact that a lot of people who want nothing to do with
us pinkos, are afraid of Palin too. People misunderstand fear. It doesn't always cause your foes to cower
in a corner. Sometimes it causes them to beat the crap out of you with
a bag of rusty nails.
Insurgencies can be militarily
defeated, but at a high cost that may be greater than U.S. interests
require. It is deeply doubtful that the U.S.
should want to replicate in Afghanistan
the experiences of counterinsurgency in Kashmir, Pakistani Baluchistan, or Sri Lanka. The
Obama administration needs to decide if a similar strategy is worth the likely
trail of American and Afghan blood.
Today on the Dish we discovered that Bill Sparkman's death was actually a suicide staged as murder. Malkin pounced on our prior coverage of the bizarre event. Also, Britain tortured.
In Palin drama, she accused the commander-in-chief of ignoring those in his command, brandished her foreign policy acumen, and read a bedtime story on the bus. Another victim of her fabrication spoke out, Chris Orr can't understand why she's going after a teenager, a female reader sized up her sex appeal, and Weigel explained why she is a better celebrity than public servant.
In other commentary, Andrew fisked the GOP's Ten Commandments, Friedersdorf lampooned Beck's latest insanity, Peter Beinart singled out Lieberman for a partisan tantrum, Larison followed up, and Tyler Cowen tackled our thinking over debt.
[T]he example of [Newt] Gingrich — the way that he’s sought after as a wise man
by Republicans, and the way that both the right-wing media and the
mainstream press tend to give him more credit as a thinker than he
deserves — suggests that precisely because the G.O.P.
currently has a reputation for being anti-intellectual, there’s a huge
upside for a Republican politician in being identified as that rarest
of species — a “conservative with domestic policy ideas.” (For a
small-bore example of how this works, look at Paul Ryan, who’s made a
substantial name for himself by being one of the few House Republicans
willing to get into the weeds
on health care reform.) Of course identity politics and symbolic
appeals will always matter more than substance, and political careers
will never be made on wonkery alone. But even — or especially — in
today’s Republican Party, being known as a thoughtful politician seems
much more likely to help you than to hurt you.
An Afghan boy reacts with a
laugh as he waits for customers at an animal market on a rainy day in
the outskirts of Kabul on November 23, 2009, ahead of the Muslim feast
of Eid al-Adha. Eid al-Adha (the Festival of Sacrifice) is celebrated
throughout the Muslim world as a commemoration of Abraham's willingness
to sacrifice his son for God. The festival falls on the tenth day of
Zulhijjah, the final month of the Muslim Calendar. Cows, camels, goats
and sheep are traditionally slaughtered on the holiest day. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty.
Joe Klein notes that Max Boot acknowledges some U.S. forces appear "a bit worn down and
pessimistic" in conversations regarding Afghanistan. Klein sighs:
[Boot] thinks morale would improve markedly
if the President uses the word "victory" in his Afghanistan rollout
next week. But "victory" is a word that was never used by David
Petraeus in Iraq--it was only used by unsophisticated bully-raggers
like John McCain--and it is a word that would be laughable if applied
to Afghanistan (just as it remains fairly implausible when applied to
Iraq). Success is a better word than "victory," less bellicose, more in
keeping with the spirit of counter-insurgency doctrine.
Looked at from either side of the spectrum, Lieberman has been anything
but interesting. He has been the reliable defender of the “centrist”
consensus established in the ’90s that finally accepted welfare reform
and insisted on U.S. hegemony abroad. In practice, this “centrism” can
be used to justify the most extreme, violent and destructive policies,
but it is considered reasonable and acceptable because it does not
partake of “fringe” ideas and enjoys the support of respectable,
“serious” people.
She's been on a roll today artfully declaring that this blog drew the conclusion that Bill Sparkman was murdered by neo-confederate thugs. Here's her formulation:
The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan immediately fingered “Southern
populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio
cohorts.”
What I actually wrote - and you can click the link for the full quote - was:
It's possible, I suppose, that anger at the feds in general could make
a drug dealer murder a census worker. But the most worrying possibility
- that this is Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and
its Fox and talk radio cohorts - remains real. We'll see.
Notice Malkin's formulation: "pointed his finger" or "immediately fingered." I said the "possibility" remained real and that "we'll see." How can you finger someone when you simultaneously say we do not yet know what happened for sure?
[If] Obama can defeat a Generic Republican with an approval rating of X, he can defeat Palin with an approval rating of X-3. Caveats
abound, of course -- this conclusion too is based on some fairly
limited evidence. But if you told me that Obama's Gallup approval
rating was 45 percent on Election Eve 2012 and that his opponent was
Sarah Palin, I'd put my money on Obama and feel pretty good about it.
Weigel tackles Palin fans for abusing statistics to make her seem more popular than she is. Another telling piece of data: of the 296 customer reviews of going Rogue, 143 reviewers give the book five-stars and 124 give the book one-star.
I give it four stars for fiction; and zero for non-fiction.
While arguing why the Senate's proposed "0.5 increase in the Medicare payroll tax on upper-income people:
individuals earning more than $200,000, families earning more than
$250,000" is unlikely to pass, Frum explains a basic political truth:
As payroll taxes become more “progressive,” the programs they support
become more blatantly redistributionist. And smart Democrats from FDR
onward have always understood that the secret of popularity for a
government program is to appear non-redistributive: everybody pays,
everybody gets. Then you can say: It’s insurance, not welfare. With
this measure, Medicare becomes more welfare-like and therefore more
politically vulnerable.
[T]hese particular FBI statistics are virtually useless for evaluating
year-to-year trends – always have been, always will be. This year, the
FBI itself went out of its way to warn against such readings,
stating “our Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program doesn’t report
trends in hate crime stats—yearly increases or decreases often occur
because the number of agencies who report to us varies from year to
year.”
Yet in reporting an 11 percent increase in hate crimes
against gays while lamenting a mere 1% decrease in race-based hate
crimes, Think Progress and Feministing ignore this important
disclaimer.
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