Author: Andrew Sullivan

Chris Cillizza points to a major hurdle for her in the first primary:

New Hampshire has an open primary system, meaning that independents can choose to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary for president. … With Obama almost certain not to be challenged for his party's nomination in 2012, independents are likely to play a very influential role in determining the Republican nominee. Palin has struggled mightily to court independent voters since the 2008 campaign; a recent Quinnipiac University national poll showed just 33 percent of independents viewed her favorably, while 50 percent saw her in an unfavorable light.

But Romney is next door and gives her an alibi. It's way too early to game this, but I see no real impediments to her taking over the party completely. She already has, in so many ways.

I love Dish readers:

A reader writes:

If you read the fine print under the graph (which you can only find on the original post you linked to, but not on your own post,) you see that the incomes represented are post-tax. In 1979, the highest marginal tax rates were 70%, double the current 35% rate. Looking at pre-tax income, you'd see a much flatter curve. More importantly though, at 70% marginal tax rates, there's a huge incentive for high-income earners to utilize tax-avoidance strategies, or just plain defer their cash income to a later date. Talk to any tax planner who's been around for a while, and I'm sure they'll tell you that there were a lot more tax loopholes back in 1979 than there are now. In fact, one of the main goals of Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986 was to close many of these loopholes.

Look, I think that income inequality is a big issue that needs to be addressed, but that chart is comparing apples to oranges. The chart doesn't prove that income inequality is increasing; rather, it proves that higher taxes mean lower post-tax income.

Sedona, Arizona, 4.07 pm

I'm stretching things a bit, I know, but it's interesting to see Ross praise what he calls David Cameron's "pro-family" impulses – especially by supporting married couples in the tax code, something I also support. The Lib-Dems have largely quashed this for now. But Cameron's pro-family agenda specifically and emphatically included gay couples. In fact, his entire argument was that we should not distinguish between gay and straight, but focus on core values – like commitment and responsibility. This is the argument I've been making for twenty years – and is directly opposed to the Republican Christianism which seeks to support family life by discriminating against and, in some states, seeking to recriminalize gay relationships.

So does Ross back, like David Brooks, Cameron's approach? Or the position of Robbie George, Maggie Gallagher, et al? Or is his evasion of this to continue?

Ezra emailed the Dish yesterday and wrote the following:

I set two rules for members: Center to left, and not working for the government, I didn't exercise discretion beyond that because I didn't want to be in the position of selectively choosing people.

He now concedes in another email that this is untrue:

I should say that I did make a few discretionary decisions. I didn't allow the Media Matters people on Journolist. I thought that was a conflict of interest.

He now says he also determined whether invitees were too interested in media coverage to join and also moderated spats between existing list-members and possible new members. This is is how Glenn Greenwald was first invited and then disinvited by Klein. It's also how much of the Firedoglake crowd never got on the list. Klein says he wasn't doing this on the basis of who he liked, and that is borne out by the evidence. He also tried to be as hands-off a moderator as possible.

But, contrary to his initial spin, he did act as a gatekeeper for a liberal list of journalists and did make decisions as to who would be included or not.

"Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil…

Now the respected judges have to be asked: If the man was really Dudu posing as Sabbar, a Jew pretending to be an Arab so he could sleep with an Arab woman, would he then be convicted of rape? And do the eminent judges understand the social and racist meaning of their florid verdict? Don't they realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of "don't touch our daughters"? That it expresses the yearning of the extensive segments of society that would like to ban sexual relations between Arabs and Jews?

It was no coincidence that this verdict attracted the attention of foreign correspondents in Israel, temporary visitors who see every blemish. Yes, in German or Afrikaans this disgraceful verdict would have sounded much worse," – Gideon Levy, Haaretz, on the jailing of an Arab man for pretending to be Jewish while sleeping with a Jewish woman.

I didn't realize that as soon as the miscegenation-deception complaint was issued, the man "was placed under house arrest for two years, an electronic cuff on his ankle." He is now jailed for eighteen months.

Now she tells us she simply couldn't handle the pressure of being asked, you know, basic questions like what she reads (nothing), what she knew (next to nothing), and why none of her substantive political claims (Bridge To Nowhere My Ass) passed muster. She is telling us that she resigned from the governorship because the mama grizzly.barracuda couldn't handle the heat in the political kitchen. Altogether now: awww. Can you imagine a Thatcher or Meir or Merkel quitting because the press was too mean? Please. And if she becomes president or even nominee, she will presumably refuse to engage what's left of the media at all. Why should she? They ask questions she doesn't want to or cannot answer. Then this:

Regarding a television interview with Katie Couric widely seen at the time as a turning point in the public’s perception of Palin, which critics argued illustrated Palin’s inexperience, Palin said the interview was selectively edited.

“It didn’t help, either, that the hours and hours of interviews with the likes of Katie Couric resulted in a few minutes here and there of selected snippets of my annoyed answers. (I naively had not believed at the time of some of the badgering questions [for example, questioning my pro-life position] that the editing process would fulfill their biased purpose),” Palin said.

A Mudflats reader writes:

I keep thinking about her son in 15 years or in 20 years. If he looks at this ad campaign or searches magazines and newspaper articles/blogs for his family’s bizarre behavior and commentary about his birth—it just makes me sad to think how he will feel. Its just so twisted.

But to comment specifically on the imagery. I’m a cultural historian (meaning, I used alot of art and objects during my studies and work) and the image of Bristol with the baby on her lap is very “Madonna and Child.” I find it pretty creepy that on the one hand she’s calling herself a statistic (which is ridiculous considering how completely different her life is from the other 749,000 young girls out there) and on the other she’s being presented in an iconographic pose. There is just so much here that is screwed up, contradictory and sad … ugh.

In other words: ruthlessly exploit the babies for money, fame, and power. That's what mama grizzlies do.

Noah Millman goes through Frum's defense of the Israeli-American relationship point-by-point.