Greg Sargent parses a statement by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley:
[In] order to satisfy Grassley’s definition of true bipartisanship, Dems quite literally must cede all their power and leverage in advance, even as Republicans are refusing en masse to back any proposal that can reasonably be called a compromise. That really is Grassley’s position, with no exaggeration.
David Corn makes a useful point:
With the Baucus plan, a family of four making $66,000 would have to pay $700 a month for government-mandated health insurance coverage. That's more than many people at that income level are used to paying now for whatever health care coverage they have. For a good number of households, this could be a rather weighty obligation.
Is there not a good argument to be made now that Obama, having failed to win any serious Republican support, should give his party what it wants: a public option or, at the very least, more generous subsidies for the middle classes this bill is designed to help? The worst outcome would be a bill that is largely unsupported on the left, reviled by the Beck right and yet too cheap to help the people it is trying to help. If the GOP insists on total opposition – and it is – Obama could consider responding by adjusting the bill to please its actual supporters. There is more to come on this long and winding road.
A fresh way to look at the news.
Larison agrees with much of this post. He adds:
The most significant assumption Stephens makes in his op-ed is that Israel has a perfect right to do whatever it thinks necessary to guard against any possible threat, no matter how chimerical or far-fetched, and that it is the task of the United States government to change Iranian behavior to prevent an unprovoked Israeli attack. No other state is granted this sort of exceptional treatment in its dealings with regional rivals as Israel is, and Washington exempts no other state so completely from the requirements of international law as it does for Israel. At no point does Andrew challenge Stephens’ baseless claim that Iran is just a year or two away from possessing a nuclear weapon. ElBaradei has made it clear that this is fiction. Why does Andrew take seriously that Stephens is interested in the “disarmament” of Iran when Iran has no nuclear weapons of which it can be disarmed?
Because I take the geopolitical challenge of a nuclear-capable Iran headed by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad seriously. Of course we have to take it seriously. We’ve seen how monstrous and clumsy and impetuous these torturing goons can be. And yet we also saw enough of the Green Revolution to understand that even more extreme polarization of the Middle East with an Israel-Iran war would be tragic. I should add that I do not think anyone has a monopoly of insight into how to deal with what is now an excruciatingly difficult – and inherently unpredictable and emotional – moment in history.
We have a Jewish state, still struggling for acceptance, facing a regime that has vowed to end the Zionist project for good. We have the Iranian people, loathing their government, while retaining pride in Persian nuclear progress. We have the knowledge that Iran has not attacked another country first since the 1979 revolution; and that Israel is constantly policing its borders and beyond them with the impunity of lockstep American support. We also know that Israel has a massive nuclear monopoly in the Middle East which has, in my view, only exacerbated its tendencies toward national exceptionalism – and the risks such dreamers take.
I understand why many Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, fear for the fate of Israel with a nuclear Iran. I share that fear and Lord knows the Dish has no love for the regime in Tehran. But there are other profound risks to Israel of attacking Iran, of sticking with the status quo, of intransigence on settlements, etc. And the situation in Iran remains fluid enough to keep the coup-leaders guessing a little. Above all, we need to create a space for a civil and sane discourse on America’s national interests: not Israel’s but America’s.
(Photo: Ahmadinejad by Behrouz Mehri/Getty.)
Not the greatest p.r.
“My primary interest was the music. I was struck by the contrast of the two styles – Biden’s and Palin’s – and the music in their voices. Of course I have strong political sentiments, but this is not about my sentiments,” – Curtis Hughes, whose new opera on the Biden-Palin debate premiers in Boston this weekend.
As Buzzfeed notes,
You know you've reached the apex of pop culture infamy when you've posed in Playgirl and Ben Folds and Nick Hornby have written a song about you.
The somewhat poignant song after the jump:
Yo:
We need tanks and hummers, not hybrid cars!
We need honest politicians, not communist czars!
USA, not the USSR.
We need more Ann Coulter and less Bill Maher …
I don’t need another lecture from the Socialistic hypocrite.Tuesday was your birthday, but where’s your birth certificate?
Communist czars? Shurely shome mishtake.
It's a shrewd and indirect one:
According to the pro-Mousavi website Jonbesh-e Rah-e Sabz, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has artfully called for mass demonstrations of people on the occasion of International Qods Day. In his declaration, Rafsanjani asks Iranians to show solidarity with Palestinians by coming to the streets and rallying to their cause.
While the declaration makes no mention of the fragile domestic situation in Iran, it can be seen to have greater significance in light of the worsening relations between him and the Supreme Leader, as well as Rafsanjani’s earlier statement that he would resign from his posts if Karroubi were “harmed.” By showing his power to mobilize the people, he may be attempting to forestall possible future attacks against him and his family by the new government and its supporters.
Notice how even the opposition in Iran is capable of using the Israel-Palestine question to its advantage.
The pattern is now clear: the imperative to play the political game has won on the right. The longer-term pattern is just as clear: a faction of congressional Democrats sometimes backed Bush on his initiatives (such as his tax cuts). No one in the Congressional Limbaugh-run GOP will back anything this president does. Not only that; they will assault him, race-bait him and insult him in a continuous reel of populist bile.
It seems to me that the GOP was once recognizable as a human personality. It had an id; but it also had a series of responsible egos – Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush I and, to some extent, Bush II; and it had a super-ego – some kind of conscience that made it think of the broader society over partisan warfare. What we've seen in the last few years is the removal of both ego and super-ego.
What you have now is just the rage at the world and its confounding trade-offs and compromises. The knowledge of the Rove right's total failure in the last eight years has only made the far right more fervent in its theo-ideology. Do they have a plan to balance the budget? To salvage or cut losses in Afghanistan? To integrate illegal immigrants rather than use their lives as political fodder? To get the working middle classes reliable healthcare insurance? Not that I can see beyond utopian platitudes.
But they do know that anything this president does is a threat to them. And the noise they can make and violence they can foment is out of all proportion to their numbers.
The Dish 