Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

I agree completely with your post, but there’s an additional concern I think the GOP should consider. Consider adjoining states, say Kansas and Missouri, with one state opting out and the other opting in. 

Let’s say that I’m considering starting a new business in Kansas which has opted out of the public option.  When I compare the costs to buy private insurance in Kansas vs. my costs to take the public option in Missouri, what is my incentive to stay in Kansas?  Wouldn’t it be smarter of me to cross the border and set up my business in Missouri?  Assuming the public option is successful in controlling costs, states that opt out could potentially see a brain drain to states that opt in.  Many of the predicted opt out states are already suffering from brain drain as it is.

Chait thinks Lieberman is bitter, but that his filibuster threat will prove irrelevant:

My guess is that ultimately he'll vote for reform, but he'll do so because the Democrats will scale back their plan and win over Olympia Snowe, making Lieberman's opposition academic. Lieberman won't join a futile filibuster, but if he has the chance to stick in the knife and kill health care reform, I think he'd probably jump at the chance.

Marc's read:

[T]he final bill, post-conference, is going to look a bit different from the reconciled Senate bill. Lieberman is giving himself the power to influence the final bill. I doubt that the Senate leadership is going to press him too hard right now, preferring to see if he can be accommodated in the final debate.

It’s almost as if this “chap-hop” artist was reading the Dish all last week. Do you know what I am saying:

(Hat tip: BF)

My favorite line:

I asked him to square his rationale with the experts' consensus, but he was undeterred.

Even after the dire warning of recent massive bomb blasts, Baghdad's elites cannot reach an agreement on the election law. They've already missed the deadline for October 15. The reason?

The parties remained divided on laws governing elections in Kirkuk, an oil-rich province to the north of Baghdad that has long been a point of contention between Kurds and Arabs. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, said he was critical of the leaders’ proposed solution on Kirkuk, which would combine voting registration records from 2004 and 2009 to reflect the province changing population, which grew more Kurdish in those years.

The surge was supposed to create the space necessary for the sectarian factions to come together. That was its critical definition of success. So far: surge fail. And if the parties cannot hammer out an agreement now, with 120,000 US troops still in country, what chance once the US leaves?

The unlikely battlefield of NY-23 is taking on epic proportions. What's interesting about it is that it's the first time the tea-party base has declared a real war on the GOP. I guess you could see the Palin nomination as the first real swipe at the Republican leadership, but it was an attempt by the GOP leadership to coopt the base fringe. This time, there's no attempt, just a brutal civil war.

According to Michelle Malkin, Scozzafava is a "radical leftist." What makes her a radical leftist?

Malkin firstly lists her support for abortion rights and marriage equality. Since abortion rights command around 50 percent of the country, and since either civil unions or civil marriage are backed by two-thirds of Americans, that would imply that half the country are "radical leftists". Yes, Scozzafava backed a bank bailout, some tax hikes, and the stimulus package. But is it now "radical leftism" to believe that the government has a reason to run deficits in the sharpest downturn in decades? Is it "radical leftism" to believe that, without deep cuts in entitlements and defense, tax hikes are essential for fiscal balance?

More to the point, Scozzafava is actually on the right of her party … in New York State:

Scozzafava’s score puts her in the 58th percentile of her party, which makes her slightly more conservative than the average Republican legislator in Albany, so she’s a conservative in her party.

For example, she’s more conservative than James Tedisco, who lost a special election to succeed Kirsten Gillenbrand in the 20th District (score: -.22 and in the most liberal fifth of the party). In the legislature as a whole, she’s in the 83rd percentile, which makes her a conservative in Albany in general. Compare her, say, to Republican Thomas Morahan of the 38th Senate District (Rockland County, just across the border from the New Jersey town where I went to high school). He scores a very liberal -0.54, or in the most liberal 2% of his party. No wonder that his party affiliations include the Working Families Party, which is closely associated with organized labor (and ACORN). So she’s no Morahan.

On the past endorsements of the Working Families Party, Malkin has a point. But much of it is related to Scozzafava's husband, not the candidate herself. And the association with ACORN is just that: an association, or in Malkin's prose: "a socialist outfit whose political DNA is intertwined with scandal-ridden ACORN." And the WFP is endorsing the Democrat in the current race.

What I take from this is pretty simple: as the GOP is now constituted, it will cease to exist in the West and the Northeast. It will struggle in the Midwest. And the base wants to reinforce these trends, buoyed by recent polls that show a slight uptick in the label "conservative."

As I have said, it will get worse before it gets better.

DiA asks "if a state was demonstrated to have killed an innocent person, would this move public opinion on the question of capital punishment?":

An October 13th Gallup Poll found that more than half of all Americans who support the death penalty believe that someone innocent has been executed in the past five years. (About two-thirds of Americans support capital punishment, a figure that has been steady for years.) David Dow, the director of the Innocence Project of Texas, argues that this is not surprising. "Most people, whether they’re death penalty supporters or not, are going to acknowledge that the system makes mistakes," he says. He argues that for capital punishment, as with everything else, it comes down to a cost question: can a state afford to execute people, with all the years of legal wrangling that usually entails? 

Here's what two Californians are being charged with:

The couple, Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, and three other people are accused of luring their two victims to an office where the men were tied up, held for hours and beaten, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney said… Each count of felony torture, defined as inflicting "great bodily injury" for the purpose of "revenge, extortion, persuasion and for a sadistic purpose," carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment.

So two civilians get a potential life sentence for tying up and beating two people for hours; but the former president of the United States and his underlings get off scott-free for tying hundreds up in excruciating stress positions for months, freezing victims to near-death (and over it), using the Khmer Rouge technique for waterboarding someone 183 times, inducing psychosis through sensory deprivation, keeping someone awake for 960 hours, and killing at least 20 and as many as 100 individuals.

It's good to be the king in Washington. The elite media will never let their sources face, you know, the rule of law.

Meep, meep.