Month: November 2009

Building off that Peter Beinart post, Larison diagnoses Lieberman:

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:

Andrew Sullivan pointed his finger at “Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts” in a post titled “No Suicide,” which decried the “Kentucky lynching.”

And again:

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?

Two days later, I wrote that, “We still don’t know very much about the death of Bill Sparkman in a brutal scene in Kentucky.” In my first post, I wrote:

From this profile of the cancer survivor and volunteer, it appears suicide is unlikely. We’ll find out.

I subsequently linked to a story that proved that the case was getting murkier. In other words, although I clearly suspected foul play and believed it wasn’t suicide, I drew no firm conclusions about the actual perpetrators of this act. In every post, I made sure readers knew that the investigation was ongoing and we did not yet know the full facts. And at every opportunity, this blog linked to stories pushing back against the idea that this was a murder.

Malkin is a journalist in the sense that I am “far-left.”

Nate Silver's qualified answer:

[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.

"There is a reason you don't have Mexican beer cartels planting fields of hops in the California forests," – Bruce Merken, Marijuana Policy Project.

(Hat tip: Reason)

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.

Which is a start.

Disco Stu has too much time on his hands:

Mark Thompson points out a left-wing ritual:

[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. 

This failure is significant because several hundred more law enforcement agencies participated in this year’s survey than last year’s survey: last year’s survey had the participation of 13,241 agencies, this year’s of 13,690.  Of those agencies, 2025 in 2007 and 2145 in 2008 actually reported any hate crimes.  This discrepancy in reporting agencies alone makes a worthwhile one-to-one, year-to-year comparison very difficult to make.  At a minimum, for the purposes of this year’s numbers, the discrepancy in reporting agencies accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the apparent increase in hate crimes against gays.

Released yesterday:

(1) Smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill
(2) Market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) Market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) Workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check
(5) Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) Containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat
(8) Retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) Protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) The right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Where to begin?

1) Are they saying that the archetypal spending bill they oppose would be a stimulus package in the worst recession since the 1930s? C'mon. Surely, a bill like Medicare D, unfunded and passed during a boom, would be a more apposite example. So on the first count, we have partisanship, not principle winning out.

2. "Government-run healthcare" is a talking point, not an analysis. Do they mean the public option? Or any attempt to help the working poor get private health insurance through government subsidies? And on this count, Mitt Romney is disqualified from being a Republican after his health insurance reform in Massachusetts.

3. They do not mention climate change, which is the entire fricking reason for cap and trade. And what are "market-based energy reforms"? Isn't cap-and-trade specifically designed to operate with markets, not against them?

4. Fine.

5. Utopian.

6. They want a surge in Iraq now? I thought we had one. And military-recommended troop surges? Are they saying that strategy in war should not be driven by the president, but by generals? And McChrystal offered various options for a "surge". Which one is the "military-recommended one"? And how can one reconcile 1. with 6. since the expense of these two endless occupations and exercises in nation-building is one of the biggest new expenditures the country has?

7. Containment of Iran? Well that's an interesting development. Except that it also means "effective action" to "eliminate" their nuclear weapons or weapons technology. Does that mean a military attack? Or sanctions? Or is this as vacuous as it sounds?

8. More with the gays.

9. They oppose denial of healthcare by the government but not denial of healthcare by the private sector?

10. Guns!

If a potential Republican candidate disagrees with more than two of the above, the RNC wants to deny funding. I'm not sure how anyone could agree or disagree with this crapulous mishmash of rhetorical degeneracy. But as a sign of intellectual health, it is depressing. It's a sign that denial is deep and a serious attempt to govern, as opposed to posture, is still far from the Republican psyche.