Month: February 2010

He's backing up his promises on nuclear power with cash. He's absolutely right, in my view. There's no way to tackle our carbon addiction without nuclear energy as part of the solution. Will he get credit from conservatives for this? Nah. Remember: it's always party before country for them.

“The business side is run like it’s Esquire in 1968, and the edit side is run like it’s Amnesty International in 1987,” – an anonymous Harper's staffer.

Nate Silver argues "the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now." Jonathan Bernstein isn't sold:

Stuff such as narratives and messages and all that matter at the margins, as independent influences.  Mostly, they are effects, not causes: Bush's narrative in 2002 was different than Bush's narrative in 2006 because the world changed, not because Karl Rove's abilities changed.  The press (collectively — there are exceptions!) pay far too much attention to that kind of thing, and far too little to policy.

The core narrative of Obama's promise and candidacy remains what it always was, in my view. He's struggling against ideology to enact pragmatic reform. This reform will be more liberal than conservative – but that's surely because the conservatism of the past two decades has run aground.

You're not going to tackle the debt if you refuse to cut entitlements and defense and want to keep cutting taxes. You are not going to end the cruelties of our current healthcare system by tax credits that don't begin to cover the cost of soaring premiums. You're not going to give people with pre-existing conditions access to health insurance unless you have some kind of mandate or subsidies big enough to get more people into the system. You're not going to tackle climate change by denying it is even happening. You're not going to defang al Qaeda by giving it recruitment tools like Gitmo and Bagram.

I wish there were a reformist conservatism out there that began to grapple with its past failures. But the response to defeat has been to ratchet up the abstract ideological construct even more. If your choices are defined as freedom or tyranny, you'll sell some books but you sure won't be able to govern a country. Or deserve to.

I didn’t catch all of it, but what I did was really quite something, The highlight – and I defer to my husband on this (because he actually knows something about contemporary music other than the Pet Shop Boys) – was Pink:

In a matter of months, both leaders of the Qaeda-allied Taliban in Pakistan have been targeted and killed by US drone attacks. The latest was in retaliation for the murder of CIA officials in a suicide attack by a double agent who turned on the US. If you add this record – and there are many examples of similar surgical strikes decapitating Qaeda figures in the last year – to the ramp-up of forces in Afghanistan and overhaul of strategy there, I think you can make a very solid case that in the war on Jihadist terrorism, Obama is proving far more effective – in both soft and hard power – than the Bush administration ever was. 

The Republicans will not concede this, because their war is not really at this point on al Qaeda. It's on Obama.

There's a helpful reality check in the NYT today on the health reform debate. Among the two most common GOP "alternatives" to health reform in the centrist bill the Senate has passed were tort reform (good idea but trivial in terms of cost control) and the ability to buy insurance across state lines. I think tort reform should have been in the bill and that Obama should be open to a stand-alone bill adding it. But the other issue is already in there:

Mr. Obama, in an exchange Friday with Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, said he had considered many Republican ideas and pointed, by example, to a proposal to allow insurance companies to sell policies across state lines.

“We actually include that as part of our approach,” the president said.

“But the caveat is, we’ve got to do so with some minimum standards; because otherwise what happens is that you could have insurance companies circumvent a whole bunch of state regulations.” After the session, Representative John Shadegg, Republican of Arizona, took issue with Mr. Obama’s comments, saying the president “got his facts wrong.” …  But in a report comparing the health care bills passed by House and Senate Democrats, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote: “Both bills would allow states to form compacts to facilitate the sale and purchase of health plans across state lines.”

Read the whole piece and you realize just how centrist Obama's proposals are and just how insane the current GOP leadership is.

"14. Sadly for any chance you have of ever seeing a raise again, it looks like Congress may not pass health care reform. It looks like they won't do that because they're scared of angry voters who are demanding that they oppose health care reform, angry voters who demand that Congress not do anything that would keep the cost of health insurance from going up and up and up. Angry voters like you.

15. Do you see the point here? You are angrily, loudly demanding that Congress make sure that you never, ever get another pay raise as long as you live. Because of you and because of your angry demands, you and your family and your kids are going to have to get by with less this year than last year. And next year you're going to have to get by with even less. And if you keep angrily demanding that no one must ever fix this problem, then you're going to have to figure out how to get by on less and less every year for the rest of your life. 

16. So please, for your own sake, for your family's sake and the sake of your children, stop. Stop demanding that problems not get fixed. Stop demanding that you keep getting screwed. Stay angry — you should be angry — but start directing that anger toward the system that's screwing you over and taking money out of your pocket. Start directing that anger toward fixing problems instead of toward making sure they never get fixed. Instead of demanding that Congress oppose health care reform so that you never, ever, get another pay raise, start demanding that they pass health care reform, as soon as possible. Because until they do, you're just going to keep on getting screwed," – a poster on Craigslist Fred Clark.

Last January, the Dish amassed 6.2 million page-views; this January 11 million. Thanks.

Reihan urges the GOP to selectively cooperate:

If Republicans choose not to pivot, if they instead continue to rely exclusively on scorched-earth opposition, they'll find that victories in 2010 won't translate into victories in 2012, when the electorate will be larger and more inclined to elect problem-solvers and not bomb-throwers.

Ya think? From Day One, the GOP has had one strategy, utterly unrelated to the country's interests, and utterly divorced from any responsibility for their own past: the destruction of any alternative to Bush-Cheney conservatism.

They believe that the policies of 2000 – 2008 are the right ones for the future, which is why their only economic policies are tax cuts, why they refuse to cut any spending, why they believe in more aggression abroad, and why they still hold to a view of the presidency that places it entirely above the law – or capable of simply pronouncing the law to say what it plainly does not – in order to wage war outside constitutional restraints.

And that appears to be what a large section of the country really, really wants: a second Bush-Cheney administration. If you doubt it, ask any of the current Republican leaders which policies of Bush and Cheney they specifically refuse to continue.

On the Dish this weekend Andrew took another long look at the president's meeting with House Republicans. Jon Cohn and Kevin Drum digested the latest machinations on HCR while Norm Ornstein reiterated last year's legislative gains. The UK showed a measure of accountability to its leaders, but the US caved again.

Jonah Lehrer examined how power corrupts and why we like music, Meghan O'Rourke mapped out the mourning process, Amanda Ripley relayed the qualities of a good teacher, Caitlan Flanagan slammed educational gardens, Patrick Brown tackled reality TV, and Greg Lukianoff surveyed the spread of PC.

Jimmel Kimmel cut down Jay Leno, Cottle exposed Frank Luntz, and Andrew called out CBS. Readers illuminated more feminism in Biblical times and gave props to Mancrunch. MHBs here and here. Dog-blogging here. Movie crack here. More masturbation talk here.

— C.B.