Month: February 2010

As more documents come to light, the role David Addington played in the torturing of human beings becomes clearer. If only we could see the emails between Addington and Yoo … oh wait. They were deleted before the OPR could see them!

Matt Pressman reports that liberal magazines are declining under Obama and conservative magazines are booming. James Joyner adds:

With some notable exceptions, we’ve seen the same trend in the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent, cable news. The right-leaning blogs dominated in the early part of the last decade, spurred on by outrage over Islamist terrorism. By the early stages of the Iraq War, though, the left-leaning blogs had a readership explosion. The top blogs of both sides have continued to do well since then but we’ve certainly seen an upswing in the traffic at InstaPundit, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Hot Air, and other blogs that have capitalized on the Tea Party Movement and anti-Obama sentiments.

This is pretty much standard experience in these things. Journalists are at their best when exposing power rather than defending it. And as consumers, we like a good rake-over as much as the next punter. But I'd like to know where Joyner's stats are for the blogs he mentions. It would be interesting. The Dish kept almost all its traffic in 2009 that it gained in 2008, and 2010 so far is way up on the first two months of 2009. Maybe my non-phony fiscal conservatism has some tea-party fans out there. I was criticizing the spending when Bush was in power, after all.

Someone has translated them all here. Full context here. Official IDF condemnation here. The t-shirts depicting a Palestinian child with a rifle in the cross-hairs of a sniper rifle says:

The Smaller They Are The Harder It Is

Another one reads:

"We Won't Chill Till We Confirm The Kill"

A reader writes:

The context for the "'Every Arab Mother Must Know That The Fate Of Her Son Is In My Hands'" quote is a perversion of a quote by David Ben-Gurion which translates roughly as

"Let every Jewish mother know that she has entrusted her son's lives into the hands of worthy officers."

This isn't only Israel violating international norms and universal human rights, but also its own past ideals.

There are similar and worse slogans on t-shirts across the Muslim world and in Palestinian and Arab and Iranian media that demonize Jews in foul and fouler fashion as well, of course. 

Today on the Dish we saw Netanyahu escalate the provocation of the Palestinians. Joe Klein furrowed his brow at the situation while Kevin Sullivan took on the foreign minister. Jewish readers defended Andrew against Abe Foxman while others challenged his criticism of Israel here and here. Greenwald and TNC tore into Newsweek for their "terrorist" debate. More OPR coverage here, more Yoo exposure here, and more Thiessen pwnage here.

In Palin news, Bristol upped her celebrity, Meg Stapleton quit, and Sarah seemed to be an empty suit when it comes to disability rights. Jeb Bush knocked her intellect and Peter Brown called her the right's Jesse Jackson.

In other coverage, Bruce Bartlett shook his head at "starve the beast" conservatives, Steele flaunted his fiscal recklessness, and Howard Gleckman examined the Wyden-Gregg tax reform proposal. Andrew railed against Tom Ricks' case for staying in Iraq. Fox News hated on Ron Paul, GMA revealed some fascinating details from the Joe Stack story, and CSPAN found its inner monster truck rally. Moore Awards here and here.

— C.B.

TNC weighs in on the Newsweek terrorism debate:

By Isikoff's lights–and by the lights of several of his colleagues–the Ku Klux Klan, an organization responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people, the men who turned Birmingham into "Bombingham," who hurled molotov cocktails into the homes of Detroiters who dared moved west of Woodward, who lynched black men in the streets, who brought food, children and wives to the spectacle, who smiled next to smoking corpses in post-cards for far-off relatives, who displayed the knuckles and testicles of black men in pickle jars, were not terrorists, but "Ethnic Intrusion Protesters."

GM kills the Hummer.

"I mean, I don't know what her deal is, but my belief is in 2010 and 2012, public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity," Jeb Bush, on Palin.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor is claiming Pelosi doesn’t have the votes. Jonathan Berstein is more optimistic:

I can’t really understand the president’s actions in the last couple of weeks if the bill is likely to fail.

Obama could have, had he thought the bill was dead, retreated to a “pass something” mode, and pushed for a small beans, happy-talk bill that either would have passed, or which he could have used to bash Republican opposition. The idea that he would spend a month or so elevating the importance of the original bill, and eventually putting his own personal stamp on the House/Senate compromise, without having a pretty good sense that it would pass just doesn’t seem likely to me. Oh, and the “Obama plan” sure looked designed to get through reconciliation (notice the absence of House-favored national exchanges and the antitrust thing, both of which are Byrd rule bait). If the White House is just scoring points, why care about such things?

Labor union favorability is down. Walter Russell Mead analyzes:

Although Pew doesn’t provide us with much data about why these changes are taking place, I think several factors are at work. First, there are more unionized workers in the public sector now than in private enterprise, and dislike of the arrogant, incompetent DMV worker who cannot be fired and gets a better pension than you do runs pretty strong.

Second, more people think unions won’t work in the jobs that they have. If costs go up, business shifts to non-unionized firms either inside or outside the US. Third, the perception that bailouts have gone to sustain wages for unionized workers has not resonated well with people who think they will pay taxes in order to support higher wages and benefits for other people. Fourth, scandals and overreaching (ACORN, card check) have sharpened public distrust of the labor movement.

Pivoting of an NYT article, Sonny Bunch criticizes NYC's teachers union.