Month: February 2010

Nate Silver gets deep into the cross-tabs of the lasted Kos poll and notices how similar GOP opinion is across the country. He thinks this will make crafting a GOP national message easier but also make Republicans pick candidates who don't fit the district:

If you take two Republican Congressional candidates and put them in the same primary, the outcome is liable to be the same whether that primary takes place in Alabama, Michigan, Idaho or Rhode Island, and whether the electorate is older or younger, more male or more female…Thus, the Republicans are more likely to make suboptimal electoral decisions in individual districts — we have a fresh example from last night, in fact, in IL-10, a D+6 district where the Republicans nominated the conservative Bob Dold rather than the moderate Beth Coulson. But the Democrats are likely to have a difficult time articulating an optimal national message — and perhaps as a result a more difficult time governing.

This, to my mind, is a function of ideology and religion, rather than ideas and politics, being the core elements of a party. It's also a function of Fox News creating a national ideology through a national propaganda arm of the RNC. Well, they will reap what they sow. At least I hope so if real conservatism is going to one day find a comeback in American political discourse.

The first couple of hours of testimony are online. Here's the trailer:

Andrew Sprung tries to make sense of the latest Yoda-like pronouncement.

A reader writes:

I'm doing a high school paper on you. I wanted to know if you believe the blogosphere in general, and your blog in specific, promotes a shift towards Habermasian political discussion. A one word answer will suffice.

Oakeshottian conversation, my dear reader. Oakeshottian conversation.

I told you there was much much more to come.

Larison endorses an American presence Haiti:

There is a genuine American interest in at least restoring Haitian institutions to what they were before the earthquake.  Aside from the humanitarian concern for the population of Haiti, a failed state in the Caribbean would become a nexus of drug and human trafficking into the southern United States.  While failing states on the other side of the planet, such as Somalia and Yemen, pose very limited security threats to U.S. interests, the collapse of Haiti would swamp the southern U.S. with refugees at a time when state resources are stretched especially thin.  If Haiti is not made relatively stable and secure, Haiti’s neighbors, including the U.S., will bear the costs of that failure for decades.

Reihan protests that I have distorted his position:

[This] is about crafting workable solutions to difficult problems. I do not believe that a weak mandate, a sharp increase in implicit marginal tax rates, and a regulation-driven strategy to addressing adverse selection — as opposed to an incentive-driven strategy using state-based high-risk pools and, better still, well-designed public reinsurance — will work. In fact, I believe that it will turn out very badly and that it will prove impossible to reverse.

In this context, opposition is a very responsible position to take, even if Republican legislators are far from flawless or blameless.

I have to assume that Andrew takes exception to many of the views, habits, and practices of his political allies in any particular dispute. My guess is that I'd be part of a very different coalition — that is, a coalition that includes more self-described progressives than self-described conservatives — on an issue like the reform of copyright or congestion pricing or any number of other issues. I'm very comfortable with that.

The fact that many people are powerfully invested in passing this reform, for political and financial reasons, doesn't strike me as reason enough for me as a writer and thinker and citizen to acquiesce. And the fact that there are people with political and financial interests on the other side doesn't mean that the basic problems with the Democratic reform model aren't very real.

My point was in response to his seeming resignation to politics as usual in the face of a huge and growing crisis. And while I would draw up my own ideal version of healthcare reform very different from Obama's, I'm not naive enough to believe it has a snowball's chance in hell of ever passing. At some point, you have to make a pragmatic choice of the actual options available. I think the current bill is it. I also think it can be worked on continually to improve it in the future. Hence my support.

In the face of brutal intimidation by the regime and desperate attempts at public conciliation by Ahmadi, the leader of the Green Movement, as February 11 approaches, has issued an extraordinary statement of resolve:

“The majority of people believed in the beginning of the revolution that the roots of dictatorship and despotism were abolished. I was one of them, but now I don’t have the same beliefs. You can still find the elements and roots that lead to dictatorship.”

He seems increasingly confident as the junta seems increasingly chaotic:

Mr. Moussavi said he did not believe that the revolution had achieved its goals.

A former senior official close to the opposition said that Mr. Moussavi “has taken his attacks against the regime one step further up.”

“People’s demands on the streets were definitely much more than what the opposition leaders were calling for,” the former official said in a telephone interview. “Now, with his new remarks Mr. Moussavi is reflecting what is closer to what people want.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution inside Iran.

Jeffrey Gedmin reports from Dubai, where Iranian expats make up nearly a third of the population:

Both sides are busy preparing [for Feb. 11]. The opposition promises a strong show of support in the streets, while Ahmadinejad has vowed to strike a harsh blow against "global arrogance" (his term for the United States). Meanwhile, his government is adding even more flights to Dubai. The logic? Better to occupy the rabble-rousers with shopping across the gulf than to have them at home, crowding the streets with their slogans and shouts of discontent. Eastern European communists tried similar techniques, pushing troublemakers into Western Europe. It worked. For a while.