Netanyahu gave a defiant speech yesterday, but Haaretz suggests it's accompanied with quiet concessions. Indeed, there's a theory (one of many) that Netanyahu's chest-thumping is in inverse proportion to private concessions.
Ackerman also writes up the speech.
YouTube defends itself against Viacom's persistent legal action over copyright:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
(Hat tip: Kottke)
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (R) holds a pen given to her by US President Barack Obama after signing the healthcare insurance reform legislation during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington on March 23, 2010. By Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.
"This is a big fucking deal," – vice president Joe Biden, on HCR.
Frum has ideas. Reihan is working on this as well. By far the better approach to railing about it all year-long. Run on conservative reform within universal healthcare, not repeal. Not that they'll listen.
Andrew Brown worries about the ways in which abuse cases were silenced and covered up at low levels of the church – especially between 1970 and 1985.
There was no Vatican cover-up. Instead of one centrally ordered cover-up, there were hundreds of little local ones. They didn't require special regulations. They grew quite naturally out of the clerical culture. They worked by silence and omission rather than anything more obviously sinister. The scandal is going to be much worse as a result…
But the crucial line in Vatican investigator Mgr Charles Scicluna's evidence comes much earlier. He says that between 1975 and 1983, there was not a single case referred to his office from anywhere in the world. This is astonishing.
I'm sure he's telling the truth. But this should be scaring him out of his wits …
because the period when nothing at all was reported to Rome was also when the abuse was most frequent and widespread and from which the worst stories have since emerged. Look at the graph [above], which admittedly only covers America. There were never fewer than 350 priests reported in any of the years between 1975 and 1983. None of those cases reached Rome for judgement. All of them were covered up spontaneously, almost unconsciously, by the local bishops.
What this means, of course, is that in every country where there was abuse there were also cover-ups, and these will come to light all round the world.
Chait sorts through the spin.
My own view is that healthcare reform will play a minor role in November's elections – because of amnesia, and other events. But in so far as it does play a role, my hunch is that it will help Democrats. My belief is that when people absorb the details that people with pre-existing conditions will soon be able to get insurance, that no-one can get priced out of their current insurance plan by massive sudden premium hikes, and that lifetime limits on insurance are now over … well, people will like it. Why would they not? And if Obama seizes the initiative on debt reduction and calls the GOP bluff on debt this summer and fall, he can outflank them on the right as well. Meanwhile people like him far more than they do the GOP.
More to the point: Obama can campaign on these things. And he and the Democrats can point plainly to all the GOP and say: they wanted no change; they tried to kill it all. If you still believe in change, vote for us. We delivered, we'll deliver again. The more determined the GOP is to argue that this will kill the Democrat vote in the fall, the less I believe them. If the economy is reviving by then, their obstructionism will fall even flatter.
Meep, meep.
Obama's favorable since November after the jump, compared with Romney's – and Palin's. Brutal:
But I hope they don't. What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care.
Not because I think I will like his opponent–I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.
Sam Harris sees science as a way to determine what is right and wrong. He is basically attacking the post-Nietzsche fact-value distinction:
The Dish 