Month: June 2010

This video is making the rounds:

Chait crafts a backhanded defense:

I find it morally abhorrent, but I don't think being an honest anti-Zionist should disqualify a person from working in journalism.

Agreed on both counts. Joe Klein agrees Thomas shouldn't be fired but thinks some punishment is due:

It's not unprecedented for journalists with odious views to have access to the press room. What is unprecedented is for such a journalist to have a front-row center seat. Thomas should no longer have that privilege. The front row should be occupied by working reporters, not columnists. The WHCA should sanction Thomas by sending her back to the cheap seats. This would accurately reflect her current status as a journalist while preserving her First Amendment right to be as obnoxious as she wants.

I don't see why the front row should belong just to reporters. Their total submission to the news cycle and making news renders much of their questioning a big old kabuki show. Why not allow bloggers in the front row? We'd sure make the awful, smug, useless Gibbs less comfortable.

Serwer whacks Bush for cementing his approval of waterboarding. Bernstein gulps:

Bush, at least, doesn't seem to be headed in the "we do not torture" direction.  And I do think that without him, it would be very difficult to move the Republican Party on this issue.  The only other hope is that an explicitly pro-torture presidential candidate gets clobbered — which certainly is a plausible scenario  in 2012 — but even then, it's more likely that the Rush Limbaughs and Marc Thiessens of the world would interpret such an event as a sign that the candidate wasn't sufficiently strident on the issue.  There are to be sure quite a few conservatives who oppose torture, but fewer and fewer of them are candidates for elective office.  Barring something new (and Bush could still flip, after all), I think a pro-torture candidate and platform is virtually certain for the GOP in 2012. And we know how the nomination process works (in both parties): candidates who are in reality basically similar in their positions on public policy are driven to differentiate themselves by taking high-profile extreme positions on symbolic, highly visible issues.

In my view, this embrace of torture – it is simply insane to describe waterboarding someone 183 times as anything else – is why the GOP needs to be defeated as a political force in its current incarnation. It is on the side of barbarism. It is an assault on America and the values generations of Americans fought and died for.

Now we know for sure: Caused by humans.

Remembering the McCarthyite mindset of TV legend Jack Paar.

Now we're talking:

Although generally hawkish and conservative with a libertarian streak — “we’re for strong defense” is an oft-repeated mantra in the movement — tea party leaders and allies contacted by POLITICO said that both fairness and common sense dictate that the military budget be scrutinized for such cuts, a view that puts them in sync with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and some of the most liberal members of Congress.

“Everything is on the table,” insisted Mark Meckler, a national coordinator with the group Tea Party Patriots. “I have yet to hear anyone say, ‘We can’t touch defense spending,’ or any other issue. … Any tea partier who says something else lacks integrity.”…

[Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), a tea party favorite], a bitter critic of Obama — and no fan of Gates or the history of U.S. military intervention since World War II, including NATO — said the country “cannot be a protector of the whole world. We cannot do that any longer. We don’t have the money to do it anyway.”

When the tea-partiers put entitlements and defense on the table and produce real plans to cut all of the above, they will get the Dish's support. I'm waiting, like a lot of people, to see whether they mean what they say. So far, they have failed utterly. But if they show a willingness to cut entitlements and defense by the amounts needed for long term fiscal sanity, we'll back them all the way.

Oh dear:

A reader writes:

They were already tested. Noam Shalit, Gilad Shalit's father, made the following offer to the flotilla organizers last week: if you will take a package to my son, I will lobby the government and try and convince them to let you through to Gaza.  His request was rejected.

Another writes:

Beinart insists that anti-blockade activists should demand the release of Shalit, a uniformed soldier captured on the battlefield. For what it's worth, I am against the blockade and in favor of Hamas releasing Shalit, but I am also in favor of Israel releasing the thousands (I've heard the number 11,000) of Palestinians who are rotting in Israeli prisons without trials.

By the way, everyone knows Corporal Shalit's name – how many of us can name a single Palestinian being held by Israel? Beinart? Anyone?

Scott Adams contends that there is no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution.

A study finds that positive events outnumber negative events and that we therefore use far more positive words than negative words:

The researchers say we've adopted a number of habits of convenience that reflect the frequent use of positive words in our language (in turn reflecting the greater frequency of positivity in the world). For example, positive words tend to be 'unmarked' – that is, the positive is the default (e.g. 'happy') whereas the negative is achieved by adding a negating prefix (i.e. 'unhappy'). Rozin cites four more such habits. Here's one more: when stating pairs of good and bad words together, it's nearly always the convention to mention the positive word first: as in 'good and bad' and 'happy and sad' rather than the other way around.

In one handy chart.