Month: November 2010

Megan tries to decide which party is worse on deficits since Reagan. The one strong argument she has to any kind of equivalence – the presidency of George H.W. Bush – seems weak to me for one simple reason. His party hated him for his fiscal responsibility, and have demonized him for it ever since. Not so the Democrats with Clinton's less impressive deficit-reduction. And the demonizers of GHW are clearly running the show in the current GOP.

As for inherited economic circumstances?

I just don't think anyone comes close to Obama after 18 months, given that he got on the hope and change elevator just after its brakes malfunctioned and was plummeting to the ground floor. He stopped the fall and the rise now is frustrating slow, and the vast majority of the debt is a function of the crisis-driven plunge and inherited wars and entitlements.

I'm sorry but today's GOP is far more toxic to fiscal conservatism than the Democrats. But we'll have an interesting test soon in an intensifying crisis, won't we?

Kate Zernike gets to the heart of the foreign press' infatuation with the Tea Party:

It has affirmed the love-hate relationship the rest of the world has with the United States. The questions foreigners ask and the assumptions they make often reveal a desire to affirm their biases about Americans — their presumed lack of sophistication, their reflexive jingoism. The Tea Party, to them, is a sign that Americans could be really be as hopeless as they thought all along. 

My British friends can't get enough of it. My mum says that from the perspective of someone just watching the British television news, it looks as if America has gone completely bonkers.

For all sorts of charities, you know what to do. Encouragement here. My promise: no dyeing. Random inspiration here.

If very skillfully constructed bombs Fed-Exed from Yemen had reached their apparent targets – one was a gay synagogue! – or if they had detonated mid-air, the news today would have been full of Captain Hindsights, and the Congressional campaign and cable news scrambled by attempts to make partisan hay out of it. Instead: not so much. But this time, the system worked, and the federal government didn't make a huge fuss about it (thanks!), and the world carried on. And the Saudis were critical to this success.

It's time we paid more attention to these actual successes, it seems to me. It wasn't perfection; but it worked. And every day, people do really, really boring things – and some very dangerous ones – to keep our tenuous peace. A moment to think of and thank them, no?

Jim Swilley, the pastor of a megachurch in Conyers, Georgia, comes out:

“As a father, thinking about your 16-, 17-year-old killing themselves, I thought somebody needed to say something,” he told WSB TV in Atlanta. “I know all the hateful stuff that’s being written about me online, whatever. To think about saving a teenager, yeah, I'll risk my reputation for that.”

Gallup measures the cresting wave:

Taking Gallup's final survey's margin of error into account, the historical model predicts that the Republicans could gain anywhere from 60 seats on up, with gains well beyond that possible.

If this really holds, we might see the Senate go as well.

Shalom Goldman picks apart the "loyalty oath" debate going on in Israel today. What it says about the emerging worldview of Israelis in this century:

According to Yaron London, among the questions that might be asked by that elusive figure, ‘the average Jew,’ is one very pointed one:

“Our Arab citizens demand that Israel act toward them in line with the noblest human criteria, while at the same time they barely criticize the injustices prevalent in the Arab world. These Arab citizens have nothing to say about the attitude to the Coptic minority in Egypt, or about the attitude to the Shiites in Sunni Gulf states, or about the Alawite tyranny in Syria.”

One of the most cutting remarks came from a retired member of the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. Abd-el Rahman Zuabi, the first Arab to serve on the court, said that if the proposed amendment passes “then there will be two countries in the world that in my opinion are racist: Iran, which is an Islamic state, and Israel, which is the Jewish state.”

How then did this frightening swing to the Right come about? In a recently published book, Israeli Identities, sociologist Yair Oron analyzes the results of twenty years of research—including interviews and opinion polls conducted among people in Israel—both Jews and Arabs. He found that for Jews of all political and religious affiliations, Holocaust memory was the dominant element in their sense of identity, and that the Holocaust serves as the Jewish common denominator, an Israeli civil religion.

In a survey Oron conducted in Israel in 1990, he found that there were then two aspects to Holocaust memory, one more universal—which warned against the possibility of genocide anywhere in the world, and one more particularistic, that feared another genocide directed against Jews. In a subsequent 2008 survey, Oron found that the particularistic view had triumphed; very few of his respondents articulated a universalistic worldview…

How can you beat the original formula? By the way, Mickey wants a Republican rout this Tuesday. You didn't see that one coming, did you?

PPP's final poll:

The Nevada Senate race is headed for a photo finish with Sharron Angle leading Harry Reid just 47-46 on PPP's final poll of the race. The survey indicates that Reid takes a 50-46 lead with early voters into election day but that those still planning to vote tomorrow are intending to support Angle by a 48-40 margin.

Democratic voters in Nevada really hold Reid's fate in their hands by whether they show up at the polls tomorrow or not.

Chait isn't sure that the establishment can beat Palin:

I wish them well, being more than willing to trade away the higher chance that Obama would beat her in order to avert the risk that she could actually win. But I see two serious problems with the establishment's anti-Palin campaign. The first is a coordination problem. Palin has very intense support. There are many Republicans who would like to carry the anti-Palin banner. But if they all run, they'll split the non-Palin vote. What they really need is to have a primary-within-a-primary for non-Palin Republicans, with the losers pledging to support the winner. Perhaps they can find some non-electoral mechanism to do that. (Fund-raising contest? Rock-paper-scissors tournament?) In the absence of that, none of Mitt Romney, John Thune, Haley Barbour, or any others has an incentive to abandon the field to any other Palin alternative.

Second, and more seriously, the Republian establishment has lost legitimacy among Republican voters. 

 The only person who can beat Palin to the nomination now is Palin.