Month: December 2010

Chait picks up on one:

Notice that neither Romney nor Krauthammer quite say that the growth-boosting effects of the deal are a reason to oppose it. Rather they argue that the higher growth isn't worth the budgetary cost, making it surely the first time either one of them has rejected a [debt]-financed tax cut on the basis of its effects on the national debt. It will be interesting to watch anti-deal Republicans try to make their case by hinting at electoral ramifications without coming out and saying so directly.

I'm afraid to say Mr Prager gets the better of this exchange. But it is blogospherically impolite for NRO not to link to the article Prager criticizes. Is the NRO fatwa on linking to the Dish now extended to others?

A reader writes:

I have read the Dish for four years, but this is the first time I'm emailing, just to point out that Papa Bear needs to get to know his scriptures a bit better. O'Reilly closes with "The Lord helps those who help themselves," a quote that not only does not appear in the Bible, but actually is from the Koran – a document O'Reilly has not appeared to appreciate much at all.  This secular progressive is happy to help him out with his religious confusion.

From 13:11 in the Koran:

Verily, God does not change men's condition unless they change their inner selves

TLC disinvited a media critic to a Talkback Live podcast after a showing of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" for the following reasons:

TLC's social-media strategist Brian Reich explained to me that "the response to her blog post was ridiculously negative — and not negative in the appropriate ways, negative in ways that go way beyond what we're comfortable with." He added that ever since a gunman sparked a standoff at the Discovery Channel headquarters in September, "everyone at Discovery and TLC is very anxious about security issues." So basically, they were worried that if they let Pozner talk on the podcast, a pro-Palin wingnut might try to bomb the building.

Well that may be stretching it. But the virulence of the Palin cult sure is powerful.

President Bush went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show to talk about his recently released memoir. Here's one nicely unself-aware exchange on "idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one":

HH: Did you, in all the reading that you did, and you did a lot of reading when you were president. Did you think any of the previous presidents had become intoxicated with power? Did anyone stand out? I mean, you obviously admire Lincoln, and of course, your father. But was there anyone out there that you marked out as someone who just fell prey to all those intoxications?

GWB: Interestingly enough, not American presidents, because it’s hard to become so totally intoxicated with power when you’re responsive to the people. But the people that became intoxicated by power that affected me were like those idealistic souls that convinced others that their vision for the future was the right one, whether it be the folks who led the French revolution, or those who bought into Mao, or those who corrupted the Leninist movement in Russia. These are people that became so intoxicated with power that they ended up being murderers.

Wait, there's more:

HH: How crucial is it for the president to keep reading and reading and reading the way that you were doing?

GWB: Well for me, it was important. I didn’t watch much TV, or hardly any TV. Instead, I read. And it’s just a fascinating experience to be reading history and making history. And one of the things that I put in the book was when I read about Truman, and realized that many of the decisions he made were affecting my ability to do the job, such as a democratic South Korea made peace more possible in the Far East. And one of the contributions I think we made to the country was to get in a law, tools necessary for presidents to help protect the country. Some presidents may use them, some presidents may not use the tools, but they’re all available.

To the civil libertarian's ear that sounds ominous. Later in the interview, Bush asserts that some people in the CIA were strategically leaking information prior to Election 2004 in an effort to oust him from the White House.

Mitt Romney is against the tax deal. Frum: "can we notice that Romney’s stated grounds of opposition to the deal make no sense?" Er, yes we can! He is capable, as David Brooks has noted, of being "borderline insane." Allahpundit's view of the politics:

Thus did Mitt cover his ass ahead of the 2011 primaries, where support for the new porkier tax cuts compromise will no doubt be a litmus test for grassroots righties. Interestingly, at last check, Huckabee is still in favor of the deal, telling National Journal in an interview published this morning, “I think it’s the best anyone can hope for at this point,” before proceeding to dump all over Obama for his angry press conference last week. Huck’s been working hard over the past two years to try to repair the image of him as a “big government conservative,” backing hardcore tea party candidates and ripping every Obama spending program to come down the pike. I wonder if he’s simply been caught flat-footed on this or whether it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to centrists.

(Photo: A bobblehead of Republican presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney during a post primary campaign rally at January 29, 2008 in St. Petersburg, Florida. By Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Julian Sanchez notes that it's seemingly good news that Eric Holder has agreed to check certain abuses of the USA Patriot Act:

But civil libertarians should pause before popping the champagne corks.

Last year, the fight over the reauthorization of several expiring PATRIOT provisions opened the door to the comprehensive reform that sweeping legislation sorely needs to better balance the legitimate needs of intelligence and law enforcement against the privacy and freedom of Americans. Despite serious abuses of PATRIOT powers uncovered by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, no such major changes were made. Instead, Congress opted for a shorter-term renewal that will require another reauthorization this February—in theory allowing for the question of broader reform to be revisited in the coming months.

Many of the milder reforms proposed during the last reauthorization debate now appear to have been voluntarily adopted by Holder. Unfortunately, this may make it politically easier for legislators to push ahead with a straight reauthorization that avoids locking in those reforms via binding statutory language—and entirely bypasses the vital discussion we should be having about a more comprehensive overhaul. If that happens, it will serve to confirm the thesis of Chris Mooney’s 2004 piece in Legal Affairs, which persuasively argued that “sunset” provisions, far from serving as an effective check on expansion of government power, often make radical “temporary” measures more politically palatable, only to create a kind of policy inertia that makes it highly unlikely those measures will ever be allowed to expire.

In a provocative piece about unbundling the welfare state at National Review, the always thoughtful Jim Manzi makes an important point early on:

The West has built an edifice of markets and free political institutions through a combination of luck, work, foresight, and painful trial-and-error learning, and this has produced once-unimaginable prosperity. But that achievement faces a constant undertow of resistance. It is essential for those who defend market institutions not to mistake this resistance for a defective temperament or malign intent on the part of those who display it, but rather to realize that it is, in part, an inevitable manifestation of human nature. This tension sits at the root of the debate about the line between government authority and individual initiative, and a contemporary capitalist democracy must find a way to manage it.

He goes on to sketch a sane conservative vision for the future of America's social safety net and other functions of government. Perhaps the flagship magazine of the conservative movement is up for challenging the sacred cows of its readership after all.

Mumbai, India, 12 pm