Month: December 2010

Daniel Larison says I'm wrong to call Mitch McConnell  the "most rightwing of Republicans." What about DeMint?

While I can understand opposing the deal, DeMint and the Club are in error in their resistance to the deal when they insist that all of the tax cuts be made permanent. The absolutist rejection of the estate tax compromise is also foolish, since the 35%/$5 million exemption arrangement is probably the best that can be had. For the sake of adding hundreds of billions more in debt, DeMint appears to be prepared to try to kill the deal. It’s important to note here that if DeMint succeeds, it will be in the name of even greater fiscal irresponsibility.

It’s Kelly Slater, and according to Matt Feeney he ought to get more love:

Given surfing’s vague and powerful evocation of things we wish we could do but can’t, Slater’s utterly transcendent status in that sport should offer him somewhere higher to transcend to. If there existed some minimal template for appreciating his brand of excellence, moments like his Teahupoo contortion (or this perfect 10 from South Africa, my personal favorite, or the insane barrels in the second half of this video) should muscle out the occasional dunk on SportsCenter, should bring Slater onstage at the idiotic ESPYs, should make Slateresque an adjective for people besides (so far) me. Our sports world—which for a while took seriously the idea that the world’s greatest athlete was a golfer—would be more interesting if it did.

So why doesn’t it?

Most of it is surely that contest surfing sucks on television and will never fit into a multisport mega-event like the Olympics. Unfortunately, surfing’s TV problem is bound up with Slater’s coolest attribute—his spooky dominance in a vast range of unreliable conditions: big waves and small waves, slow rampy walls and slabby, spitting barrels, perfect glassy peaks and windblown junk. (Watch him grind like a teenage skater on this dribbler.) Kelly’s not only the “king” athletically, he’s also the acknowledged master of wave magic. He seems to conduct waves when he’s on them and, if you believe his exasperated opponents, he has the power to summon them from the ocean itself when he needs one good one to win a heat.

I'm with Bill Galston on this: the key to Obama winning the next two years politically (he's already won them economically by getting a GOP-backed second stimulus) is to use his next key speech to make one clear commitment: he will do everything in his power to end the long-term debt by the end of his first term. He will do it in part by sweeping tax reform and simplification – the sugar that will make the medicine go down. He should eschew any classic SOTU laundry list and go for the central, simple message, repeated again and again and again with as much insistence and regularity as "hope and change" in 2008. The gist:

"We will not pass on this debt to our children. Not on my watch. Not at this time. We must get past partisan bickering and solve this once and for all. I've proved I can work out a compromise with the Republicans. We now need an even grander compromise – to end the debt within a generation, restore long-term confidence, and simplify and reform our insane tax code."

It writes itself.

Peter Beinart measures the fallout from various nations recognizing Palestinian statehood:

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of Israelis applying annually for permanent residence in the United States doubled between 2000 and 2009. Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak both have adult children living here. And it's not just the U.S. An Israeli friend recently told me that there are so many young Israelis in Berlin (Berlin!) that when he goes there and runs into acquaintances from Tel Aviv, they don't even act surprised.

These young, cosmopolitan, educated Israelis are exactly the ones you can't afford to lose. They're leaving for graduate school, and jobs in finance and high-tech and a thousand other things, but they're also leaving because they want to be connected to the world, not only economically, but politically and culturally as well. And they're not thrilled about spending a month a year as army reservists manning checkpoints in the West Bank. Offer them a future of mounting international isolation and no prospect for peace, and watch them flood into Williamsburg and West L.A.

Maybe you can console yourselves that their ultra-Orthodox counterparts—who don't work, don't serve in the army, have an average of seven children per family, and drain the government coffers dry—aren't going anywhere. Luckily for you, one of their parties, Shas, controls the ministry charged with fighting the fires that last week ravaged Israel. Shas' spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, helpfully volunteered that the fires were God's punishment for Israelis who didn't keep the Sabbath.

 

Hugh Hewitt, appalled at any cooperation between the GOP and Obama, hyperventilates about Tea Party opposition to President Obama's deal on tax cuts and unemployment benefits:

On my program today Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake announced he is a "hard no" on "the deal," and Senator Tom Coburn has not yet decided how he will vote though he sounded very skeptical to me … TeaPartyPatriots.org founder Mark Meckler announced his organizations complete opposition to "the deal," as well as its opinion that voting for "the deal" breaks the Pledge to America.  The members of TeaPartyPatriots.org, believed by many to be the most representative of the Tea party movement's umbrella organizations, are contacting the current and future members of the D.C. GOP to express their dismay with the terms of the deal as well as with the manner in which it was negotiated and the new House committee chairs. 

I read both the congressman and the senator the language of the House GOP's "Pledge To America," and both did not attempt to argue that "the deal" fulfilled those specifics (listed in the post below) but instead argued that the Pledge wasn't binding until the 112th Congress arrived. Perhaps, but invoking a technicality to justify abandoning the terms of the Pledge, given in September, is not the way to build confidence in the new House majority.

Steve Clemons thinks it's time for Obama to make his own weather in the Israel-Palestine question:

My hunch is that people around the President like Tom Donilon, Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau, and Adam Frankel are collectively the Ted Sorensens of today — though not quite the irreplacable him. They have faith in President Obama, and they need to guide him into what will eventually be a collision with Netanyahu that will both be part unstoppable assertion of America's power combined with sensible restraint. But there is no doubt that the President now must put his imprint on the deal he wants and no longer depend on the illusion that the two primary parties have the maturity or sense of their long term national security interests to do a deal on their own.

The question is whether he can get away with it domestically, even though it's clearly in the national interest. I think he can if he places the argument firmly within the contours of the broader goals of American foreign policy, and of rescuing Israel from a descent into apartheid-style international isolation. He will be opposed of course. AIPAC helped destroy the Obama promise to reset relations with the moderate Muslim world in 2008/2009; Eric Cantor will no doubt do whatever he can to give Israel as many weapons, goodies and cover for war that he can; candidates in 2012 who dare to suggest the US adopt its own foreign policy in the Middle East, rather than the Israeli government's, will be ruthlessly targeted by AIPAC and its donors.

But the end-point of this same old pattern will be the destruction of Israel in the near or distant future. And at some point, surely, even AIPAC will want some kind of two-state solution.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1.37 pm

Ryan Avent thinks that "most of the rise in Treasury yields is due to improved expectations for the American economy":

I've argued that the surest way to get Congress to tackle deficits is to generate a strong recovery. Bond yields will force action, and bond yields respond most strongly to rising growth expectations.

Ed Kilgore asks liberals to think a couple moves ahead:

[P]ersonally, I consider ever-worsening economic inequality the great undiscussed issue of our time, and think the abolition of estate taxes would be morally obscene. But those who urge a course of action that makes these positions non-negotiable have a responsibility to game-plan this out a bit in terms of real-life consequences. "Fighting" is not a strategy; nor is "drawing a line in the sand." No rebellion is going to change the Obama administration's handling of the 2009 stimulus bill or the 2010 health reform bill. And you can't make the tax issue a no-brainer: yes, Obama did promise to oppose extension of tax cuts keyed to the top bracket, but he also promised, much more vocally, to extend the rest of them, so he's going to have to break a promise anyway you look at it.

Laura Miller compares Google's new e-book store to Amazon's Kindle:

Google eBooks is a big improvement on the Kindle (still the most popular dedicated e-reader device) if you anticipate wanting to switch from one dedicated e-reader device to another, but if you're switching to an iPad, then it's a wash. On the other hand, if you're a student at the library one afternoon without your Kindle or iPad and you want to be able to access a Kindle book you bought for a class, you're out of luck. (If that last example strikes you as an exotic scenario, bear in mind that while Kindles are the most popular dedicated e-reader devices, the majority of people who read e-books still read them on a laptop or desktop computer, and many of these readers are students.) Your Google e-books, however, can be read on the library's computer using a Web browser. But hold on a minute! — Amazon just announced that it will be introducing its own Web-browser-based Kindle reader in a month or so.

(Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)