“The reason the markets calmed down [during the financial crisis] is that we took [the banks’] toxic assets and handed the financial institutions Treasurys. If we’re in a default situation, the Treasurys themselves are the toxic assets, and it’s not clear what we can hand anybody to calm them down,” – Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute.
Butters is threatening the debt ceiling.
Butters helpfully explains neoconservative foreign policy: the US gets to occupy your country for ever if you behave well enough.
Perhaps it's understandable that Fox News is a little off its game, since its own former president and its own political party launched the war, but it's real enough. As my colleague, Jeffrey, rightly notes, the attack on a Coptic church in Eqypt really was a huge story that got lost in the Holiday melee (and is now being compounded by disgusting anti-Semitism). The good news is that many Egyptians seem genuinely distressed. The bad news is that the dark hand of religious cleansing is sweeping across Mesopotamia once again. Here's the hideous latest:
A survivor of the Christian church massacre in Iraq two months ago was killed in the continuing spree of violence targeting the community in the country. A Christian woman in the Karrada district of central Baghdad was shot to death at dawn on Monday while she was asleep, reports quoting Iraq's interior ministry said. The assailants also robbed Rafah Butros Toma, who lived alone in Al-Wahda neighborhood, of her possessions. She was a witness to the massacre of worshipers in a failed rescue operation by Iraqi security forces in a Catholic church in central Baghdad on October 31.
44 congregants and two priests who assembled in Our Lady of Salvation Church for an evening mass were killed hours after militants held them hostage demanding the release of all al-Qaeda prisoners in Iraq and Egypt, including two Muslim women. Seven security force personnel who were deployed for rescue operation were also killed. Rafah Toma survived the suicide-bomb attack but her cousin was killed. It was followed by a threat from 'Islamic State of Iraq' that it will attack Christians in Iraq and other parts of the world.
Who among the neocons would have thought that one of George W. Bush's final legacies would be bringing pogroms, bombings and genocide to Christians in his new zone of freedom?
Yes, I am honored to announce we have now reached the 50th certifiable, unchallenged, demonstrable untruth uttered and never withdrawn or corrected by the current leader of the "conservative" movement.
John McWhorter wants to legalize all drugs. The heart of his argument:
[W]ith no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no “black problem” in the United States. Poverty in general, yes. An education problem in general—probably. But the idea that black America had a particular crisis would rapidly become history, requiring explanation to young people …
That is neither an exaggeration nor an oversimplification. It comes down to this: If there were no way to sell drugs on the street at a markup, then young black men who drift into this route would instead have to get legal work. They would. Those insisting that they would not have about as much faith in human persistence and ingenuity as those who thought women past their five-year welfare cap would wind up freezing on sidewalk grates.
(Hat tip: TDW).
The neocons are taking the same line on you know who:
Ezra does not point to any empirical or anecdotal evidence to support this assertion. Indeed, recent events suggest otherwise. Her advice was not heeded on the tax deal. Her numbers are sinking as a potential 2012 candidate. And when one talks to Republicans in private gatherings, on the Hill, and even in Tea Party gatherings it is rare to find anyone who labels Palin as the party's leader or who looks to her for guidance on major issues. This is not a slur on Palin; she has an important and essential role in rallying the base, getting under Obama's skin and debunking much of what passes for conventional wisdom.
So who but liberal elites, who pine for a ready made target (in precisely the same way they defined Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the GOP after Obama's election), consider Palin the voice of the right?
I would think the polls that place her in the first tier among primary voters, the massive name-recognition, the absence of any rival of her star power, the vast book sales: all of these point to as strong a candidacy as any out there right now.
Fallows rolls his eyes at the reported rumors that Jon Huntsman, Obama's ambassador to China, will run against his boss in 2012. But Jim adds some speculation of his own in a follow-up post:
[A] friend in Beijing writes to say that there may be a hidden logic or silver lining to the rumor — on Huntsman's side, if not on Newsweek's. This friend is neither American nor Chinese, but he knows Huntsman, and he deals every day with Chinese officialdom. In the haiku eloquence of a tweet he writes:
>>That interview is going to raise JH's effectiveness as ambassador exponentially with the Chinese. The way they like to hedge….<<
Ie, there is nothing that will get the attention of the Zhongnanhai leadership like the idea that the mere ambassador they are humoring today might be back another day as a mighty American President.
For a good primer on how Huntsman could be the future of a sane GOP, see Zvika Krieger's profile of the former Utah governor.
Craig Fehrman traces the history of the soundbite, which as been shrinking for over a century according to new research by professors David Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier. Fehrman writes that by "1916, [Ryfe and Kemmelmeier] found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892." This isn't necessarily a negative:
[Soundbites] do come with benefits. [Daniel] Hallin [author of a famous 1992 study on shrinking sound bites] has argued all along that television news in the 1960s and 1970s, which many take to be the genre’s golden age, was never actually that good. Stories were dull and disorganized; those long quotations would be followed by a couple of seconds of dead air. Early newspapers, in their time, were no different. The Boston Globe’s first issue, in 1872, devoted much of its front page to transcriptions of church sermons.
Cosma Shalizi defends the lottery:
The benefit to playing the lottery comes entirely between buying the ticket, and when the winner is revealed. During this interval, someone who has bought the ticket can entertain the idea that they might win, and pleasantly imagine how much better their life could be with the money, what they would do with it, etc. It's true that in some sense you always could just make yourself think about "what if I had $280 million?", but many people find it very hard to get their imaginations going on sheer will-power. A plausible and concrete path to the riches, no matter how low the probability, serves as a hook on which to suspend disbelief. In this regard, indeed, lottery tickets are arguably quite cost-effective. If a $1 lottery ticket licenses even one hour of imagining a different life, I don't see how people who spend $12 for two or three hours of such imagining at a movie theater, or $25 for ten hours at a bookstore, are in any position to talk.
The Dish 