Month: January 2011

Recorded in real time:

Chatroulette, its glory days behind it, tries to monetize more schlongs.

Yes, that's the billboard for Limbaugh's show in Tucson. But no, the mainstream right does not have a problem with glorifying violence, does it? My view is that until someone senior in the GOP takes Limbaugh on, his racist, bigoted, polarizing extremism will rightly define the GOP. I'm so sick of the cowardice:

"I've always said that no radio show built on hate could ever survive … There has been a radio network pop up that tried the exact opposite, say whatever you have to say, outrageous as it can be, whether you believe it or not, filled with disgusting hate.  It was called Air America, and look how long it lasted.  I mean even liberals who share the same hateful points of view did not find it worth listening to because they weren't hearing anything different than what they saw and experienced during their humdrum daily lives."

Joe Klein gets it so right:

He spoke as a son–I couldn’t help but think of his personal regret over not being by his mother’s side when she passed as he said, “Did we spend enough time with an aging parent, we wonder.” You could see the devastation insinuate itself onto, and then be quietly willed away from, his face. He spoke as a brother to his fellow public servants, killed and wounded in the events–an eager brother bringing the glad tidings the Gabrielle Giffords had opened her eyes. He repeated it, joyously, three times. But most of all, he spoke as a father–rising to a glorious peak describing the departed 9-year-old, Christine Taylor Green, a girl near the age of his daughters, whose own deaths, perhaps in the line of fire, he had so clearly been thinking about. And he spoke, more broadly, as the head of our national family, comforting, uplifting, scolding a little, nudging us toward our better angels.

(Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty.)

That's what Conor proposes:

Folks on the right think leftists don’t confront the indefensible speech uttered by their side. And vice-versa. So why don’t the folks at The Corner enter into a bargain with a prominent blogger on the left?

What do you say, Matt Yglesias or Kevin Drum or Jonathan Chait? Here’s how it would work. Every day for a week, Monday through Friday, The Corner’s designated blogger could draft one post for publication on the left-leaning blog. The catch? They’d be limited to offering five direct quotations per day of lefties engaged in indefensible rhetoric, however they define it (in context, of course).

In return, the liberal interlocutor could publish the equivalent post at The Corner. And every day for a week, the participants would have to read one another’s five examples for that day, and decide whether to acknowledge that they’re indefensible and assert that the source should apologize if he or she hasn’t done so… or else defend the remark(s).

Maybe I’m wrong. But I suspect that Yglesias, Drum, and Chait would all be game for this sort of exchange. And that it wouldn’t be approved at The Corner in a million years.

A sudden outbreak of conservatism:

"[Reagan's] reaction to the Lebanon bombing was not to stay, it was to leave," Norquist said. "Ronald Reagan didn't decide to fix Lebanon. I think that's helpful in getting the conversation going on the right." Norquist said conservatives recognize the weakness of the arguments for the war, which is why they don't often make them. He scoffed at the notion that fighting two wars was making American stronger.

"Being tied up there does not advance American power," he said. "If you've got a fist in the tar baby Iraq and you've got a fist in the tar baby Afghanistan, then who's afraid of you?"

It's a huge strain on the budgets of the global poor. Yglesias asks whether the US is in any way culpable:

A good rundown from Lester Brown suggests a few ways in which American policy is making things worse. Most notably, ethanol subsidies aren’t a good way to clean the environment, but they’re a great way of raising the price of agricultural commodities. Farmers like it, but people who need to eat suffer. Similarly, pro-sprawl and anti-density policies incentivize the redevelopment of farmland as exurbs. Nice if you’re an oil-exporter, not so nice if you eat food.

In the long run, higher prices will probably lead to higher crop yields and it’ll all even out. But in the interim expect hungry people and food riots.

Yes many people have used the phrase "blood libel" – including yours truly – but I nodded to the term's history when I wrote:

Paladino speaks of “perverts who target our children and seek to destroy their lives.” This is the gay equivalent of the medieval (and Islamist) blood-libel against Jews.

Not many people use the anti-Semitic meme of Jews sucking others blood about a Jewish financier – but Fox News put it right up there, thanks to Glenn Beck.

Adam Serwer contends that blood libel "is not wrongfully assigning guilt to an individual for murder, but rather assigning guilt collectively to an entire group of people and then using it to justify violence against them":

Jim Geraghty has a list of examples of other people using the term in a political context, but some of them are actually appropriate, others less so. Eugene Robinson's reference to the Reconstruction Era lie that black men went around raping white women as a form of blood libel fits the above description, Andrew Sullivan's use of the term to describe anti-gay-rights politicians accusing gays of all being child molesters is similarly appropriate. It's about using a falsehood to establish collective guilt in order to justify collective punishment, not mean things said about an individual person.

The phrase used by Palin, if a little off, as Adam notes, does not offend me. The timing of it left my jaw on the carpet. I still wonder who wrote it.

The newly elected Governor of Florida has an education reform proposal:

[T]he creation of "education savings accounts," a voucher-type system that Scott had spoken about somewhat vaguely in recent weeks… Parents would be allowed to receive funding equal to 85 percent of the "amount the student would have generated in the public school system," presumably in per-pupil funding, to pay for private school costs, private tutoring, private virtual education, prepaid college plans, and other options. And the remaining 15 percent? Scott's team says it would flow back in the public coffers. "The state will save 15 percent for every public school parent who chooses this option," his team predicts.

Reihan explains why it excites him:

Some might fear that affluent parents who would have chosen parochial or independent schools even without the subsidy will now seek public dollars, but I'm not sure this is a particularly pressing concern. The idea is that children would receive 85 percent of the funds they would receive in the public school system. One obvious solution is to embrace something like Robert Reich's proposal for "progressive vouchers," which would assign higher amounts of public resources to poor children as opposed to affluent children. Imagine a statewide ESA program in which educational dollars are provided through a statewide formula, not through local funds raised via property taxes, thus enhancing property values in working class neighborhoods with weak schools and dampening them in the state's richest areas.