Month: February 2011

Yep, Mark Levin, the talk radio fanatic who took Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell seriously as candidates, now says Mitch Daniels is unqualified for the presidency. The Daily Caller describes his monologue:

“Mr. Daniels, you get a little ‘x,’” he said. “You’re too weak. You don’t see the full horizon. You’re ready to battle on some turf, but on way too much you’re ready to surrender the turf. You should be speaking out in defense of your fellow governor from Wisconsin and you’re not. You should be encouraging exactly what the legislature is doing in — Indiana, to attract more and more enterprise and create more jobs but you’re not. That’s why you’re not presidential. Like I say, you may be a great governor. I don’t know. I don’t live in Indiana but I do live in the United States and you get a little ‘x’ next to your name.”

Over at Big Government, Mike Flynn is piling on:

First, I need to start with a confession and a plea for forgiveness. For the last two years, when the DC parlor game of “who should run in 2012? came up, I had one answer: Mitch Daniels. Sure, he was kind of boring. But, I thought that after four years of the “flash and dash”, “hope and change” flimflammery of the Obama Administration, boring would be right up the voters’ alley. Daniels was competent, in precisely the kind of way you trust-and want-your accountant to be competent. He was, I thought, the man for the times.

I was wrong. I am sorry. It turns out Mitch Daniels is a 1990s conservative; hesitant, afraid to stand on principle, desperate to be loved by editorial writers from the dying newspaper industry. (Newt Daniels?) He needs everybody to support him and stands ready to jettison any principled policy position for an extra few points bump in the polls. No doubt, he wants to ‘rise above’ politics, but he has personally risen so far above it that one wonders why he even bothers. He wasn’t pressed into service as Governor and presumptive presidential candidate. He chose that path, presumably, because he had a vision for how to lead. Again, and I will say this a lot, I was wrong.

These people claim that the United States is on the edge of a fiscal cliff, that what they care about is liberty. But at every opportunity they show that an actual record of fiscal conservatism in government isn't nearly as important to them as polarizing rhetoric.

Avik Roy has a defense of Daniels up at National Review. Which is encouraging.

Defendant Detlef S. waits at the start of another day of his trial in the regional court in Koblenz, Germany on February 25, 2011. The 48-year-old is charged with sexually abusing his daughter, stepdaughter and stepson in a house of horror in the small village of Fluterschen in western Germany over a 23-year period. By Torsten Silz/AFP/Getty Images.

Leonhardt says that cost isn't the main problem with college:

If policy makers began to tie funding to performance — both graduation rates and measures of actual learning — we might not drive down the cost of the good colleges. But I bet we’d stop wasting so much money on colleges that are doing their students a disservice. And I bet there are more of these colleges than we care to admit. With better data on learning, we could also figure out how to evaluate new kinds of schools that may indeed be cheaper than traditional colleges are.

As YouTube commenter number one says, there "will never be a better Rumsfeld interview for the rest of human history":

Pareene provides background on Louis C.K.'s ridiculous question:

C.K. is referencing the theories of former sportscaster and internationally renowned conspiracy researcher David Icke, who has worked for years now to expose the shape-shifting reptilian Anunnaki gods from the constellation Draco. Disguised as humans, they secretly rule the world. For more, seek out Jon Ronson's documentary about Icke, which is is available on YouTube. (Also you can just watch videos made by the people who believe these things.)

Ezra Klein considers media coverage of healthcare rulings (click the above image to enlarge):

The graph is based off of data Steven Benen pulled together. As I've written before, I'm sympathetic to the argument that pro-ACA rulings simply ratify the status quo and are thus not newsworthy. But we also have to be mindful of the fact that most Americans don't follow this stuff closely, and if all they see are news stories about the minority of judges who have ruled against the individual mandate, they're quite likely to think that the mandate has actually been ruled unconstitutional.

K-Lo posts a pictorial version of Megyn Kelly and Maggie Gallagher's propaganda on DOMA. Sigh.

Misty Irons notes how weak the substantive case for Prop 8 was shown to be in the Walker trial and wonders if that pushed the president to his new position:

Even if someone else wants to step up and defend DOMA, how do you avoid a repeat of the pro-Prop. 8 case? Where will you get your witnesses? How will you argue the case? What will this do to people's professional or political credibility? I think the Obama administration must have realized all this and now they don't want anything to with the case. And if that realization has hit the highest level of our government, then that is significant indeed. It should only be a matter of time before the repercussions pervade throughout the moral fabric of this country in the coming decade.