Month: February 2011

Olympia, Washington, 11 am

The Daily Beast has some fascinating emails shedding light on this. Alexis dissects them:

The gymnastics of the Facebook's recent dealing remind me of a 1995 paper written by science and technology studies scholar Melvin Kranzberg. He proposed a series of "laws" and this was the first:

"Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral."

Perhaps Facebook could have stayed neutral if it had been solely used by privileged college kids, but as its deployed around the world, local users are adapting it to meet their challenges, which are often larger than finding someone to make out with.

David Frum says what's happening in Wisconsin is only going to spread:

Since 2007, Americans have lost trillions of dollars in wealth. And ever since, we’ve been arguing about who should pay and who should be protected. Wisconsin represents the next — and most painful — round of the argument. During the good years, states and cities made retirement promises to their workers. When you total all the promises – and compare them to the money set aside to pay the promises — you reach a gap of more than $1 trillion, according to the Pew Center on the States.

Where did the trillion go? Some was lost in the declining value of investments after the dot-com crash in 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008. Some of the trillion was unexpectedly added as rising health-care costs inflated the projected costs of state-worker retirements. But the largest part of the trillion dollar gap was accumulated by wishful thinking and political cowardice: States making workers happy by promising them payouts in the future, and trying to keep taxpayers happy by neglecting to set aside the necessary funding in the here and the now.

Here's something to understand about the antagonistic relationship developing between public employee unions and the public at large. In normal circumstances, the tendency is going to be for the government to pay its workers a bit more than would be the case if the public were paying closer attention, because special interests are always more focused on matters that affect them directly than average voters with many disparate priorities.

As a result, when the public at large suddenly starts to scrutinize the deal any special interest has secured for itself – public employee unions included – it's quite normal for there to be a sizeable backlash as voters begin to comprehend a status quo on which they never knowingly signed off. In this sense, public employee unions benefit from the ignorance of voters during boom times, and suffer more than most from backlashes in bad times.

Yes, I'm with David on this. Over at Ricochet, Daniels explains why he opposed right-to-work legislation in his state this year. It's a Republican version of Obama's pragmatism and well worth a read:

Here in Indiana we have a very extensive 2011 agenda that these critics, if they took the time to look, would strongly applaud: another no-tax budget, an automatic refund to taxpayers past a specified level of state reserves, sweeping reform of archaic and anti-taxpayer local government, reduction of the corporate income tax, and the most far-reaching reform of education in America, including statewide vouchers for low and moderate income families.   We laid all this before the public during last year's elections.

Into this a few of my allies chose to toss Right to Work (RTW).  I suggested studying it for a year and developing the issue for next year.  No one had campaigned on it; it was a big issue that hit the public cold.  I was concerned that it would provide the pretext for radical action by our Democratic minority that would jeopardize the entire agenda above, with zero chance of passing RTW itself.  And that is exactly what has happened. We're not giving up on the agenda we ran on, but this mistake presents a significant obstacle.  RTW never had a chance this year and now the task is to make sure that it doesn't take a host of good government changes down with it.

Broun puts out a press release:

Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Oglethorpe County, Georgia an elderly man asked the abhorrent question, “Who’s going to shoot Obama?”  I was stunned by the question and chose not to dignify it with a response; therefore, at that moment I moved on to the next person with a question.  After the event, my office took action with the appropriate authorities.  I deeply regret that this incident happened at all.  Furthermore, I condemn all statements—made in sincerity or jest—that threaten or suggest the use of violence against the President of the United States or any other public official.  Such rhetoric cannot and will not be tolerated.

In one of the more unhinged defenses of the Israeli settlements, Jonathan Kellerman suggests that telling Jews where they can’t live foreshadows another Holocaust:

The concept of Judenfrei — moving Jews out of specific areas of Europe — was a bulwark of Nazi policy that rapidly devolved to the even more viciously racist notion of Judenrein, cleansing Jews from all of Europe. We all know where that led.

That appears in JPod’s Commentary. Chait reponds. This, by the way, is the official position of Mike Huckabee, who just returned from Israel to attend the ceremony initiating a new settlement on the West Bank:

“To tell Jewish people, ‘You cannot live here, you cannot raise your children here,’ this is the true racism, this is apartheid.”

Huckabee’s radical position on Israel – a break from the position of every US president since Reagan – is indistinguishable from that of Avigdor Lieberman, whom even Marty Peretz has called a kind of fascist. And yet Huckabee’s statement drew little attention.

Kottke:

This is a jetsprint boat race; I've never seen a boat turn so sharply at such a fast speed.

Start at the 0.48 mark. Wow.

That's what several witnesses are saying. By the way, here's some background on Broun from a reader:

Just google this Broun idiot.  Looks like he has used some very inflammatory language regarding Obama.  He was the congressman who sat out the SOTU so he could sit in his office and tweet about what a big socialist Obama is.  He was one of the first to compare Obama to Hitler and Marx (yes, both) and claim that Obama wants to build a paramilitary force answerable only to him.  He also likes to call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression."  So, small wonder that reports from yesterday's town hall is that the question, "Who is going to shoot Obama?" drew a hearty laugh from the crowd in attendance.  (I pray there is video.)

Oh, almost forgot the best part: Broun is your new chairman of the Science and Technology subcommittee.  He plans to use that chair to help prove that climate change is all a hoax.

Think Progress has countless posts on the radical congressman. There is a difference, however, between radical politics and this kind of a response to a demand to assassinate the first black president of the United States. He needs to resign.

Ira Stoll pushes back against the anti-Koch brigade:

The Times could write a story headlined Billionaires’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute and have the article be about not the Koch brothers but about the funders of Common Cause. But the left-wing interest groups rarely get that kind of treatment in the Times, where these left-wing interest groups are more commonly quoted approvingly as expert sources rather than scrutinized skeptically or suspiciously as targets.

I think he has a point, don’t you?

Ramesh Ponnuru explains how the cable news network is distorting the GOP primary by paying many of the potential candidates: