Month: March 2011

If you're having a bad day …

The key paragraph in the new paywall announcement:

Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles.

That's a relief – and smart. By keeping the content accessible to the online world, even making blogs and social media linkage an exception to the paywall, the Times hopes to retain traffic while also making more money. Obviously, the Dish has a vested interest here.

We remain parasitic on the NYT and other news sites; and I should add I regard the NYT website as the best news site in the world; without it, we would be lost. But like most parasites, we also perform a service for our hosts. We direct readers to content we think matters. So we add to the NYT's traffic and readership.

But what makes this exception even more interesting is that, if I read it correctly, it almost privileges links from blogs and social media against more direct access. Which makes it a gift to the blogosphere. Anyway, that's my first take: and it's one of great relief. We all want to keep the NYT in business (well, almost all of us). But we also don't want to see it disappear behind some Great NewsCorp-Style Paywall. It looks to me as if they have gotten the balance just about right.

The appeal of Sarah Palin as a GOP nominee is not just about domestic resentments. It is also about foreign policy revanchism. And it seems rash to me to dismiss the importance of this. There is  something about an attractive woman wielding military force that reaches those parts of the psyche that no-drama Obama never will or can. Ask Thatcher or Meir (or Elizabeth I or Indira Gandhi).

It is therefore fitting that Palin's first major foreign trip will be to Israel and even more fitting that it was arranged by a Christian tour operator, and will, accroding to current reports, include meetings solely with Likudniks. Israel is the place where the neocon alliance with the evangelical right was always intended to have the biggest impact. Palin, like Huckabee, favors Greater Israel and the permanent annexation of the entire West Bank. This springs from theological convictions about the Jewish Biblical claim to land granted by God and also less conventional ideas about the in-gathering of Jews in Greater Israel as a harbinger of the End-Times (when all those Israelis will convert to Christianity or die). It is impossible to imagine any American pressure on Israel if Palin or Huckabee become president. The very idea of peace with Palestinians is abhorrent to evangelical principles within the ancient territory of Israel.

Among primary voters, those who care most about foreign policy favor Palin over the others, according to a recent poll. What she truly represents is a chance at a civilizational war against Islam. And unlike other more prudent types, she would not hesitate to unleash it.

(Painting: John Opie's Queen Boudica.)

Busted. Mine have much better poker-face.

Beautiful innit? But it reveals just how low current taxes are in historical context, especially for the very wealthy. The explanation from the creator, Stephen von Worley:

That’s a line for every year from 1913 onward, sized and colored by the tax burden: the amount of tax due relative to the long-term average at each income level. Above-average burdens appear thick and red and below-average thin and blue. We adjusted everything for inflation to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, with the caveat that the effects of Social Security, Medicare, and other taxes are not included. The underlying data comes from The Tax Foundation, IRS, and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is the same information we used in last year’s bracket graph, updated for 2011.

In a time of massive debt, it seems to me that some revenue increases have to be part of the equation. Some of that blue needs to redden.

They won't say so, but how else to interpret these polling results:

But you can't get anywhere near fiscal balance by slashing domestic discretionary spending. What we see here is the total failure of the president to make the case for fiscal reform and the utter failure of the Republicans to be honest with the public about what needs to be done.

So on this question, Americans have rightly observed that there is now little difference between Obama and the GOP on the deficit. Both parties are utterly unserious. And neither wants to take the heat for being honest.

Radley Balko notes:

[University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter] Kraska found that the number of SWAT deployments in America increased from 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to around 50,000 by the mid-2000s. That’s about 135 SWAT raids per day. The vast majority of those are for drug warrants.

Balko partially blames "the martial rhetoric of the 'drug war'": 

Unlike the targets and crosshairs that ultimately had nothing to do with the Tucson shootings, the willingness of politicians to define drug prohibition policies in terms of war has had real consequences—namely, cops who approach drug law enforcement as if American streets were battlefields. Ronald Reagan once compared the drug war to the World War I battle of Verdun. Drug warriors have described the narco-carnage in Mexico as a positive sign. One Georgia sheriff recently likened his own anti-drug efforts to the invasion of Normandy.

Larry Sabato updates his takes on the 2012 GOP contenders. On Palin:

It is now difficult to find a senior Republican that thinks Palin will jump into the ring for 2012. Perhaps everyone is wrong, but Palin’s nowhere to be found in Iowa and New Hampshire, and most of her public appearances are by satellite studio from Alaska, on Twitter, or at paid speeches. Instead of talking politics in the superb Indian restaurant in Iowa City, Palin is flying to the Indian subcontinent to give a lecture. More foreign policy experience is good for her, but not at the expense of stateside campaigning.

She's not playing the conventional game. The last candidate who didn't play the conventional game? He's now president.

Why are interest rates not higher given the massive public borrowing going on? A good question.

National Review wants "a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone" around "the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi to prevent Qaddafi’s armored vehicles from entering the city. " Douthat counters:

[T]he lesson of Iraq isn’t that we can’t execute a tactically-successful military intervention. It’s that even the greatest power in the world needs to think long and hard about what happens after the intervention. And National Review’s preferred course promises a very, very long “after” for America in Libya.