Finally, it licks its chops at the thought of Karl Rove:
“Karl Rove should go into retirement where he belongs. The old machinery is broken, and new and much smarter blood is needed.”
So true. Pity Donald Trump and his birther madness is the reason someone finally said it.
Belbulak, Kazakhstan, 12 pm
Tyler Cowen weighs whether a massive conversion of low-income people to Mormonism would reduce poverty, since Utah's numbers are so low:
A viable policy, no, but a viable solution yes. Many of the costs of poverty are sociological rather than narrowly economic per se. In other words, many of the poor do not have what could be called Mormon lifestyles. This point holds all the more strongly in Latin America, where alcoholism is arguably a larger economic problem than in the United States. It is not uncommon for a rural village to have a male alcoholism rate of up to fifty percent.
A political conservative is more likely to make this point than to simply focus on the lack of money earned by the poor. A political liberal is more likely to assume that the rate of strict religiosity can rise only so high, and take that as a background constraint.
He concludes that "almost everyone ends up a little screwy and off-base on this issue, victims of the fallacy of mood affiliation."
"Which pledge is most important… the pledge to uphold your oath to the Constitution of the United States or a pledge from a special interest group who claims to speak for all American conservatives when, in fact, they really don't? The fact is we have enormous urgent problems in front of us that have to be addressed and have to be addressed in a way that will get 60 votes in the Senate… and something that the president will sign… Where's the compromise that will save our country?" – Senator Tom Coburn.
Coburn is emerging as one of, to me, the real heroes in this battle to, yes, save the country. He believes, as I do, that risking more months and years before we make the decisions that alone can save us from the risk of default or a new depression is too big a risk. He also believes that ruling any tax hikes out of consideration is simply a bizarre ideological response.
The Bush tax cuts were premised (falsely) on a large and growing surplus. I supported them as a way to prevent all that revenue being soaked up by the feds. But they were very quickly revealed as imprudent.
They were imprudent because the surplus wasn't real (it was largely a function of the tech bubble) and because the country was about to embark on two massively expensive global wars and a massive new domestic entitlement, Medicare D. They were only passed on the condition that if circumstances evolved which revealed them to be imprudent, they would be sunsetted by now.
Like Coburn, I think we have a golden opportunity to raise necessary revenues without hiking tax rates, if we do this through tax reform. Norquist responds not by substantively defending his draconian supply-side mess of a budget proposal, but by claiming Coburn had broken a no-tax-increase pledge in 2004. Yes: 2004.
I remain a fan of Coburn's in this, if not in social policy. The real fiscal conservative is not playing ideological games right now. He's seeking a politically viable compromise on spending and taxes in which both parties will need to take their lumps. I see no other practical way to avoid the iceberg ahead.
A reader writes:
The poll cited by Ben Smith never asked if the respondents thought Bush was "complicit" in the 9/11 attacks. It asked, "How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?" That's kind of a broad question, but it doesn't even mention Bush.
In any case, according to Smith, 22.6% of Democrats said "very likely" (another 28.2% called it "somewhat likely"). That's a far cry from the 45% of Republicans that give an unqualified "no" when asked if they think Obama was born in the US. And this, after incontrovertible proof has established that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.
Another writes:
We are are talking about roughly the same period of time when anthrax from a US Government Army Research Lab was mailed to various high-ranking politicians. According to the FBI, a government employee was 100% responsible. Given that the FBI, along with most Democrats and Republicans, believe that the federal government was responsible for this terrorist act, is it really so "insane" that roughly 50% of Democrats thought it was at least "somewhat likely" that it could've played a role in another?
Another:
I think many people felt, especially after the "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S." memo ruckus, that the administration was distracted at the wheel and therefore were passively complicit as opposed to directly, nefariously involved.
Another:
Ben Smith gives the impression that he is the first to reveal the details of this 2006 poll ("the University of Ohio yesterday shared with us the crosstabs"). However, this poll, including the crosstabs, has been commented on at length before – here for example. These articles demonstrate that although 50.8% of Democrats subscribed to some form of conspiracy theory regarding 9-11, the poll also showed that nearly a third of independents and nearly 20% of Republicans also believed in the 9-11 conspiracy theories. Unlike the birthers, the truther conspiracists were not exclusively Democrats. I also point out a recent article in Skeptic Magazine, "Who Still Believes in 9/11 Conspiracies? An Empirical Study on Political Affiliation and Conspiratorial Thinking" which concluded that truthers today are mostly right-wingers.
Finally, and really most importantly, truthers have always been the fringe of the fringe on the Democratic side. Truthers have been banned from Daily Kos since 2005. No reputable Democratic leader to my knowledge has ever given the slightest bit of credence to 9-11 conspiracy theorists. Obviously this is not true of the Republican party and birthers.
I particularly recommend Nate Silver's analysis on the difference betwen birthers and truthers.
After a campaign by gay rights groups, the law firm representing the Speaker in defending Section III of DOMA in the courts appears to be backing out of the case. Readers know I believe DOMA to be a shameful piece of legislation, and by making invidious, irrational distinctions between equally valid civil marriages in the states, violates the constitution. But I see no reason why the law should not be defended in court by those sincerely believing in it. Someone has to do it, as part of the legal and judicial process. Pressuring law firms not to is, it seems to me, an ugly way to go about making our case.
Everyone deserves a lawyer; and every lawyer deserves to be treated as a professional, not as a partisan. The campaigns to target lawyers for Gitmo detainees, for example, were, to my mind, attacks on the judicial system. Ditto this, to a lesser extent. Why would we not want DOMA to get the best defense and still fail? Isn’t that easily preferable to hounding law firms to drop cases?
Macy Halford takes pleasure from this side of the pond:
The British royal wedding might be the last great bastion of (non-religious) kitsch in the English-speaking world. Remember our own recent royal wedding, and how speculation and emotionalism about the event were discouraged up to the very day of the occasion? Only afterward, when the official photographs had been released, were we allowed a glimpse into paradise, allowed to imagine Marc and Chelsea living out our dreams at their respective investment funds (or not). Well, you see the problem: American lives are not very romantic.
I am in a defensive and slightly bored mode this week. I will not be getting up at 4 am.
Lloyd Grove reads the tea leaves for 2012:
[A]lthough he is, by many measures, a successful politician, he’s governor of a tiny state (population: 2.9 million) that ranks last in such indices as median household income, academic achievement, and health care; and first in obesity, infant mortality, teen birthrate, and sexually transmitted diseases; and boasts a troubled and violent racial history that still shapes its identity.
And Barbour reinforces all the reasons the GOP has alienated so many independents: an anti-government party also up to its neck in corporate lobbyists; and a party so regionally fixated it is close to becoming a cultural, identity-politics ghetto rather than a national party offering national policy proposals. Barbour simply isn't presidential material. And at this rate, the GOP debates will be the worst advertizing and branding the party will get since … Bobby Jindal responded to Barack Obama.
(Photo: Republican Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi speaks during the final day of the American Conservative Union's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) February 12, 2011 in Washington, DC. By Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
David Shulman sifts through the wreckage after Goldstone’s partial retraction:
The government spokesmen clearly, perhaps deliberately, miss the point.
Goldstone’s statement in The Washington Post by no means exonerates Israel’s conduct in Operation Cast Lead. Rather, Goldstone’s statement rectifies the egregious failure of the Goldstone report to clearly condemn Hamas for its crimes leading up to and during the conflict, and expresses some satisfaction with the Israeli army’s own investigations into at least some of the alleged cases of war crimes. Perhaps most important, Goldstone unequivocally states that “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.” I am sure that this last statement is correct; anyone who knows the Israeli army knows that, for all its faults and failings, it does not have a policy of deliberately targeting innocent civilians. Suggestions to the contrary are simply wrong.
But serious questions remain about Israel’s Gaza war; Goldstone’s recent statement does nothing to dispel them, nor, I would guess, did he intend to do so. (The other three members of the original Goldstone committee have meanwhile reaffirmed its original findings.) I want to touch on three such issues: the intensity of fire and the official and unofficial “rules of engagement”; the overall planning and strategy of Operation Cast Lead; and the wider context within which the operation took place. Sober consideration of these themes reveals, in my view, systemic moral failure on several interlocking levels.
"WikiLeaks has generated more newsworthy scoops over the last year than all media outlets combined," – Glenn Greenwald.
Can anyone gainsay him? Today's catalog of the Gitmo nightmare is just the latest. And yet the MSM still feels the need to to distance itself from the data within, even as it uses it. Why?
The Dish 