Month: April 2011

When you're too extreme for Michele Bachmann, it may be time for a different strategy.

In an article on Redstate, Ms. Bachmann concludes that “the current battle has devolved to an agenda that is almost too limited to warrant the kind of fighting that we’re now seeing in Washington.” Likewise, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and a possible presidential candidate, said Friday afternoon in an interview that a shutdown would “hurt the Republicans, not the Democrats.”

Of course, I agree. And to shut down the government over a difference of a billion dollars and Planned Parenthood makes the GOP look deranged. They're taking pay from the troops just to make a point about abortion? The backlash among independents could be severe.

Akwaeke Z. Emezi comes out:

Everyone I'd been involved with deeply wanted monogamy, and they seemed to be part of an overwhelming majority. I didn't want to not be able to give that to them, but eventually I reached a point where I had to put my foot down, throw my hands up and say — I don't want to be monogamous. Never have. Ever. Ever. Just admitting that was step one, and step two meant that I had to get vocal about it from the jump, so that I wouldn't end up dating monogamous people and mislead us both about what was possible.

A reader writes:

I think perhaps more important than Hamas firing a missile at a school bus is that yesterday was the first actual deployment of Israel's home-grown missile defense system, the Iron Dome.  Obviously some of what we're reading in the papers is propaganda, but it appears that to some degree the thing actually worked.  While it will not be effective in disabling the short-range attacks, it could be huge when Hezbollah decides to launch more sophisticated weapons from southern Lebanon (I'm presuming Hezbollah isn't stockpiling weapons for show).

More info on the Iron Dome here. The system intercepted three rockets launched at Ashkelon today. But Noah Pollak is skeptical:

Israel's missile defense uses $50,000 rockets to shoot down $100 rockets. When u look up "unsustainable" in dictionary, it says "Iron Dome."

OMB Watch has a list (pdf) of the policy riders in H.R. 1. These are additional policies attached to the GOP's bill to avert a government shutdown. Eli Lehrer reads the list and finds that the abortion language – which is getting the most attention – isn't necessarily the biggest hurdle: 

The proposed healthcare policy riders are so broad that if implemented, they would amount to an outright repeal of the healthcare bill. They offer so little wiggle-room that President Obama can’t, as a political mater, agree to even a single one of them as written.

Furthermore:

[T]he much longer list of environment-related riders looks like it was written almost entirely by specific industry lobbyists who have good relationships with certain members of Congress. Although there are some very broad efforts that would end virtually every climate-change or carbon-regulation program in the government, most of the environmental efforts are very narrow and, one assumes, serve a very few interests.

Politico says the EPA riders have been axed. Jay Newton-Small summarizes the Democrats' talking points:

Reid was asked by CNN's Brianna Keilar if he'd offered Boehner more money to drop the Title X rider. He said he had, but that Boehner had turned him down. This surprises me as I've always been under the impression that Boehner was using the policy riders as leverage for more cuts — that he never really expected to move the needle on abortion, climate change or health care reform. The brouhaha over the riders must be taken with a grain of salt as it behooves Dems to portray Boehner as obsessed with "extreme" riders rather than negotiating in good faith on funding the government.

Ezra Klein breaks down Planned Parenthood's spending:

As you can see in the chart atop this post, abortion services account for about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s activities. That’s less than cancer screening and prevention (16 percent), STD testing for both men and women (35 percent), and contraception (also 35 percent). About 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s users are over age 20, and 75 percent have incomes below 150 percent of the poverty line. Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. It’s also worth noting that federal law already forbids Planned Parenthood from using the funds it receives from the government for abortions.

(Chart from (pdf) Planned Parenthood)

Ross Douthat is disheartened by the news from Libya:

I find it extraordinarily unlikely that American ground troops will ever enter Libya. But unless France and Britain rush in where President Obama obviously fears to tread, we seem to be headed for exactly the situation I feared at the beginning — in which Qaddafi is bloodied but still dangerous, and NATO is stuck safeguarding an East Libyan protectorate more or less indefinitely.

My feelings entirely. Notice how this not-war has completely dropped out of the press? Just another imperial obligation, without an actual empire to make sense of it.

A reader writes:

Thought you might get a kick out of this recent Facebook message.

Esther reference? Check.
Obligatory socialism refutation? Check.
Little starbursts? Check, check, check.

Yep, she's not over yet. Screenshot after the jump:

Jason Kottke unearths a fake TLC promo. Fucking genius: 

Aaron Carroll wants a policy win for the country rather than a political win for the Dems:

[Democrats need to] answer [Paul Ryan's] ideas with their own. If they hold merit, then a real debate can take place, and America can decide how best to improve our long term deficit.

If, however, opponents take the opportunity merely to attack and demonize without countering with their own plans, then we will lose a valuable chance to use debate and compromise to achieve an optimal solution. Some believe that the Republicans passed up such an opportunity with health care reform. Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make the same mistake. They may win a political battle, but America could lose the policy war.

Some disturbing news out of Afghanistan:

"Black sites," the secret network of jails that grew up after the Sept. 11 attacks, are gone. But suspected terrorists are still being held under hazy circumstances with uncertain rights in secret, military-run jails across Afghanistan, where they can be interrogated for weeks without charge, according to U.S. officials who revealed details of the top-secret network to The Associated Press…

Human rights advocates say the severest of the Bush-era interrogation methods are gone, but the conditions at the new interrogation sites still raise questions.

Obama pledged when he took office that the United States would not torture anyone, but former detainees describe harsh treatment that some human rights groups claim borders on inhumane. More than a dozen former detainees claimed they were menaced and held for weeks at the Joint Special Operations Command site last year, forced to strip naked, then kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day, according to Daphne Eviatar of the group Human Rights First, which interviewed them in Afghanistan.

Eviatar said her monitoring group does not believe the JSOC facility is using the full range of Bush-era interrogation techniques, but she said there's a disturbing pattern of using fear and humiliation to soften up the suspects before interrogation.

This is not a return to the Cheney era. But forced nudity is something the president regards as a form of abuse and needs to be stopped. Petraeus has recognized the problem. But JSOC seems all but untouchable at times. For more, here's Ackerman.