Month: May 2011

"You take away the money from Israel? No. That’s something we can’t do. Do I like foreign aid? Sometimes, but not every time. Don’t like giving money to our enemies, but I love giving money to Israel. And so there’s a picture there that people realize that, we stop helping Israel, we lose God’s hand and we’re in big time trouble," – Congressman Dan Webster (R-FL).

Gallup's latest:

So Huckabee's withdrawal has largely benefited Palin. Weigel is shocked by Herman Cain's numbers:

Cain has come out of the gate making knowledge blunders (not knowing what the "right of return" is, for example), getting generally dismissive coverage. There is no team of reporters covering his every move on the trail, as there is for Huntsman. There's no massive scrum outside his appearances, as there is for Pawlenty. And yet he's outpolling Pawlenty.

Weigel can't quite cop to the fact that he has misread Palin's strength. This poll, moreover, was conducted before yesterday's flurry of signs that Palin is actually running. Notice that Palin has three times Bachmann's support and is within the margin of error next to the front-runner.

In this poll, it's a Palin-Romney race. Which would make the primary battle a struggle between the clueless and the shameless.

Congress will do nothing about it, but it's clear now that the president is in clear violation of the War Powers Resolution, and will be for the foreseeable future. It's worth recalling that the reason for the division of war-authority between legislative and executive reaches to what was the core of the American project: preventing the emergence of a king rather than a president. If a president could go to war whenever he wanted for as long as he wanted, the potential for abuse of power was immense. That has only deepened after the dictatorial precedent of the Bush administration. If a president can alone launch a war, alone determine who is an enemy combatant, and is empowered to do anything at home or abroad to fight that war, including seizing citizens on false charges and torturing them (as in the case of Jose Padilla), then we really do have a version of tyranny, and one far more pernicious than an individual healthcare mandate.

But nothing will happen. And some of the legislative ideas being bandied around are really odd:

Among those critical of the administration’s move, there was no clear consensus on how to react. Representative Chris Gibson, Republican of New York, proposed an overhaul of the war powers act that would prohibit presidents from using money to deploy the military into hostilities without prior permission from Congress, except in the case of an imminent attack on the United States or Israel or because of a treaty obligation.

The defense of Israel is now on a par with the the defense of the US?

Katie Roiphe unpacks the term:

Since our bigotries are less openly and exuberantly expressed than they were in past decades, they take refuge in subtle, shifting word choices. Love child is definitely more friendly or tactful than the more Shakespearean bastard but it nonetheless cloaks a certain discomfort with the facts. Love child is both tolerant (that is, more tolerant than other terms) and mocking; it contains within it our contradictions; it passes judgment in an ironic way—indirectly, playfully, but also plainly.

In my view, this euphemism is so non-judgmental it's judgmental.

Obama's insistence on a two-state solution may be prompting donor flight:

Billionaire financier Haim Saban told CNBC last night that Obama hasn’t done enough to show support for Israel. He also said that he has no plans to contribute to the president’s campaign …

There have been reports that Obama is losing Jewish support after his clash with Prime Minister Netanyahu last week, but this development is the most significant so far. If a key donor like Saban has decided to break with the president, then there are likely others who will follow suit.

Steve Rosen, director of the Washington office of the Middle East Forum, and a former AIPAC official, said that this is part of a trend of Democrats rejecting Obama’s policy toward Israel. “It’s not happening in isolation. It’s happening in a context in which Harry Reid broke with the president in the last two days,” Rosen told me. “I think that Saban is another step in that direction.”

"In this situation, they’re almost tone-deaf. I mean, you stop and think about it, your press office should be recognizing that the visuals that Americans are seeing is of this devastation. Don’t put a visual of the president up playing ping-pong. It’s awful. … [T]he perception is that the president is detached. He’s more concerned about raising a toast to the Queen. People have died," – former FEMA chief Michael Brown, on the Joplin tornado.

Take a look around from what looks like the realtor's pitch:

The financing illuminates some of the mess in the mortgage industry:

Let's recall the math on Ms. Palin's purchase: Whitmore buys the short sale from JPMorgan in March 2010 for $805,000. He then flips it just about one year later to Ms. Palin for… $1,750,000. A profit of 118%. Surely, this transaction should set off dozens of "suspicious" red flags at JP Morgan.

Ironically, Palin, who in this case is completely innocent of any wrongdoing, may have tripped the alarm switch on a trick that is being used by mortgage "investors" across the country (with who knows what sources of capital – arguably money from the likes of… JPM?), which are buying up wholesale REOs only to flip them to end buyers at up to 100% profits shortly thereafter.

To make sure I'm not misunderstood, let me put it in my own words: Palin is completely innocent of any wrongdoing. It's just an interesting take on the housing market.

Charles Simic laments:

I heard some politician say recently that closing libraries is no big deal, since the kids now have the Internet to do their reading and school work. It’s not the same thing. As any teacher who recalls the time when students still went to libraries and read books could tell him, study and reflection come more naturally to someone bent over a book. Seeing others, too, absorbed in their reading, holding up or pressing down on different-looking books, some intimidating in their appearance, others inviting, makes one a participant in one of the oldest and most noble human activities.

Yes, reading books is a slow, time-consuming, and often tedious process. In comparison, surfing the Internet is a quick, distracting activity in which one searches for a specific subject, finds it, and then reads about it—often by skipping a great deal of material and absorbing only pertinent fragments. Books require patience, sustained attention to what is on the page, and frequent rest periods for reverie, so that the meaning of what we are reading settles in and makes its full impact.