Month: March 2012

Scarborough Retreats

He scorned my Newsweek cover-essay on "How Obama Set a Contraception Trap for the Right" when I argued that the contraception contretemps would be the first wedge issue that would backfire on the GOP, especially after Obama's final compromise. Scarborough thought it would hurt the president. Now he thinks that the Republican over-reach on the issue has been brutally bad for them.

Here's where he got things wrong, I think. He didn't realize how deeply these sexual issues motivate the Christianist base. He forgot that these people would not relent:

"It was so obvious what they were gonna do!" Scarborough exclaimed. "They just weren't smart enough to pull back when they should've pulled back, and now the president is killing them in the polls." "This has been going on for a month," he continued. "I swear, what is wrong with these people?"

That is a question Joe might have asked a few years ago. You cannot ask religious fanatics to become restrained and canny overnight. And those in the GOP in denial about their fusion with fundamentalism need to wake up.

To See What Is In Front Of One’s Nose …

Sometimes, what Washington takes as so routine is what is worth looking at again:

"The ritual of the AIPAC speech really is something. I am trying to think of a parallel for the first part of this address, in which Obama explained that he was really, truly Israel's friend … It's the expectation of the apologia that is remarkable. I can't think of another situation where an American president, speaking to an American audience on American soil, would find it necessary or dignified to plead his bona fides in a similar way.  (About England? Italy? Canada? Mexico?)

I recognize the uniqueness of Israel's history and the importance of "trust" in a president's word and intent. But the oddity of the AIPAC ritual is worth noting, and not in a good way."

The Big Lies Of Mitt Romney I: “No Military Options On The Table With Iran”

It's probably time to start the series. Here's what Romney said yesterday:

"This is a president who has failed …  to communicate that military options are on the table and in fact in our hand. And that it’s unacceptable to America for Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

These are two bald-faced lies. Here is what Obama said just last week to Goldblog:

In the conversations I've had over the course of three years, and over the course of the last three months and three weeks, what I've emphasized is that preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn't just in the interest of Israel, it is profoundly in the security interests of the United States, and that when I say we're not taking any option off the table, we mean it …  I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.

Nothing the president said to Jeffrey he has not said before. But he was more explicit than ever. That Romney simply invents positions that Obama has not held and does not hold is nothing new. He lies.

The Establishment Strikes Back

On the heels of Romney's endorsements from Tom Coburn and Eric Cantor this weekend, Bernstein argues that reports of the GOP establishment's demise have been greatly exaggerated:

Romney's nomination is quite comparable to the nominations of Kerry in 2004, Dole in 1996, and Dukakis in 1988, and a lot more certain a lot earlier than that of McCain last time around. That seems to very much fit a model in which party actors compete and coordinate on nominations and voters in primaries and caucuses ratify it, rather than a model in which candidates compete in a weak party environment and voters in primaries and caucuses determine the nomination. Yes, there's been momentum and press effects and other stuff that has produced a few oddball primary and caucus results, but none of that has really, as far as I can see, done as much to shape the contest as has decisions by party actors. In particular, the party's apparent lack of interest in Rick Santorum, seen through a lack of high-profile endorsements after Iowa and again after Colorado and Minnesota, appear to have been far more predictive than Santorum's strong showing in those states.

Hewitt Award Nominee

"[Obama] has encouraged Arab street revolts against corrupt autocracies. Long-standing American allies, such as former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, were abandoned. Yet, contrary to his simplistic narrative of freedom fighters battling tyranny, Mr. Obama has helped pave the way for the triumph of Shariah democracy – the drive to establish a global Islamic caliphate. At his core, Mr. Obama is a radical secular progressive. Like all multiculturalists, he believes in one seminal myth: Mass poverty and oppression in the Third World is America’s fault. Hence, he champions anti-colonial 'liberation movements' – the uprisings of repressed peoples, especially those in the Muslim world, chafing under authoritarian rule. Yet he never bothers to ask: What comes next? What kind of regime replaces the previous one? The results are often even worse," – Jeffrey T. Kuhner, The Washington Times.

The movement on the right from celebrating Arab democracy under Bush to fearing it under Obama is a real shift. It reveals the shallow veneer of neoconservatism's defense of Arab democracy when compared with its deep attachment to Greater Israel.

Bunny Ears Get An Upgrade

An innovative product launching later this month in NYC: 

Christina Warren has high hopes for Aereo:

Just as Netflix has forced cable networks and service providers to adopt a more expansive TV Everywhere approach to content, Aereo could help force the same sort of disruption in the broadcast space.

Unsurprisingly, the broadcasters are suing. Timothy B. Lee sizes up the lawsuits and gets the opinion of Jimes Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at New York Law School:

Grimmelmann told us that the case is likely to hinge on a 2008 ruling that is emerging as a legal foundation for a number of innovative new business models. In that case, a federal appeals court ruled that Cablevision did not infringe copyright when it created a "remote DVR" system in which the physical DVR hardware was located in a Cablevision server room rather than the customer's living room.

Cablevision argued that it wasn't vulnerable to copyright infringement claims because the user, not Cablevision, was ultimately in control of which programs were recorded and played back using the system. The court agreed, and its reasoning depended on the fact that Cablevision stored a separate physical copy of a program for each user who requested it, rather than storing a single copy and streaming that copy to every user.

(Full disclosure: IAC, which employs the Dish, has invested in Aereo)