Josh Marshall’s thinks money has played a major role:
The word has clearly gone out that if you want to fund a Senate campaign in the Democratic Party, you have to get right on Marriage Equality. Period. If you’re not, the funder class just will not be there for you, not to mention the grassroots Dems who give their $50 and $100 checks. Again, I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. But if you’re looking to understand the avalanche that is a big part of what’s driving it.
McArdle wonders what Obama hopes to accomplish with his new budget, which leaked last week and will be officially released this week:
It’s unusual for a budget to leak so far ahead of its actual release. The administration is clearly trying to seize the initiative, getting a few days of talk about their budget while the Republicans, who don’t have the actual budget yet, are unable to mount a real attack on it. But it’s not clear to what end he is fighting. Winning the budget messaging war is not going to get us a sound budget, and probably not going to open up much movement on the rest of his policy agenda. The president is defending his flanks while the advance grinds to a halt.
Mainly this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious. On the one hand, this strikes me as completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it might actually work! BipartisanThinkers like Ron Fournier (“a gutsy change in strategy”) and Joe Scarborough (“Now THIS is a real budget … exciting”) are gushing with praise.
In conversations with the president’s key advisors and the President himself over the last three years one point that has always come out to me very clearly is that the President really believes in the importance of the Grand Bargain. He thinks it’s an important goal purely on its own terms. That’s something I don’t think a lot of his diehard supporters fully grasp. He thinks it’s important in longrange fiscal terms (and there’s some reality to that). But he always believes it’s important for the country and even for the Democratic party to have a big global agreement that settles the big fiscal policy for a generation and let’s the country get on to other issues — social and cultural issues, the environment, building the economy etc.
Drum’s notes that Obama’s budget “sounds as if it mostly embodies the president’s sequester-replacement plan that’s been on offer for the past two months”:
This will be an interesting test of the theory that one of the things preventing a deal has been simple Republican ignorance of what Obama has offered. Once these things are in the official budget, there’s simply no way to ignore them. They’ll get a ton of coverage—including massive outrage from the liberal base—and there will be enough detail that even Bill O’Reilly should be satisfied that Obama is offering a “real plan.” The fact that Obama is proposing serious cuts in entitlements will finally be impossible to ignore.
Peter Orzag puts Obama’s chained CPI proposal, which would reduce future increases in Social Security payments, in perspective :
President Barack Obama deserves credit for political courage in being willing to adopt the chained CPI — in the face of strong opposition from members of his party. But if switching to the chained index reduces the 10-year deficit by less than $150 billion and the 75-year Social Security actuarial gap by less than 10 percent, can a “grand bargain” built around it really be all that grand? And if it reduces benefits for an 85- year-old retiree by less than 2 percent, is it really so destructive?
And Collender expects the budget to have very little impact:
The reality is that the Obama 2014 budget has already been declared dead on arrival by the House GOP leadership. Minutes after the first leaks appeared last week about the Obama budget proposing to change in the way the CPI is calculated so that payments to Social Security recipients would be lowered, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) denounced both the chained CPI proposal and the administration’s efforts to tie that change to additional revenues. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) then repeated the denunciation on CNBC later in the week.
Thatcher’s role in advancing the spread of free-market ideas to other policymakers was crucial. To explain why free-market capitalism became the pre-eminent idea in economic policymaking over the past few decades, you have to look at Thatcher. She preceded Reagan, becoming the first leader in the developed world to try to change her country’s variety of capitalism. Even after Reagan came to power, one could persuasively argue that Thatcher mattered more. As some international political economy scholars have noted, ideas and policies spread much faster when “supporter states” embrace them vigorously rather than reluctantly. Thatcher embraced capitalism with a near-religious fervor, acting as a vanguard for the rest of Europe on this front.
Just compare the real per-person GDP performance of the UK economy versus the French economy. One nation in 1979 started to again embrace markets, the other did not. Brits went from being 10% poorer than Frenchmen to being 10% richer.
Damian Thompson of The Telegraphcalls Thatcher the “the greatest politician of her generation”:
As her aide Ferdinand Mount once said of her – and he was by no means blind to her faults – she made Britons believe that things were possible: that we could revive ourselves through a sheer act of will and by blocking our ears to the enemies of progress. The intensity of the hatred she inspired was, paradoxically, a tribute to her. No one who changes the way a country works, to put it bluntly, can do so without implementing policies that hurt people. She knew that, and regretted it, for she was a kind lady. But Britain is enormously in her debt.
Anne Perkins of The Guardian, on the other hand,criticizes Thatcher’s policies:
While seeking to limit the scope of government, she introduced a style of command and control, top-down, centralised authority that has proved hard for her successors to resist. It has leaked into the way political parties are managed, so that they struggle to regenerate a spirit of local activism. Institutions of civil society from the churches to the trade unions have suffered from the decline of collective enterprise in the public esteem.
When Ronald Reagan died, American politics and memory had already sanctified him; many people flying into Washington for the funeral arrived at Ronald Reagan International Airport. The debate over Thatcher’s legacy of privatization looks, from the American perspective, to be pretty well over and won. But we’ve never had a national health service and we broke the power of our unions 60-odd years ago, and only briefly did we have as high a top tax rate as the U.K. in 1979, so the comparison’s never going to make sense here. At some point today I expect there’ll be a statement from a former Alaska governor about how much Thatcher meant, but we can probably ignore that.
[T]he Tories haven’t gone mad and made Thatcher look like a milquetoast moderate. In this sense her legacy has been more durable than Reagan’s. She re-centered British politics to a place where it’s more or less stayed, while today’s American right has completely left Reagan in the dust.
The Spectator rounded-up some choice Thatcher quotes here.
There has been a lot of death these last few days, and I’m gathering my thoughts. But for the time being, here’s an elegant, brief video capturing Margaret Thatcher’s remarkable life and career.
Nathan Bransford thinks they will soon be reality:
The screen will be in front of our eyes. We’ll blink to or wave our hands or just think about the page turning or it will just know somehow and it will turn. And let me tell you this: I, for one, welcome our coming hands-free-books overlords. Yes yes, the turning of the pages. Yes, the tactile experience of holding something in your hands as you’re reading.
Me? I’ll be sprawled out on a hammock or easily riding a subway or sweeping my floors or tripping over the sidewalks trying to read and walk down the street. Who knows! I just know I’ll be able to read more if I don’t have to have something in my hands to do it.
In his new book, Deserter, Charles Glass focuses on the AWOL soldiers of WWII:
The British gave deserters an amnesty in 1953, but America never has. Theoretically, deserters who are still missing are still wanted. I was keen to do some comparisons of second-world-war desertion rates with Iraq and Afghanistan but the Ministry of Defence won’t tell me, or anyone else, how many deserters there are. From that point of view it is still taboo.
In his review, Neal Ascherson looks at the punishments doled out for deserting:
In the first world war, the British shot 304 men for desertion or cowardice, only gradually accepting the notion of “shell-shock”. In the United States, by contrast, President Woodrow Wilson commuted all such death sentences. In the second world war, the British government stood up to generals who wanted to bring back the firing squad (the Labour government in 1930 had abolished the death penalty for desertion). Cunningly, the War Office suggested that restoration might suggest to the enemy that morale in the armed forces was failing. President Roosevelt, on the other hand, was persuaded in 1943 to suspend “limitations of punishment”. In the event, the Americans shot only one deserter, the luckless Private Eddie Slovik, executed in France in January 1945. He was an ex-con who had never even been near the front. Slovik quit when his unit was ordered into action, calculating that a familiar penitentiary cell would be more comfortable than being shot at in a rainy foxhole.
His fate was truly unfair, set against the bigger picture. According to Glass, “nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces” during the war.
In the movies and on TV, it just takes a few pushes on the chest and, voilà! The victims cough a few times and they’re back to their old selves. Doctors understand that this is rarely the case. When CPR “works,” a more likely scenario is that the person ends up in the hospital receiving even more interventions and suffering from some kind of brain damage, [George Lundberg, editor at large for MedPage Today] says. … Even in the very best case scenarios, only about half of victims survive to be discharged from the hospital — and that’s when CPR is enhanced with advanced technology (AEDs) and highly trained personnel at the ready. Most importantly, those success rates happen only when CPR is given to the victims the technique was intended for — people experiencing sudden cardiac arrest.
This weekend on the Dish, we provided our usual eclectic mix of religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Gary Gutting urged us to put love first, Wesley Hill contemplated the crucified God, and Matthew Sitman defended Christian Wiman’s new religious memoir. Damon Linker considered the theocons’s case against same-sex marriage, Scott Galupo analyzed the compartmentalization of the fundamentalist mind, and Andrew Cohen revisited a brilliant essay on God and evolution. Lauren Winner realized doubt is essential to the religious life, The Economistmused on the footwear of the faithful, and Rachel Johnson paid a visit to a kibbutz she spent time at in her youth. We also featured a video series from John Corvino about the morality of homosexuality, including what the Bible really says about the matter, here and here, while Marc Ambinder reminded us of the tragic lives that still await many gay teenagers. In the latest installment of The Mind Report, Charles Randy Gallistel made the case that we don’t really know how memories are stored.
In literary and arts coverage, Elizabeth Wurtzel pondered the fate of the rock star, Michael Leary unpacked Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, and Christina Pugh argued for the conservatism of poetry. Michael Kimmage found Philip Roth to be the last of a dying breed, Justin Ellis applauded the NYT’s serendipitous poetry, and Doug Allen explained his minimal social media presence. Rodney Welch read a mediocre play by Nabokov, Patrick Feaster found a way to recover the audio of old records, and Alexander Huls described the profound impact of the special effects developed for Jurassic Park. Read Saturday’s poem here and Sunday’s here.
In assorted news and views, Emily Urquhart chronicled her daughter’s albinism diagnosis, Joseph Stromberg provided the science behind the smell of rain, and women proved to be thought the hornier sex for much of history. Rose Surnow profiled a novel approach to matchmaking, Colin Lecher examined your sense of smell’s role in dating, and the demand for American sperm increased. William Breathes reviewed pot dispensaries in Colorado, Seth Masket wondered where the Youtube politicians were, Bijan Stephens was pessimistic about his post-Yale job prospects, and Josh Horgan thought the social sciences are still struggling to find their place in the shadow of the hard sciences. MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.
The Dish 
