Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ezra Klein thinks there is a silver lining for health care proponents in this ruling:

The real danger to health-care reform is not that the individual mandate will be struck down by the courts. That'd be a problem, but there are a variety of ways to restructure the individual mandate such that it doesn't penalize anyone for deciding not to do something (which is the core of the conservative's legal argument against the provision). Here's one suggestion from Paul Starr, for instance. The danger is that, in striking down the individual mandate, the court would also strike down the rest of the bill. In fact, that's exactly what the plaintiff has asked Hudson to do.

Hudson pointedly refused. 

Clay Shirky heralds it:

[Nick] Carr … pointed out that Google news showed 11,264 separate outlets for the Somali pirate story in 2009, almost all of them re-running the same couple of stories. (I was similarly surprised, last year, to discover that syndicated content outweighed locally created content in my old hometown paper by a 2:1 margin.)

The idea that syndication should be different in a digital era has been around for a while now. Jeff Jarvis’s formulation — “Do what you do best and link to the rest” — dates from 2007, and the AP started talking about about holding back some stories from subscribers in order to drive their PageRank up last year. What could make 2011 the year of general restructuring is Google’s attempt to give credit where credit is due, in the words of their blog post, by offering tags that identify original and preferred sources for syndicated stories.

(Hat tip: Alexis)

Chait wants Obama to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2012 and then rejigger taxes:

I do like the policy goal of broadening the tax base, eliminating favorable treatment for different kinds of income, and lowering the rates. However, the administration isn't going to be able to do this before the question of the Bush tax cuts is settled. A tax reform agreement is going to be premised on being revenue neutral (all or virtually all the proceeds of eliminating loopholes and credits will go toward lower rates) and being distributionally progressive or neutral (the rich will pay an equal or greater share of the tax base.)

The problem is, neither side agrees what base to start from. Republicans are going to want to base that off the status quo, with the Bush tax cuts in effect.

Why not just accept that as a starter and then have a second debate about the level of taxation as a whole? My own view is that targeting and attacking the long-term debt is the key to Obama's next two years. If he punts on debt for these reasons, the GOP will take credit for the tax deal and keep – however unfairly – outflanking him on fiscal conservatism.

Mickey pulls an impressive – and probably accurate – triple flip:

I'm not sure that Democrats who want to preserve the estate tax shouldn't secretly like the new Republican position of 35% after a $5 milllion exemption. That's low enough that it might actually stick–Republicans would have a hard time ginning up "double taxation" outrage at a 35% rate. A relatively high exemption would also minimize the need to engage in elaborate estate planning transactions to avoid the tax. All those lawyers and accountants and life insurance salesmen constitute a waste of social energy that extends way beyond a few thousand families and is surely the tax's greatest cost.

A reminder of Jesus’ actual radicalism, in contrast to Fox News pablum:

Defense spending critic Gordon Adams salivates:

[T]he White House is negotiating with DOD on a base defense budget number for FY 2012 which is below the number Secretary of Defense Bob Gates sought, when he wanted to hold the line at one percent real growth.   DOD officials are suggesting privately that the reality is starting to seep in.  Discipline is coming to defense and Secretary Gates' effort to hold the line is failing. And it will come in the framework of a broader effort at deficit reduction, one endorsed by a growing number of elected and former elected officials. … I predict that over the next two years the politics of deficit reduction will move center stage in Washington, DC and "everything will be on the table."

Yglesias tries to understand Andrew Exum's call for more localized good governance in Afghanistan:

A revealing double standard:

At this stage WikiLeaks has breached no international law and no laws of any country, but Mastercard, Visa and PayPal have all blacklisted it. Yet all three continue to enable the support of settlements that are in breach of international law, in some cases of Israeli law, and in defiance of US policy on settlements under successive Republican and Democrat administrations.

The Israeli far right goes there:

The Lehava organization issued a notice Sunday evening, inviting the public to call a voicemail service and record the names of Jewish Israelis renting apartments to Arabs. Lehava, identified with supporters of Meir Kahane, thus adds its weight to the recent call by 50 prominent rabbis to avoid renting to Arabs which, the organization says, amounts to no less than assimilation. According to the notice, the information given anonymously will be verified, after which the names will be published as a mark of disgrace "so the public can decide what to do with them."

In a response brimming with gratuitous hostility towards yours truly, Pejman Yousefzdeh nevertheless makes a few points worthy of response. I wrote that "several Democrats immediately supported [Bush's] massive tax cut – while no Republicans, in the wake of an Obama landslide – supported a desperately needed stimulus." I was thinking of the House vote, which attracted not a single Republican vote during what looked remarkably like the beginnings of a second Great Depression. Bush's tax cuts, on the other hand, got 28 Democratic votes in the House – with no economic crisis at hand and after the president was inaugurated with fewer votes than his opponent. Yes, in the Senate, "Arlen Specter (while a Republican), Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins all supported the stimulus." And one has already been purged for it; and the other two hang by a thread. Furthermore:

[W]hen President Obama announced his Afghanistan policy–and got attacked for it by the Left – it was Republicans who came to his aid, and offered their full-throated support for the policy. Does this not count as a form of bipartisan cooperation initiated by the Republicans to assist a Democratic President?

Not really – since they were so already on the record behind both wars initiated by their own president that taking on Obama on this would have required taking on Bush. Pej goes on:

For that matter, has Sullivan forgotten that the very tax deal he celebrates this week with endless, meaningless, Baghdad Bob-ish, nauseating frequency, featuring one ludicrous “meep, meep” after another, is a tax deal that was crafted in negotiations with Republicans? That Republicans are supporting this deal, and are trying to save it–and the Obama Administration’s prestige–in the face of Democratic assaults so virulent that F-bombs have been thrown the White House’s way, and House Democrats have even stated that they will not bring the tax package for a vote? Why is all of this not equivalent to some Democrats supporting a Bush tax cut?

Pej has a point there. But the principle of low upper rate taxes is a Republican principle, and it is this for which the GOP fought. Lower taxes, in contrast, were definitely not a Democratic principle in 2000, when many, like Gore, urged that the surplus should go to shore up social security and pay down the debt. Pej goes on to argue that the ubiquitous Bush as Hitler smears during W.'s two terms are equivalent to the muck thrown at Obama, that cultural artifacts such as the image above prove the left's secessionist dreams, and that Vanity Fair's Bush Joker and Maclean's Bush Saddam are no better that Forbes' Obama with Stalin. My point is that the Bush-as-Hitler crap (which I decried at the time) did not start at the very beginning, but emerged after Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq, using torture as a method, adopting radical notions of executive power in a permanent wartime, and being responsible for an incompetently occupied country where hundreds of thousands were slaughtered. The high-level demonization of Obama began from the very start – with no real cause at all, except that he won an election easily.

But look: it's true that the left despised and demonized Bush. And I attacked them mercilessly for conflating him in any way with Saddam or al Qaeda and the like in a time of war. I stood up for the guy begging the left to give him a chance. 

But their complaints about legitimacy after Bush vs Gore were far more defensible, it seems to me, than the far right delusions about Obama's birth certificate. And after 9/11, there was huge support for the president by the vast majority of Democrats – something I encouraged (look at W's polling numbers in the winter of 2001 – and imagine anything like that for Obama since the Depression began.) I do not recall any major Democrat saying he hoped that Bush would fail in the war on terror, the way Limbaugh broadly hoped for the failure of Obama in the economic crisis. And the attempt to turn Obama into an un-American from the get-go was pre-meditated, and dabbling in dangerous racial waters.