Author: Andrew Sullivan

Morgan Clendaniel examines Proverbial Wallets, a new project from the MIT Media Lab:

The Bluetooth equipped wallets physically transform depending on your current financial situation: The Bumblebee buzzes every time your bank account updates. The Peacock inflates or deflates depending on your total assets. The Mother Bear … has a hinge that makes it harder to open if you are approaching monthly budgets.

Ezra Klein thinks that the pay-roll tax cut holiday will be extended in a year's time. Drum doesn't. His main reason:

Republicans don't care about middle class taxes. They care about taxes on the rich. I don't doubt for a second that they'll make some noise a year from now about how Democrats are increasing your taxes, but their hearts won't be in it. They'll fight to the death over taxes on millionaires, but when it comes to payroll taxes it will just be pro forma partisan kvetching.

Frum differs.

TNC reacts to a first degree murder verdict for a 15-year-old. Derrion Albert was part of a group who beat another kid to death:

My sense of this is that most kids would like to walk to school in peace, but somewhere around fifth grade or so, the corruption reaches out and taints them. … Your first forays into direct violence may be only defensive or retaliatory, but this quickly spirals into offensive violence, so as to burnish your rep. The hood is a galaxy of competing powers, and to be born there is to be drafted into your nation's Army. To spend time lamenting your citizenship, to be less then zealous in defense of your country, is to be unpatriotic, to invite charges of treason, with predictable penalties. And even this formulation makes it all sound too neat, too rational. We are, after all, ultimately talking about children, and thus people vulnerable to the worst impulses.

Palin's op-ed in today's WSJ bashes the fiscal commission report by invoking "death panel" nonsense and by defending  military spending. But then there's this:

In my view, a better plan is the Roadmap for America's Future produced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wisc.). The Roadmap offers a reliable path to long-term solvency for our entitlement programs, and it does so by encouraging personal responsibility and independence.

Allahpundit games this out:

Does this mean a Palin/Ryan ticket is officially on the table? And two: If she’s nominated, what’s going to happen to the all-important senior vote in the general election once Democrats start clubbing her over the head with this? I admire her guts in backing it, but it’s not a pure asset for a candidacy. Just ask McConnell and Boehner.

Andrew Sprung hopes – as the Dish does – for a bipartisan tax reform deal. The stars are aligning:

Who would have thought a month ago that the deficit commission could knead its initial plan outline into a shape that would garner 11 out of 18 votes, and that Obama and the Republicans leadership could agree on a package that yields substantial real stimulus to balance the giveway to the rich? 

Andrew Exum is traveling through Afghanistan. He sees reason for hope but lodges this criticism: 

We have two "Achilles heels" in the current strategy: Afghan governance and insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan.

What these two weaknesses have in common is their combined effect on the ability of insurgent ranks, which have been decimated this year, to regenerate either through sanctuaries (to include external support) or by exploiting grievances caused by bad governance. I'm going to be honest and say that I do not see a coherent or otherwise effective strategy for dealing with the sanctuaries in Pakistan. I do not see it anywhere in the U.S. government or within NATO, whose writ only extends to the borders of Afghanistan anyway. With respect to governance, I have seen some isolated rays of hope at the local level, but it is easy to see how, as long as Afghans consider their country the third most corrupt country on Earth and look elsewhere for the rule of law, insurgents will continue to recruit and recover their losses.

A reader writes:

I wonder if the biggest benefit for Obama of the tax cut deal, assuming it gets passed more or less intact, won't end up being that it frees the Republican party to spend the next two years tearing itself apart.

Think about it: up until this point virtually the only thing that all Republican factions – libertarians, political operatives, business lobbyists, theocrats, neocons - have agreed on is extending the Bush tax cuts. Repealing health care reform may be a close second – but even there, the party's Congressional leadership has shown a remarkably consistent propensity to hedge on what they may actually do. They, like everyone else, have seen the polls saying that most specific elements of the ACA are strongly supported by the public. Deregulation of all kinds may be third, but there too the specifics are generally much less popular than the concept. And the Tea Party wing hates Wall Street. Do Republicans really want to spend 2011 repealing Dodd-Frank?

Beyond those issues, there looks to be nothing but minefields.

Defense spending … Medicare spending … Social Security … abortion … stem cells … Afghanistan … it's hard to think of an issue where a strong legislative push won't wind up with Republicans either tearing themselves apart, or leaving themselves open to effective Democratic counterattacks. A solid victory on taxes in the first months of 2011 might have given them some unifying juice to last the next 23 months – but now that's been taken away from them. Instead we may spend the next two years watching the surfacing and metastasis of thirty years of underlying divisions in the Republican coalition. All thanks to a shrewd bit of appeasement by Obama, which also bought him some progress on liberal priorities and a healthy stimulus as a bonus.

Pejman Yousefzadeh pushes back against this post:

The mere fact that Republicans are negotiating with the Obama Administration over legislation does not mean that critiques against the Administration are somehow invalidated. You weren’t making this claim about the supposed invalidity of Democratic critiques of George W. Bush when Democrats were negotiating with him over legislation, were you?

Wrong on both counts.

No one on the left doubted George W. Bush's cultural or biographical legitimacy as president. In the first term there were claims of illegitimacy – but on the, er, understandable and technical grounds that he won fewer votes than his opponent, and won via an extremely contentious court case. No one treated the son of a former president as some kind of anti-American or un-American alien, the way Palinites treat Obama. Nonetheless, several Democrats immediately supported his massive tax cut – while no Republicans, in the wake of an Obama landslide – supported a desperately needed stimulus. I do not recall states mulling secession or nullification of federal decisions under the last president.

As for "critiques", GOP cooperation does not invalidate them. But I'm not talking about good faith critiques of policy. I'm talking about the plain fact that Fox News, talk radio, the Pajamas Media network have not just criticized the president, but demonized him as beyond the American pale, lying about his belief in American exceptionalism, tying him to "Kenyan anti-colonialism" or other such Stanley-Kurtz style paranoia-for-pay. Check out the image above. Did it appear in some fringe Larouchian publication? Nope; it was right there in Forbes Magazine, next to a piece by Steve Forbes. Name one MSM publication that photo-shopped Bush in that way.

The level of bile against anything he has done, the loathing projected onto him – for doing what he clearly promised to do – is clearly beyond what happened to Bush. I remember. Because for the first two years of Bush in office, I defended him against those on the left who wouldn't give him the slightest benefit of any doubt. And the fury that crested against him was largely due to the Iraq war – a decision he implicitly ran against in 2000, when he promised a humble foreign policy and less defense spending than Gore.

No, my point stands. By simply rallying behind Obama against his liberal base, the GOP leadership has deeply damaged the grass-roots campaign to make Obama seem like a remote alien, who has taken over America, rather than a president who is trying to govern it. That's one big concession that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, and it will benefit Obama almost as much as the massive second stimulus the GOP just gave him for re-election.