Author: Andrew Sullivan

YouTuber Sp0ntanius performs a mesmerizing rendition of Zelda's “Song Of Healing”:

Conor begs Reihan to look beyond economics:

What I do think is that longtime residents of the United States brought here by illegal immigrant parents during childhood are in a unique position: through no fault of their own, they’ve long resided in a country where they don’t have a legal right to live or work (partly due to an incentive system set up by American citizens who are glad to employ illegal immigrants). It’s a tragedy for the affected kids. Economically they’re better off than lots of people in Third World countries who’d like to come here. But life is more than economics. Unlike would-be immigrants, potential Dream Act beneficiaries have developed friendships, formed romances, an invested themselves into communities in the United States. All that will be lost if they are forced to leave, and along with American complicity in their plight, those costs that factor into how I think about the legislation despite my not valuing people here already more than far away illegal immigrants. 

John G. Geer finds –surprise! – that partisanship greatly influences the answer:

[A]mong all Republicans, just 5% judged the negativity aimed the Tea Partiers to be “fair.”  Yet consider that 60 percent of “strong” Democrats did view the attacks on the Tea Party as fair.  

On the flip side:

The same story holds when judging negativity aimed at Democrats.   Among “strong” Republicans, 72% deemed such attacks [aimed at Democrats] as “fair” and only 1% as unfair.   Among “strong” Democrats, 50% deemed such as attacks as “unfair” and 6% as “fair.”  

His bottom line:

The gaps presented here underscore why it is so hard to forge a consensus in the news media or in the public on whether any attack is fair or unfair.  That judgment is so bounded up by partisanship that an objective, unbiased assessment is near impossible.    In many ways this reminder is an obvious one.  But in an increasingly partisan press, it is worth being reminded about the obvious.  And in anticipation of what will surely be a highly negative campaign in 2012, it may well pay to have additional reminders as the battle for the Republican nomination starts to heat up in just a few months and with the general election soon to follow. 

Larry Greenemeier interviews Hemanshu Nigam, "a former U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor of child and computer crimes who has also held high-level cybersecurity positions at Microsoft and News Corp":

You can shut down a Web site, but there's no question an individual intent on distributing that information will already have thought about keeping a copy of it in multiple other locations, either online or offline. When you run a Web site, if you're worried about an attack on that Web site, whether it's a distributed denial-of-service attack or some sort of virus attack, the best solution to those worries is to create backup plans. There could be a copy of that information sitting on a thumb drive that everyone buys at Costco for really cheap nowadays. It could be backed up on a CD. It could be stored with a cloud network storage company that can be accessed from anywhere. That's why this is a pretty significant challenge for the government to try to shut down a site—the task is, frankly, impossible.

Like the Dish, Bruce Schneier thinks that "the government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it's easy to copy and distribute digital files." What surprised him :

I'm not surprised that these cables were available to so many people. We know that access control is hard, and that it's impossible to know beforehand what information someone will need to do their job. What is surprising is that there wasn't any audit logs kept about who accessed all these cables. That seems like a no-brainer.

 

In an interview with Fallows and Goldberg, the TSA's John Pistole reacts to concerns that airports are becoming a "Fourth Amendment free" zone:

If people take an affirmative act of engaging in, in this case, aviation — they want to get on a plane — they're taking an affirmative act to do that. Then, yes, there is authority to do the administrative search for public safety purposes. As I've said a number of times, I think reasonable people could disagree as to the precise technique used on each person. So for you, it may be patting around the knees or the armpits. You might be sensitive there. For others, it is groins.

My solution. Do not fly if you can possibly help it. Conor is pissier:

Americans take affirmative action to do almost everything – to drive a private vehicle into a downtown area, to board a bus or a train or a ferry or a subway, to attend a concert or a baseball game or a political rally, to do their Christmas shopping at a mall rather than online, to crowd into a dance club on Saturday night, to buy their vegetables at a crowded outdoor market, etc. All these venues are plausible targets for a terrorist attack.

Suddenly air travel doesn’t seem so different – not to me, anyway.

Does Mr. Pistole believe that all the places I’ve described afford citizens less protection from the Fourth Amendment because everyone there made an affirmative decision to be present?

A reader writes:

I think the question over whether the tax cut compromise is ultimately a win or a loss for Obama sort of misses the point about why liberals are angry over the whole thing. Two things he talked about in the press conference stand out for me. First, when he criticized the left for being sanctimonious and purist and seeing compromise as weakness, saying "if that's the standard by which we are measuring success or core principles, then let's face it, we will never get anything done."

The problem with that is, for the past two years liberals have watched as the right wing has been more sanctimonious and ideologically uncompromising than the left ever has been or could be, and still get everything they want and more thanks to Obama's particular way of compromising (namely, giving away the store as an opening to negotiation).

It's always the Democrats who have to be practical and pragmatic because they're the only ones who care even a little bit about actual governance, and because the other party doesn't, the Democrats always have to settle for less. Maybe it is the only way in this political climate, but it still sucks. And to be honest, I think you are being a bit unintentionally condescending here by telling liberals to basically get over it, given the fact that one reason you're not angry like we are is because the parts of the progressive agenda being sacrificed to compromise are all things you don't support in the first place. It's easy for you to take the long view; not so easy for people who've been fighting for this stuff for years. 

Also, there's the sense that Obama seems to be working from a false premise, buying into a weird Halperin-esque view of the world that somehow the country that elected Obama and the Democrats to historic majorities did so because they really wanted Mitch McConnell calling the shots. "This is a big, diverse country," he says. "Not everybody agrees with us. I know that shocks people." Thing is, they kinda do. I'm not saying the 2008 election was a huge national shift to the left ideologically, anymore than the recent midterms were a shift to the right, but on a lot of these issues he's giving away, stuff he campaigned on by the way, he actually had pretty broad public support. You often ask how the Democratic congress with it's huge majority, a president so sympathetic to the cause, and such favorable poll numbers can't seem to pass DADT, and I know you've framed that as not just a sign of political reality, but also a sign of political weakness on the part of Democrats. Well, the same can be said about the public option, extending unemployment insurance, and only extending the middle class tax cuts. Again, when you're particularly invested in something, it's a weakness when it's not done, but when you're less invested, as with all the stuff we liberals care about, that's just the way it is.

I take the point. We all tend to get more exercized over what we care about – and it's true, I have nothing like the interest in progressive taxation that most liberals do, and so don't share their outrage. What DADT and the tax deal represent, it seems to me, is the danger of procrastination. Both should have been tackled long before now (and the midterms) … and it isn't Obama's fault that Reid ducked for cover on taxes before an election (although it is Obama's fault that he waited so long on DADT – a study could have been set up very soon after his election to give everyone time to mull it over). Nonetheless, given the constraints, it seems to me that Obama's GOP-endorsed second stimulus is a rather impressive feat of jujitsu. And if he gets DADT repealed and START ratified in the same Congress, quite a coup.

Reihan isn't a fan of the DREAM Act:

As I understand it, the DREAM Act implicitly tells us that I should value the children of unauthorized immigrants more than the children of other people living in impoverished countries. If we assume that all human beings merit equal concern, this is obviously nonsensical. Indeed, all controls on migration are suspect under that assumption.

Timothy B Lee counters:

From my perspective, the fundamental question in the immigration debate is: do we recognize immigrants as fellow human beings who are entitled to the same kind of empathy we extend to other Americans, or do we treat them as opponents in a zero-sum world whose interests are fundamentally opposed to our own? Most recent immigration reform proposals, including the Founder’s Visa and the various guest worker proposals, are based on the latter premise: immigrants in general are yucky, but certain immigrants are so useful to the American economy that we’ll hold our collective noses and let them in under tightly control conditions.

The DREAM Act is different. The pro-DREAM argument appeals directly to Americans’ generosity and sense of fairness, not our self-interest. The hoops kids must go through to qualify for DREAM are focused on self-improvement for the kids themselves, not (like the Founders Visa) on maximizing benefits for American citizens. There’s no quota on the number of kids who are eligible, and at the end of the process the kids get to be full-fledged members of the American community.

Adam Serwer tweaks Lee's formula:

DREAM is politically feasible precisely because it appeals to Americans' generosity, sense of fairness, and self-interest. Those who would be eligible are poised to offer concrete, sustained benefits to the country as a whole. Sending them away is a waste of the resources we've already invested in them, not to mention the ones they're prepared to contribute. DREAM also shaves about $1.4 billion off the deficit in the next ten years. So while DREAMers are getting something very valuable, the rest of us are as well.

Hussein Ibish sees the logical next step toward a two-state solution:

With diplomacy in disarray, the importance and indispensability of state building, as the only real source of practical momentum at the moment, is increasingly obvious. On the diplomatic front, Palestinians were blocked from entrenching their position in the UN by the United States, but have succeeded in securing recognition from Brazil and Argentina, with Uruguay and several other states expected to follow. State building is practical and strategic, but increased international recognition for Palestine is important as well. Unilateralism is probably a dead end, but multilateralism isn't necessarily anything of the kind. Palestinians would be foolish not to understand that in the end Israeli opposition will make it practically impossible to establish and maintain a viable, sovereign and independent state of Palestine. But Israel would be foolish not to understand widespread international recognition of Palestine's legitimacy and existence has very significant consequences as well.

(Hat tip: Goldblog)

Keith Hennessey, who worked on economic policy in George W. Bush's White House, supports the tax compromise:

Unlike many Congressional Republicans, I support extending extended unemployment insurance benefits when the unemployment rate is this high.  My back-of-the-envelope suggests that, at a 9.8% rate, between four and nine people who would like a job but cannot find one are getting more generous UI benefits for each person who is getting those same benefits and choosing not to take a job.  I’m OK with that ratio.

If I could make two changes to the bill, I’d pay for the increased spending on unemployment insurance with spending cuts in the outyears, and I’d drop the accounting gimmick that doesn’t lower future Social Security obligations to account for the lower payroll tax revenues.

If I could make a third change, I’d drop the business expensing.  This provision is a timing shift – it will cause firms to accelerate their medium-to-long-term investment spending into 2011.  That’s good for 2011 growth but bad for 2013 and 2014 growth.  Since I accept the consensus predictions that we’re in a multi-year slow recovery, that’s not a constructive change.  There are times when this makes sense.  I don’t think this is one of them, but I’m open to opposing arguments.

 

Will Wilkinson takes issue with the priorities of Democrats:

Even if it would be wise in the long run, raising taxes on top earners can wait until the economy's out of the woods. Conceding for now on taxes is a very small price to pay, especially if you think extending jobless benefits again is imperative. Is Mr Obama's willingness to kick this can down the road a couple years really worth getting in a twist about? I understand the frustration over the Democrats' failure to strike down this hated element of George W. Bush's legacy, but, but, but…

I guess wounded, wailing laments over the president's pathetic, weak-kneed capitulation wouldn't grate so much had I heard a peep yesterday about the administration's success in standing rock steady behind the president's legal right to unilaterally order the killing of American citizens. One would think this holdover of George W. Bush's reign would outrage liberals, but evidently one would be wrong. Perhaps liberals should take courage from the fact Mr Obama doesn't cave on everything. Besides, what's the power to raise taxes on the rich next to the power of discretionary assassination?

The "power of discretionary assassination" is a loaded term for killing an active al Qaeda member directly connected to ongoing efforts to kill innocent Americans, including a cartoonist now in hiding. But, yes, Will's core point rings true. The left's response to the deal really does highlight their redistributive passion, something the Dish does not share. Which is perhaps why it seems such a brilliant maneuver to me, and such a betrayal to them. I really don't hate the rich. The only reason to tax them more is the debt. And if we get a real deal to address the debt in the next two years, a little lee-way now to get a second stimulus seems to me to be political manna.