"You need to drill a little tiny hole there, a peephole, to let me look through and see where he is,"- Todd Sarah Palin, on a reality show about the Palin's life, complaining that Joe McGinnis is invading her privacy.
Sarah Palin also keeps up her meme that somehow moving in next door must mean Joe McGinnis is a pedophile. But it's always others who are wanting "to seek and destroy."
Josh Marshall confesses that although he despises our drug laws, he probably would have voted against Prop 19:
I just don't know if I think marijuana should be legalized at all. Maybe it's that I'm getting into my 40s. And maybe I'm a hypocrite… But do I think it should be like alcohol? Anyone over 18 or 21 can buy it?
I remember, many years ago, talking to my father about the idea of legalization. And bear in mind, my Dad, God bless him, smoked a decent amount of grass in his day, said he didn't like the idea. One reason is that he was already a bit older by that time. But he had this very contradictory and hard to rationalize position which was that he was fine with people smoking pot but keeping it at least nominally illegal kept public usage in some check. Again, how to rationalize that in traditional civic terms? Not really sure. But frankly, I think I kind of agree.
How to rationalize the irrational? From the post cited, I'd say Reason One is: I'm older. Reason two: er, see Reason one. What Josh seems to be saying is that he wants pot de facto legal but closeted. But like most closets, this one requires a shame that simply isn't there any more – and has not been for decades now. And any illegality is bound to end up hurting the poor and minorities to a disproportionate extent. It's not unenforced. It's enforced brutally upon hundreds of thousands of people. It's okay to sit there mulling how uncomfortable fully legal pot makes you, as long as none of your friends is thrown into jail, or forever barred from employment, or fired for no reason related to work performance. Josh's view reminds me of the argument of those who backed sodomy laws but didn't want them aggressively enforced. They didn't want to throw people in jail, but they wanted the stigma to remain. Yes, stigma. For one kind of pleasure (being stoned) as opposed to another (being drunk).
Of course, Josh is not a libertarian. My view – regardless of the arguments back and forth about the effects of marijuana – is simply that it is absurd for any government to prevent people from growing a naturally-occurring plant that requires no processing to provide humans with pleasure. It's pretty basic, actually. This is a core freedom for human beings and requires an insane apparatus of state control and police power to prevent it from occurring. All you have to do is burn a plant and inhale the smoke. If humans are not free to do this in the natural world in which they were born, what on earth are they free to do? My premise is freedom; Josh's is not.
Should we ban roses because they give us pleasure with their beauty and their scent? Should we ban herbs, like rosemary or thyme, because they give us pleasure and encourage us to eat more? Should we ban lawn-grass because maintaining it consumes too many people's weekend afternoons? Should we cut down trees because the beauty of them can sometimes distract someone from the road? I could go on.
The point is the government has no business regulating how its citizens derive pleasure from a naturally occurring plant. Period. The whole idea is preposterous. And yet it is taken for granted.
(Photo: U.S. Marines from India Battery, 3rd Battalion, 12th Marine Regiment patrol through a marijuana field in a village near Forward Operating Base (FOB) Zeebrugge on October 10, 2010 near Kajaki, Afghanistan. Yes, that soldier appears to be smiling. By Scott Olson/Getty Images)
"I’m going to ensure that Republicans come out of the gate and seize this moment, we’ve really been given a second chance at a first impression and I’m going to tell them that we have to rise to the challenge with principle and conviction and not with this attitude that you saw coming from the White House yesterday and from some other quarters on the establishment left in Washington which was that somehow the message of the election was that they want Democrats and Republicans to work better together, to get along — good heavens," – Mike Pence.
The pre-election NYT poll found that 78 percent want the Republicans to compromise with Obama rather than stick to their positions in the next two years; 76 percent want the Dems to do the same; and a slightly lower percentage, but still overwhelming, wants Obama to compromise too: 69 percent.
Bartlett argues a sole focus on unemployment in the president's first two years could have won a bigger or a second stimulus. It's a little too Captain Hindsight for my taste – and I don't think it would have made much of a difference to the results last Tuesday, whereas access to health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions will make a lot of difference to people's, you know, lives for the indefinite future. This tactical point, however, is well-taken and seems to have been internalized by the president:
The political problem is that by offering his tax credit up front, rather than negotiating with Republicans on inclusion of a tax cut in the stimulus package, he lost an opportunity to possibly buy their support. One idea Republicans were keen on, that Democrats might have supported, was a temporary cut or suspension of the payroll tax, which could have been more effective in stimulating employment than the tax credit. In the event that Republicans refused to negotiate, the money consumed by the tax cut could have been reprogrammed into more economically effective public works.
Ouch:
The 105 polls released in Senate and gubernatorial races by Rasmussen Reports and its subsidiary, Pulse Opinion Research, missed the final margin between the candidates by 5.8 points, a considerably higher figure than that achieved by most other pollsters. Some 13 of its polls missed by 10 or more points, including one in the Hawaii Senate race that missed the final margin between the candidates by 40 points, the largest error ever recorded in a general election in FiveThirtyEight’s database, which includes all polls conducted since 1998.
Moreover, Rasmussen’s polls were quite biased, overestimating the standing of the Republican candidate by almost 4 points on average.
The core reason, as Joyner explains:
Rasmussen’s sample is biased because they’re polling on the cheap — using robocalls, which by law can’t dial cell phones, and otherwise cutting corners — rather than because of some agenda to propagandize for the GOP. The end result, however, is the same: Polls that can’t be trusted.
Wanchai, Hong Kong, 4.25 pm
Ta-Nehisi dares to suggest that Americans are to blame for many of their own problems:
I think I'm deeply uncomfortable with any sort of populism. No matter the target–bankers or the poor–it seems to require its leaders to say, "There's nothing wrong with you America."
In saying that I don't mean to ignore the difference in power, but to contest the notion of powerlessness as some sort of moral cleaning agent, and finally to contest the notion of powerlessness itself. There must be some way to acknowledge, all at once, the outer crookedness of deceptive lending, and then the inner crookedness of trying to get something for nothing… the notion that Americans are pure, and what's really wrong with this country, has everything to do with aliens–the media, the Muslim, the poor, the illegal, the rich, the elites–but nothing to do with the natives strikes me as comfort food.
Comfort food, super-sized.
Larison argues that Gary Johnson doesn't have a real shot at the nomination:
…all of the reasons why I would want to support him (e.g., his views on civil liberties, foreign policy, the drug war, etc.) are the reasons why he would be persona non grata for much of the GOP.
Still, his run could do some good:
Like Ron Paul’s run in 2008, a Johnson campaign would be refreshingly oriented toward ideas and policy, and it would show many of the leading candidates to be hypocrites and frauds when it comes to protecting constitutional liberties, balancing budgets, and reducing spending. More than that, it would offer libertarians and traditional conservatives a decent alternative, and it might force some healthy and much-needed debates on the security/warfare state, foreign policy, and the drug war.
Noonan calls Palin a "nincompoop" in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Reagan:
Electable means mature, accomplished, stable—and able to persuade.
Conservatives talked a lot about Ronald Reagan this year, but they have to take him more to heart, because his example here is a guide.All this seemed lost last week on Sarah Palin, who called him, on Fox, "an actor." She was defending her form of policical celebrity—reality show, "Dancing With the Stars," etc. This is how she did it: "Wasn't Ronald Reagan an actor? Wasn't he in 'Bedtime for Bonzo,' Bozo, something? Ronald Reagan was an actor."
Excuse me, but this was ignorant even for Mrs. Palin. Reagan people quietly flipped their lids, but I'll voice their consternation to make a larger point.
Ronald Reagan was an artist who willed himself into leadership as president of a major American labor union (Screen Actors Guild, seven terms, 1947-59.) He led that union successfully through major upheavals (the Hollywood communist wars, labor-management struggles); discovered and honed his ability to speak persuasively by talking to workers on the line at General Electric for eight years; was elected to and completed two full terms as governor of California; challenged and almost unseated an incumbent president of his own party; and went on to popularize modern conservative political philosophy without the help of a conservative infrastructure. Then he was elected president.
The point is not "He was a great man and you are a nincompoop," though that is true. The point is that Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him.
Doesn't the guy want to keep his Fox News gig?
(Headline via McLaughin Group watcher in-joke, c. 1995.)
The Dish 