Author: Andrew Sullivan

Shep Smith dares to ask the question that made Chris Wallace sigh so deeply on The Daily Show: will Sarah Palin ever take real questions from the open press when she begins her run for president? That's one of those questions to which we already know the answer: no. She remains a Fox propagandist, and if she runs, she will remain a Fox-only propagandist, unless Fox's handful of actual journalists, such as Smith and Wallace, are prepared to enrage their viewers.

So 2008 – the first time a vice-presidential candidate never held an open press conference – was the new normal. No candidate need from now on to be grilled by an open press conference. It's all about targeting vague, content-free identity politics through direct media to those already sympathetic. Anything else is "lamestream."

(Hat tip: Palingates)

Roger Ailes passes on Christine O'Donnell as contributor.

Limbaugh asked who on earth came up with the idea of progressive taxation? In America, Lincoln established it. In theory, Adam Smith proposed it, as several readers have noted:

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in proportion."

I'm sympathetic to Limbaugh's general argument – although I believe the debt and alarming inequality should temper one's preferences in this respect in the current circumstances. But it tells you something about today's "conservatism" that it is fiercely opposed to both Abraham Lincoln and Adam Smith on taxation and Friedrich von Hayek on universal health insurance.

The long, interesting explanation is here. Damn.

Two polls find Romney, Huckabee, and Palin in a dead heat. James Joyner sizes up the candidates:

My gut tells me that Romney is the frontrunner and Palin the strongest challenger.  I can’t [imagine] Huckabee beating Palin, although he has a track record of hanging around long after his defeat is inevitable and could serve as a spoiler.  Gingrich has way too much baggage.

My hope is that someone who didn’t run in 2012 — a governor like Gary Johnson, maybe — emerges.   But it’s going to be difficult because this race will get started quickly and the winner will need enough money to choke a horse.

I suppose there’s always Marco Rubio — he’ll be more experienced than Obama was in 2008 and he’s got a huge fan base and boatloads of charisma.   But I suspect he’ll wait a little longer.

Contra Drum, Tyler Cowen is pessimistic: 

I don't see marijuana climbing the legalization hill, if it can't make it through current-day California. We're seeing the high water mark for pot, as aging demographics do not favor the idea. 

That assumes that today's younger anti-prohibition generation will get pro-prohibition as they age. But is that true? Maybe having kids changes things, but my experience of ageing boomers is that they're not anti-pot at all. Here's Ilya Somin on the question:

My tentative conclusion is that it's probably more of a generational effect. This is not just a difference between the very young and the rest. Rather, each successive age group is much more pro-legalization than those older than them. Even 50–64 year olds were 12 points more favorable to Prop 19 than the over-65s. Moreover, much social science data suggests that political attitudes tend to be fairly consistent with age, solidifying for most people when they are in their twenties. Winston Churchill notwithstanding, if you were a socialist at twenty, that implies a high probability you will still be one at forty. In addition, an important recent study suggests that the elderly actually become more socially liberal as they age, not less so.

In a monologue on the Bush tax cuts, the talk radio host mused:

Looked at within the prism of liberty and freedom, as our founding documents spell out, the Declaration, the Constitution, in nowhere in any of our founding documents was it ever said that people earning X would be punished for it.  It was never said in our founding documents that people earning X would share a greater burden of funding the government than people who didn't.  Where does all this talk start?

The answer is that it started with Abraham Lincoln, and the Congress that helped him to defeat the Confederacy:

When the Civil War erupted, the Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, which restored earlier excises taxes and imposed a tax on personal incomes. The income tax was levied at 3 percent on all incomes higher than $800 a year. This tax on personal income was a new direction for a Federal tax system based mainly on excise taxes and customs duties. Certain inadequacies of the income tax were quickly acknowledged by Congress and thus none was collected until the following year…

On July 1, 1862 the Congress passed new excise taxes on such items as playing cards, gunpowder, feathers, telegrams, iron, leather, pianos, yachts, billiard tables, drugs, patent medicines, and whiskey… The 1862 law also made important reforms to the Federal income tax that presaged important features of the current tax. For example, a two-tiered rate structure was enacted, with taxable incomes up to $10,000 taxed at a 3 percent rate and higher incomes taxed at 5 percent. A standard deduction of $600 was enacted and a variety of deductions were permitted for such things as rental housing, repairs, losses, and other taxes paid. In addition, to assure timely collection, taxes were "withheld at the source" by employers.

Niche blog of the day.

"My feeling about Don't Ask, Don't Tell was, in the middle of the height of the Iraq war, not a good time to do it. We're not in the middle of the height of the Iraq war. Afghanistan is a different kind of thing. You could probably accomplish it now. It's eventually going to happen and it seems to me that it gets my party out of this anti-gay, feeling that we're being unfair to people who are gay," – Rudy Giuliani.

We'll have, as I noted, a really great test for what exactly the rebranded GOP now is when it comes to this issue next month. I suspect Rudy is isolated – and the new Congress will be the most socially conservative and anti-gay in modern times. But I'd love to be proven wrong. And Rudy is right, I think, that it would be a very good move for the GOP to embrace this popular decision. Alas, I don't think they can – because of the very base that got them elected.