Romney is signaling that he'd take American foreign policy in a radical old direction, back to the days of confrontation and brinksmanship.
In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and—let's not mince words—thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney's attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.
Milbank gets tough:
A blue-and-white Israeli flag hung from Blair House. Across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Stars and Stripes was in its usual place atop the White House. But to capture the real significance of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit with President Obama, White House officials might have instead flown the white flag of surrender.
And the Cairo promise is aborted by the pro-Israel lobby:
A Pew Research Center poll last month found that the percentage of Muslims expressing confidence in Obama fell from 41 percent to 31 percent in Egypt and from 33 percent to 23 percent in Turkey.
And that is just what Netanyahu wants.
Dana McCourt is tired of the debate. So am I. But only one person can end it, and it isn't me.
Salon interviews Stan Cox. Joyner is as unimpressed as I am:
It’s hard to tell if Cox and others like him hate air-conditioning because of its impact on the environment, because it caused people to move south, or because it allegedly led to the resurgence of the Republican Party as a Southern-SouthWestern party. Whatever the reason, it hardly qualifies as serious scholarship. If Cox wants to spend the next week without air-conditioning, that’s is choice. I, on the other hand, will be keeping him at a tolerable temperature completely guilt-free.
The worst thing about the Cape is that they pride themselves on not needing much air-conditioning. And then this current heat wave happens, and you end up hotter out here than in the oven that is Washington DC. I regard air-conditioning as one of the greatest contributions to human well-being in the last century.
"I have a soft spot for gritty old leftists. Don’t get me wrong: I’m fully aware of the horrors their beliefs and activities brought upon the world. It’s just that when I’ve met them in person, I’ve always found them likeable, even simpatico. Being right about politics is one thing; having personal qualities such as integrity, honor, and courage is another. These are, as we math geeks say, orthogonal variables. You can be dramatically wrong yet filled with admirable personal qualities. Contrariwise, you can be right (which is to say, Right) in your opinions while none the less being a repulsive creep," – the Derb.
Busted again.
Clifden, Ireland, 4.46 pm
The Sunni Arab states and Joe Lieberman help keep the drumbeat going.
Steve Kornacki agrees with Larison that she'd be a disastrous presidential candidate (I think that understates her talent as a performer) but also sees why her nomination is perfectly possible:
Today's GOP calls to mind the Democratic Party of '82 and '83: an aggrieved, resurgent base asserting itself after an electoral drubbing, believing with all its might that inevitable midterm blues facing the new president mean more than they actually do. That is the environment that produced Walter Mondale in 1984. And it's the environment that could produce a similar debacle for Republicans in 2012.
Dave Roberts consults various journalists and wonks about what to do now that a federal cap and trade bill appears dead. Terry Tamminen:
I would stop focusing on the glass that's empty and focus instead on the one that's full. We already have a price on carbon in 10 Northeastern states, at least as it pertains to the electricity sector, under RGGI [Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative]. We are in the final stages of designing a similar cap-and-trade system in the majority of the Western states, and the Midwestern states have said they'll copy what we do. So by 2012, regardless of what Congress does, if we support these state actions — which are much more deeply rooted and have a lot more political support and practical demonstration of success — we are much more likely to have a price on carbon in the U.S. in the near-term.
The Dish 