Author: Andrew Sullivan

Sprung captures a beaut:

Boehner and Cantor, 2/8;

If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand? Our ability to move forward in a bipartisan way through this discussion rests on openness and transparency.

McConnell, today:

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) criticized the White House's plan to post a health care reform proposal online, just days before the upcoming health care summit.

"You know, apparently we're going to be there most of the day and have an opportunity to have a lot of discussion," said McConnell. "But if they're going lay out the plan they want to pass four days in advance, then why are — what are we discussing on Thursday?"

They'll say anything, won't they?

A supercut of mirror scares (just for Aaron):

A nice assessment from Robert Costa. For me, the most refreshing thing about Paul is his dogged refusal to exclude the crippling cost of defense and the increasingly nutty attempt at global domination and control by the US. Oh, and habeas corpus – a conservative shibboleth until the Cheney era, which National Review aided and abetted.

In case you missed it, the most riveting conversation in the hallways of CPAC – already a viral web sensation – can be read here.

The American checks out US migratory patterns. The places that have weathered the recession the best:

These recession gainers are increasingly, at least in their major metro areas, two-tiered societies, with a highly educated and high-income native-born elite (augmented by high-skill immigrants) combined with an increasing body of relatively uneducated and low-income immigrant masses. Middle education and middle income have been squeezed out, though at a lesser rate in the recession. Politically, these states have voted heavily Democratic, with both tiers casting large Democratic percentages.

And the locations that have done the worst:

They fall into two classes. One is northern New England: the recession seems to have choked off movement to resort and small town areas; New Hampshire’s low-tax advantage seems to have diminished over the years, as neighboring Massachusetts has lowered its tax rates and Democrats who may increase taxes have dominated New Hampshire state government. The other class consists of auto-dependent Michigan and Ohio, which had a dire decade up through 2007 and an even worse one in 2007 to 2009. None of these states has had a significant immigrant inflow, unlike the Recession Gainers, which owe their current population growth to continued immigration.

Is McConnell getting a little antsy?

The CPAC bruiser who was invited to speak on the ACORN video stunt and suddenly swerved into a diatribe against including GOProud at CPAC and then left the stage, is a familiar type if you ever knew anything about college Republican politics. These people engage in insanely vicious internal feuds and think Jonah Goldberg is a public intellectual. Sorba also fits into a sub-sub-sub-category of those young men, always bristling with somewhat strained masculinity, who are obsessed with the subject of homosexuality and have obviously spent a huge amount of time finding sources and arguments that can back up their feelings on the subject.

Here is a Google video of a recent lecture of his at Cal State. Enjoy a glimpse into the future of Republicanism.

A few years ago, when I wrote “The Conservative Soul,” the conservative media, insofar as they acknowledged its existence, insisted that its core diagnosis – the the GOP had become a religious, more than a political, organization, was over-wrought. I regarded the fusion of politics and religion – from the world of Islam to the West Bank in Israel to the core of the GOP – as a neurotic and extremely dangerous reacti0n to confusing modernity. I believed and believe that the core conservative mission today is to confront and defeat it. I believe what Barry Goldwater believed in 1994:

When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

I stand with Goldwater when he declared:

“Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.”

Moreover, I do not believe that Barry Goldwater had become a left-liberal. I believe he remained a conservative to the end, but the Republican Party slowly became a fundamentalist cult, fueled by Nixonian resentment, neoconservative ideology and fiscal recklessness. I mention all this because of Tim Pawlenty’s speech to CPAC this past weekend.

Pawlenty, we have been told,  was the moderate alternative to Palin as McCain’s possible veep nominee. He’s from Minnesota, hardly the deep South. He was about fiscal responsibility, not intolerance. He was no Santorum or Barbour or Palin. And yet this is what he said should be the first principle of conservatism in the twenty-first century:

‘God’s in charge.’ ‘God is in charge.’ There are some people who say, ‘Oh, you know, Pawlenty, don’t bring that up. You know, it’s politically incorrect.’ Hogwash.’ These are enshrined in the founding documents and perspective of our country. In the Declaration of Independence, it says we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. It doesn’t say we’re endowed by Washington, D.C., or endowed by the bureaucrats or endowed by state government; it’s by our creator that we are given these rights.”

And so he manages to turn what was at the time one of the most radical declarations of a constitutional system not reliant on Scripture or on the divine right of monarchs, but on self-government and reason, a revolution against a country where the church and state were fused, a country where the vast majority of the Founders were Deists who believed that God’s control of earthly affairs was extremely remote … into the fundamentalist neurosis that passes for so much religious faith in America today.

And you thought I was exaggerating.

A reader writes:

First a simple 'thank you' for all of your writing. It both challenges and supports me.

I am a gay catholic priest, so often your pieces on how you reconcile being gay and catholic really resonate. For myself, I've always separated the concept of 'institution' from the concept of 'what do we believe', or more accurately 'how we believe'. This is never an exact separation but it at least allows me to serve the people in the church without too much conflict that I'm serving 'the Church'

It's an insane time right now. But many folks in the pews also notice

the insanity.

I sing in our local gay chorus and I've had parishioners at several of our concerts. They see not the slightest conflict in the idea that a man can be both gay and still able to proclaim God's word. It's THEIR faith that sustains me when the institution does not.

Unfortunately as someone who's studied a lot of church history, I'm also aware that the pendulum of the church's attitude swings slowly. We may not get out of this in our lifetime. So that isn't my goal.

My goal is to nudge that pendulum along so that our next generation will have it better.

That, I think, is accomplishable.

Nature reports (gated):

Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain.

Sager has a good summary of the study.

(Hat tip: 3QD)