Category: The Dish

Publius:

I think farm bill opponents need a new political strategy. Most of the opposition focused on how the bill was wasteful pork. And it truly was — reading about it makes you want to take a long shower. But that said, the pork argument doesn’t really resonate all that well…Instead, farm bill opponents should have spent more time arguing that it’s a substantively bad bill — more precisely, it’s a bill that jeopardizes health and increases hunger. For one, the subsidies of corn, sugar, and meat play a huge role in our nation’s obesity problem (not to mention in the broader lack of nutrition).

Ruffini:

In the minority, our job is to 1) make the majority’s life miserable, grinding the House and Senate floors to a halt, and building a narrative of the Democrats as broken and incompetent, and 2) offer big, bold alternatives to this mess like the Contract did in 1994.

Whatever you do, don’t cooperate for the common good.

The Onion proposes.

It’s another fascinating development:

Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible — a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad…

But — unlike al-Sadr’s anti-American broadsides — the Iranian-born al-Sistani has displayed extreme caution with anything that could imperil the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The two met Thursday at the elderly cleric’s base in the city of Najaf south of Baghdad.

If Maliki continues to isolate Sadr and Sistani backs him, we could have a moment when a Shiite government in Baghdad asks the US to leave. Then what will Bush do? Or McCain?

Another view and worth reading. Yes, Burke was a sentimentalist; but he was also a Whig. We should indeed be careful when ascribing issues such as marriage reform to a man who lived centuries before such an idea would become mainstream. But an essay that does not include Burke’s support for, say, the American Revolution in its account of his view of political change is incomplete, it seems to me. I might add that my own preference for a skeptical conservative approach to the modern liberal order is much more indebted to Oakeshott than to Burke.

As for Yuval Levin’s backing for a Sam’s Club conservatism, all I can say is that I admired Ross’s and Reihan’s contribution (although it isn’t out yet), but I don’t see government redistribution of taxes and welfare to the working poor to be a genuinely conservative response to growing social and economic inequality. It strikes me as a palliative. And I fear it is more about solidifying a Republican majority than reimagining conservatism in our times. But that’s an argument we should probably leave until their book comes out.

From the NYT:

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign said Thursday that Mr. Clinton had not had private conversations in which he was pushing her for the vice presidency or arguing that she deserved it, and that he believed the choice of a running mate was a personal one for the nominee.

And "personal" for the Clintons means that one of them is not a part of the decision?

Pollster’s bottom line:

The net effect of some 16 years of public debate was a 10 point decline in opposition and a 12 point rise in support.

There is an obvious backlash moment in 2004, but it soon recedes and the trend continues. We will continue to have ups and downs. But we have changed consciousness for ever.

That’s, er, the Conservative candidate in the Crewe by-election in Britain – and now member of parliament. A massive 17 point swing to the Tories. The Anglo-American mood is restive.

A new ranking list of English-language sites from a big news aggregator in Europe, Wikio.

From al-Jazeera (via Kos), some raw reporting not widely aired in the US: