Category: The Dish

Douglas Kmiec in a fascinating interview with Beliefnet:

As a Catholic looking at candidates, my faith instructs me to look at the whole person respective to the church’s social teaching on wages, education, issues of family, culture, responsibility toward the environment, the reduction of mindless or excess consumption. And the Catholic Church was quite explicit about the concept of preemptive war being contrary to the principles of just war. One of the things that happened to Catholics over the last two decades is because of the evil of abortion, we’ve been somewhat less mindful of the need to serve those around us—those who are calling upon us for assistance in a tangible way.

Excerpts from Kmiec’s email in-tray in response to his Obama endorsement can be read here.

Ron Paul won’t quit the race, insisting that actual conservatives have a candidate to vote for at the Convention. He has been smeared as a racist by association, as now seems to be the main way to destroy or attempt to destroy any genuinely reformist politics in America. But his legacy will endure because, as Michael Grunwald points out, he actually represents something honorable:

When his fellow candidates denounced big government, Paul was there to remind them that President Bush and the G.O.P. Congress had shattered spending records and exploded the deficit. When they hailed freedom, Paul asked why they all supported the Patriot Act and other expansions of executive power. And when they called themselves conservatives, Paul asked what was so conservative about sending thousands of young Americans to try to transform the Middle East.

These questions have not and will not go away. At its very best, Iraq, it is now more than apparent, is a decades-long, bankrupting, utopian liberal attempt to build a democratic culture where no such culture has ever existed; and at worst, it is a corrupting, demoralizing cancer on America’s reputation and power in the world. At home, the long term fiscal situation is at a crisis-level, with Republicans adding $32 trillion to future unfunded liabilities by the federal government in seven years, and with a commitment not to raise any more revenue for the indefinite future. Neither Obama nor Clinton has any plan to tackle this debt or to restrain entitlement spending in any serious way. Millions of private individuals have  taken out idiotic mortgage loans on houses they cannot afford and should never have been reckless enough to buy. The dollar is headed into the toilet as much of the US economy is leveraged on the bona fides of a still-authoritarian regime that is currently brutally suppressing human rights in Tibet and across its territory.

For all his quirks, and for all his unseemly past associations, Ron Paul had some serious view about the gravity of the situation and a philosophy that was once called conservative and is now smeared as nuts. History will be far kinder to him that today’s chattering classes.

"I think [Obama] is an extraordinary political talent. Likeable, a non-threatening liberal in the same way that Ronald Reagan was a non-threatening conservative. Eloquent, naturally eloquent, but also a compelling figure in the context of American history. It would be an historic day for him to take the oath of office," – Michael Gerson, with Danny Finklestein. He has good things to say about McCain as well, of course.

"Hillary Clinton has many admirable qualities, but candor and openness and transparency and a commitment to well-established fact have not been notable among them," – Carl Bernstein, on Anderson’s blog.

Exclusive alternative footage of what actually happened in Tuzla:

A provocative question:

Are health insurance mandates constitutional? They are certainly unprecedented. The federal government does not ordinarily require Americans to purchase particular goods or services from private parties.

The closest we come is when government imposes a condition on the grant of discretionary benefit or permit. For instance, in most states, you must have auto insurance to drive a car, or you are required to install fire sprinklers when building a new house. But in such cases, the "mandate" is discretionary – you don’t have to drive a car or build a house. Nor do you have a constitutional right to do so.

But Americans do have a constitutional right to live in the United States. Accordingly, neither federal nor state governments can require you to purchase health insurance as a "condition" for residency.

Hillarack. Kinda gay, don’t you think?

Jim Fallows on the Clinton campaign spokesman, Phil Singer’s, distribution of a smear piece by the American Spectator, accusing an Obama spokesman of being an anti-Semite.

Key Biscayne, Florida, 9.50 am.

Larison on Ackerman:

Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding.  It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level.  Team Obama’s problem with the “freedom agenda” is that it has been too superficial, and they intend to go much deeper, which in turn implies that they apparently intend to get us stuck much deeper in the conflicts and problems of all those countries to which we are supposedly “inextricably” tied.  Forget nation-building or building institutions, which are hard enough in the best of times–Team Obama calls for dignity-building, which is almost infinitely more open-ended and aimless. To repudiate the policies of hubris, they offer hubris cubed.