The Dish

Balko delivers the bad news:

She’s a cerebral academic who fits Washington’s definition of a centrist: She’s likely defer to government on both civil liberties and regulatory and commerce issues. And though libertarians allegedly share ground with Republicans on fiscal and regulatory issues and with Democrats on civil liberties issues, neither party cares enough about those particular issues to put up a fight for them. Which is whyKagan sailed through her first confirmation hearings, and is widely predicted to sail through the hearings for her nomination to the Supreme Court.

A person who will back executive power comes after two of the most radical pro-executive Justices (Alito and Roberts) in recent history. The onward march of the dictatorial presidency – in a time of constant threats from abroad – continues.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama (L) nominates Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court during an event in the East Room of the white House in Washington, DC, May 10, 2010. By Jim Watson/Getty.)

Another round of Sunni violence kills scores in Iraq, as the country staggers toward a Shiite-dominated, Iran-friendly government, constructed by your tax dollars.

Every now and again, the vileness of Bill Kristol's McCarthyite tendencies are simply impossible to miss. So his first assault on Elena Kagan is the assertion that she is somehow "anti-military." The way in which he does this is the classic modus operandi of the ideological propagandist. First concede the obvious point, so your smear cannot be immediately rebutted:

Kagan has professed at times her admiration for those who serve in the military.

Kagan has a long record opposing discrimination against honest homosexuals in the US military (only liars are currently allowed to serve without fear of persecution). This is a perfectly honorable position, backed by a huge majority of Americans, and has nothing to do with hostility to the military as such. In so far as this position seeks to back all the troops, and not just the heterosexual ones, it is arguably much more pro-military than Kristol's own exploitation of homophobia for short-term political ends. But here he goes:

Consider these words in particular from her letters to "All Members of the Harvard Law School Community": On Oct. 6, 2003, Kagan explained that she abhorred "the military's discriminatory recruitment policy….The military's policy deprives many men and women of courage and character from having the opportunity to serve their country in the greatest way possible. This is a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order." On Sep. 28, 2004: "…the military's recruitment policy is both unjust and unwise. The military's policy deprives…" etc. And on March 7, 2006: "I hope that many members of the Harvard Law School community will accept the Court's invitation to express their views clearly and forcefully regarding the military's discriminatory employment policy. As I have said before, I believe that policy is profoundly wrong — both unwise and unjust…," etc.

Notice, time and again: "the military's discriminatory recruitment policy," "the military's policy," "the military's recruitment policy," "the military's discriminatory employment policy."

But it is not the military's policy. It is the policy of the U.S. Government, based on legislation passed in 1993 by (a Democratic) Congress, signed into law and implemented by the Clinton administration, legislation and implementation that are currently continued by a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress. It is intellectually wrong and morally cowardly to call this the "military's policy."

Yes, this is the thin reed on which he and his cohorts will nonetheless seek to spread a canard through the FNC propaganda machine. And, of course, it is a subtle but powerful way of attacking Kagan because she is, according to large numbers of people who have known her, a lesbian. A lesbian who hates the military. It's always worth listening to Kristol first. You get the contours of the coming smear.

Brad Johnson sums up the last efforts to stem the spill:

The giant box, known as a cofferdam, was lowered onto the leaking wellhead [Friday], with the intent of pumping the leaking oil up a pipe to the sea surface a mile above. … After the [100-ton, four-story concrete-and-steel box] was lowered onto the leak site, a slurry of methane crystals formed on the inside of the dome’s surface, making it bouyant and clogging the outtake at the dome’s roof. The giant box has been moved 200 meters from the disaster site, and is sitting on the sea bed.

The methane hydrates — natural gas that under the extreme pressure and low temperatures of the ocean floor is in a semi-frozen state — have also been implicated in the oil rig explosion, according to rig worker testimony acquired by the Associated Press. The liberal blog FireDogLake was the first media source to discuss the role of hydrates, noting a presentation from November, 2009 by Halliburton, who was responsible for cementing the Deepwater Horizon well, that warned of blowouts caused by hydrate destabilization

TreeHugger looks ahead to the next strategy: island building.

Ilya Somin follows up:

To a large extent, both conservative Republicans and left-wing Democrats tend to “root for their political team” with little regard for objectivity or truth. But it is also the case that knowledge makes a difference. Increasing political knowledge tends to alter one’s views towards greater skepticism about most (but not all) government interventions in both economic and “social” spheres (taxes are an important exception). These results hold true even after controlling for ideology, education, race, gender, and partisanship. Increasing political knowledge doesn’t necessarily make you a libertarian; far from it, in most cases. But it does, on average, make people significantly more libertarian than they would be otherwise.

As does Yglesias:

Inability to see that supply-restrictions on housing raise the price of housing is a big problem. Inability to see that carbon dioxide emissions are leading to ecological catastrophe is a big problem. The good news about progressives is that actual policymaking in, for example, the Obama administration is not based on elementary errors of economic policy. Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Tim Geithner and their key deputies all understand the situation perfectly well as do leading progressive political commentators like Paul Krugman. Unfortunately, the situation with climate science and the right is by no means parallel in this regard.

Scott Morgan's two cents on the connection between medical marijuana and outright legalization:

[Some Drug warriors lobby] for the right to continue arresting seriously ill patients, solely because they're afraid that failing to do so will result in the eventual legalization of marijuana.

Medical marijuana laws can't possibly lead to full legalization unless the American people are impressed with how well those laws work and agree to expand them. Unfortunately for the drug warriors, recent polling suggests that this is already beginning to happen.

Matt Steinglass examines the state of reporting:

I understand Brad DeLong’s frustrations with journalists failing to get complicated stories about economics and economic policy right. I don’t know anything about the specific cases in which he feels some reporters at the Washington Post weren’t trying to get it right. But as a broad response, I would have to say: for most of us, the level of detailed and scrupulous reportage which he expects on every story entails an amount of work that almost no journalistic institution in the world will pay us enough to do, anymore.

This isn’t really a complaint; it’s more of an observation.

New York, New York, 7 pm

McArdle fumes:

This is our nation's drug enforcement in a nutshell.  We started out by banning the things.  And people kept taking them.  So we made the punishments more draconian.  But people kept selling them.  So we pushed the markets deep into black market territory, and got the predictable violence . . . and then we upped our game, turning drug squads into quasi-paramilitary raiders.  Somewhere along the way, we got so focused on enforcing the law that we lost sight of the purpose of the law, which is to make life in America better.

I don't know how anyone can watch that video, and think to themselves, "Yes, this is definitely worth it to rid the world of the scourge of excess pizza consumption and dopey, giggly conversations about cartoons."  Short of multiple homicide, I'm having trouble coming up with anything that justifies that kind of police action.  And you know, I doubt the police could either.  But they weren't busy trying to figure out if they were maximizing the welfare of their larger society. They were, in that most terrifying of phrases, just doing their jobs.

And in the end, that is our shame, not theirs.

Dan Riehl defends the cops.