The oleaginous Labour peer and Blairite eminence rose, Lord Mandelson, comes out swinging against the Tory press's "smears" against Clegg:
“The press stories we have seen today are straight out of the Tory Party dirtytricks manual. These things do not happen at the drop of a hat. This is pure Andy Coulson-style News of the World territory turned into political form.
“They are classic smears of the sort that we have seen directed against Labour in many general elections. Now this Tory treatment is being given to the Liberal Democrats."
He added: “This is born of Tory panic, the Tories pushing the smear button in the hope that this will damage Clegg. Well, in my opinion, the Tories are wrong. I think people will see this exercise for what it is: it is cheap and frankly rather squalid with no place in this election.”
Of course this is all a clever attempt to recast the Tories as the nasty party, and suck up to the liberal-Democrats in preparation for a possible liberal-Labour coalition government if the Tories fail to get a majority.
Dan Savage pounces on a proposed voter initiative that would raise revenue on high-income earners in Washington state:
The language of the initiative specifies that the 400K threshold applies only to "married couples filing jointly"; the income tax would kick-in at 200K for all other "individuals." Gays and lesbians in Washington state who are in domestic partnerships—which are supposed to confer all the same rights and responsibilities as marriage (well, the ones controlled by the state)—would have to pay the income tax if their incomes hit 200K. The language of the initiative—which is here—is clear: high-income people in registered domestic partnerships would be treated as "individuals" under this law, should it pass, and they would pay a steep penalty at tax time.
The Tory tabloids have gone to town. This Daily Mail quote from Clegg in 2002 is the most potentially damaging:
"Watching Germany rise from its knees after the war and become a vastly more prosperous nation has not been easy on the febrile British psyche. All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still. A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off. We need to be put back in our place."
I have to say there's a lot here that I agree with.
The greatness of Churchill and the triumph in the Second World War did present Britain with a crippling post-war legacy. How do you move forward when you have already been told that, if the British empire were to last a thousand years, 1940 was its finest hour? American pols always point forward, but post-war British pols and people looked backwards.
That shifted in the 1990s at long last. And yes, it was an insidious burden. And yes, it did prevent a more ruthless assessment of economic reality. In this, I think, Clegg is saying something important and true. But we'll see if in the debate this afternoon, it comes back to haunt him.
Does Lindsey Graham's voting record on DOMA and the Federal Marriage Amendment put him in the category of hypocrite that qualifies for outing, from your perspective? According to Wikipedia, "He received a rating of 0% from the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign in each reporting period from 1995-2008, with the exception of 1999, when he received a rating of 9%."
As a South Carolina native now living in Los Angeles (and gay, by the way), I can only imagine what this is going to do to his political career. There will not be a good ending for him in SC, believe me.
Another writes:
The GOP is known for gay baiting when it suits their purposes. So now that Graham is getting the treatment, I have no sympathy for him. In fact, I am enjoying the spectacle. If you sleep with dogs sooner or later you are going to get fleas.
Another:
Public officials are elected to represent the will of their constituents. If the overwhelming majority of South Carolinians are opposed to gay rights, why should Lindsey Graham, if gay, be expected to vote otherwise? Senator Graham is not citizen Graham.
[T]his has been, so far, a very productive Congress. Note that he’s now rated by Politifact as having fulfilled over a fifth of his campaign promises (and about a third if compromises, such as state instead of national insurance exchanges, are included), for what it’s worth. That’s without the big items still out there: banking (fairly likely), climate (still unlikely, but not impossible), and immigration (I’d be shocked)…am I missing any? And it’s also without all the small things that will happen. Of course, that alone doesn’t make Barack Obama a successful president, whatever that means. But those who are focused only on what hasn’t happened, or what has been compromised, are missing the big picture here.
Here we are a year and a half in and what do we see? An end to illegal torture of terror suspects. A beginning to a saner method of detaining, trying and convicting terror suspects. Adept handling of the worst financial crisis and recession since the 1930s, leading to a profitable bank bailout (excluding Freddie and Fannie) and a return to growth. Check. Salvaging of the automobile industry, which is now showing signs of life. Passage of an ambitious stimulus package that has helped repair many crumbling parts of the US infrastructure and poured money into green industry. The biggest social policy reform since LBJ – guaranteeing access to health insurance for all Americans. Financial re-regulation of an out-of-control Wall Street, and the beginnings of real scrutiny (see Goldman) of the self-serving corruption at the heart of the financial industry. Repaired relations with Russia, leading to a new START treaty, and better relations with China, leading to a revaluation of the yuan. Joint Chiefs’ endorsement of ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
A tough re-balancing of the US position in the Middle East, away from the Likudnik-oriented jerking knees of the last eight years, and an assertion that US foreign policy should be conducted to advance the interests of the United States, not the interests of a belligerent faction in a foreign country.
My view is that Obama should aim for immigration reform next. Why? We need it. And it will force the GOP into an even whiter, nastier, angrier posture as they fight for the midterms. The long-term damage to the GOP among Hispanics will cement Democratic electoral dominance for quite a while.
Change we can believe in? How much more could you possibly have asked for in eighteen months?
If you missed it, check out one of the sanest, smartest conservatives today finally getting around to calmly dismembering Mark Levin's asinine tract, "Liberty or Tyranny." Jim Manzi, to National Review's credit, posted this at the Corner. It feels like a whiff of Clorox in a urinal. Money quote of Levin's take on climate change:
I’m not expert on many topics the book addresses, so I flipped to its treatment of a subject that I’ve spent some time studying — global warming — in order to see how it treated a controversy in which I’m at least familiar with the various viewpoints and some of the technical detail.
It was awful. It was so bad that it was like the proverbial clock that chimes 13 times — not only is it obviously wrong, but it is so wrong that it leads you to question every other piece of information it has ever provided.
Levin argues that human-caused global warming is nothing to worry about, and merely an excuse for the Enviro-Statists (capitalization in the original) to seize more power. It reads like a bunch of pasted-together quotes and stories based on some quick Google searches by somebody who knows very little about the topic, and can’t be bothered to learn. After pages devoted to talking about prior global cooling fears, and some ridiculous or cynical comments by advocates for emissions restrictions (and one quote from Richard Lindzen, a very serious climate scientist who disputes the estimated magnitude of the greenhouse effect, but not its existence), he gets to the key question on page 184 (eBook edition):
[D]oes carbon dioxide actually affect temperature levels?
Levin does not attempt to answer this question by making a fundamental argument that proceeds from evidence available for common inspection through a defined line of logic to a scientific view. Instead, he argues from authority by citing experts who believe that the answer to this question is pretty much no. Who are they? An associate professor of astrophysics, a geologist, and an astronaut.
Friedersdorf argues that "the right’s 'real Americans' nonsense isn’t about race" since it's also applied to presumably white liberal academic elites on the coasts, etc. This isn't an either or, and it's pretty clear from the lengths people of color have to go to qualify that the definition has a racial dimension as well as a cultural one — and that neither are ultimately very inclusive of people who don't happen to be white, Christian, and heterosexual.
The Dish 