The Dish

Joyner weighs in:

[U]nlike Michelle Malkin, Dan Riehl, and others, I do think Republican leaders have some responsibility to condemn violence.  No, I don’t think they’re directly responsible for any of it; we don’t yet even know for sure who’s making the threats.  But we’ve had over a year of very heated rhetoric over the dire consequences that would flow from a government takeover of one sixth of the economy, death panels, legislation being rammed through with dirty tricks, and all the rest.   That’s part and parcel of American politics these days and mostly fine.  But, with signs that people are going off the rails evidence, it’s time for leaders to calm their followers.

Cantor says it is "reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain." He adds:

I’ve received threats since I assumed elected office, not only because of my position, but also because I’m Jewish. I’ve never blamed anyone in this body for that. Period…

Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week. And I received threatening emails. But I will not release them, because I believe such actions will only encourage more to be sent.

Josh Marshall protests and calls Cantor's "behavior is shameful beyond imagining."

Joe Klein does a health care post mortem:

The profound question for Republicans is whether they continue on the path of intransigence or decide to participate in the government. Intransigence has its pleasures. In the hermetically sealed tornado of right-wing bloviation, the wildest claims have come to seem the most marketable.

This was a problem on the left for a long time. When Congressman Randy Neugebauer of Texas screamed "Baby killer!" on the House floor, the epithet resonated — the protesters who screamed those same words at U.S. troops in the 1960s sent the American pendulum swinging back toward conservatism and crippled the Democratic Party for several generations. The Tea Party nativism, paranoia and anti-intellectualism embraced by the Republicans have rarely been a winning hand in American politics.

(Image via Joshua Tucker)

Jonathan Bernstein wants to do away with them:

The big deal about the Sunday shows, their real remaining actual function, is that for years the shows have been used to float trial balloons.  Any trained monkey could handle that, which makes me think that Amanpour is a poor choice — not because she couldn't handle it (please!) but because her considerable talents as a real reporter will be largely wasted there.  Beyond that, I have to say that no one should care who hosts the Sunday shows, and that any attempt at "improving" them is a total waste of time. 

My view of Sunday morning is that it should involve sleeping. But as for TV shows, what's needed, I suspect, is a reinvention of them. Real questioning of people in power; discussion of issues, not process; fewer Beltway hacks; no predictions; no sports-journalism masquerading as a serious discussion of politics. You know: what a serious version of the Daily Show would do. Its possible; just not without disturbing the balance of power in Washington.

My take on sex, love, power and corruption in the church here.

Since HCR passed, a big jump in Obama's approval ratings. Maybe a fluke. But he remains more popular than Ronald Reagan was at this point in his term of office – and has been ahead of Reagan now for three months. The approval graph closest to Obama's has been Reagan's in recent history.

Alexa Meade, who we blogged about awhile back, was a virtual unknown two weeks ago. Now she is to be shown at Saatchi Gallery in London. Dak Zak wrote about her in yesterday's WaPo:

Internet memes are most virulent when they blow people's minds, and Meade's "Living Paintings" seem to have done that. For two weeks she has been linked, blogged, page-viewed, tweeted, Digged, thumbs-upped, CNN'd, OMG'd and lavished with parades of exclamation points by anonymous commenters — the plebeian, virtual equivalent of a good opening at MoMA, minus the bona fides.

Zak adds a detail at his blog:

Alexa keeps the acrylic epidermis of her subjects in big Ziploc bags. The nature of her work is temporal; once a model is done sitting, that’s it. The paint peels off. You’ll never see it again, except for in a photographic print. She keeps the molted paint in the bags, as artifacts. It’s very “CSI.”

A reader writes:

As interesting as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic example is, a better one would be the primarily Lebanese Maronite Church.  This is an Eastern Rite member of the Roman Catholic family which has never had an Orthodox branch, and has always been doctrinally correct.  Of course, as you might expect, in the American Maronite Church, priests are not allowed to marry.  But in Lebanon, it is estimated that at least half of the priests are married.

Another writes:

Given the stance of the religious right to consider natural law when thinking through first principles, doesn't that mean that celibacy is equivalent to the "perverse" they're trying to argue against? Who can claim celibacy is natural? If we were just as craven as they, couldn't we start pushing the view that the Church has *caused* the child predators in their midst by enforcing an "unnatural" lifestyle?

Finally, the silence breaks – with a link to the Vatican press release on the NYT story. Yes, a Vatican press release. It's like reading Jackson Diehl on Israel.

Hmmm. I have no idea, do you? But here's a Nexis story from the WaPo in 1994 that helps provide some historical context:

On the map, Maale Adumim is a settlement built on West Bank land that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. But for Raanan, it is not. "It is Jerusalem," she said. Raanan is at the vanguard of a long-planned and ambitious drive by Israel to fortify the area around Jerusalem with expanded Jewish settlements. While the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has curbed settlement building elsewhere in the West Bank, the vision of a "Greater Jerusalem" – a buffer zone of Jewish habitation around the city – is coming closer to reality every day.

Nah that couldn't be it, could it? From another WaPo piece in 2004:

Israel is close to finishing a decades-long effort to surround Jerusalem with Jewish settlements, walls, fences and roads that will severely restrict Palestinian access to the city and could reduce the chance of its becoming the capital of a Palestinian state, according to documents, maps and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians and foreign diplomats.

… Projects to cut off access to Jerusalem to Palestinians living in the West Bank, which borders the city on three sides, have accelerated since the start of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. Today, Jewish settlements outside the city have been integrated with the urban core, redrawing the map of Jerusalem and complicating any negotiations over its future and the future of West Bank settlements, Israeli and Palestinian experts say. 

The web of projects includes 13 settlements to the north of the city that are being linked with each other and with Jerusalem by access roads that act as physical barriers to Palestinian communities. To the east, Israel has approved expansion of the West Bank's largest settlement, Maleh Adumim, to absorb a swath of Palestinian land between the community and East Jerusalem. To the south, access and bypass roads and Jewish settlements have carved Palestinian lands into a checkerboard…

Avraham Duvdevani, head of the settlement unit of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), which implements the Israeli government's settlement program in the West Bank, said that the aim was to consolidate the capital of the Jewish state. "It's been the formal policy of all governments in Israel that Jerusalem will not be discussed or divided — Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, to stay undivided forever," Duvdevani said. "Because of that, it was very easy to get permission from the minister of defense and the governments to build settlements that strengthened Jerusalem as the capital and the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and that blocked the option of the Palestinians to build in and near Jerusalem."