The Dish

And yet no-one seems to get it:

I watched Obama's rise from Hyde Park over the last 15 yrs. Two things stand out: his political rivals almost always, and fatally, underestimate the guy's abilities. I sense there's some racism there, and his opponents always try to smear him as a "radical black guy" but Obama has always positioned himself above racial street fighting. The fact is, Obama is not just smart, he's brilliant.

Second, the guy constantly fights a war of attrition, staying the course, keeping his cool, but applying constant steady pressure to the abutments of the opposition, and over time almost all of them crumble. 

I don't think conservatives have yet figured this out about a guy, who now, is their biggest danger to future political relevance. He's grinding them, slowly, into dust.

It's why I supported him. Because he was change; and because he actually thought change was needed for substantive reasons; and because he had proven his capacity not just to argue for change, but to persist in it, zigging and zagging, waiting and holding back, but still persisting.

The question is: will Netanyahu get the message?

West Wardsboro, Vermont, 11.58 am

Resistance to national standards for schools has long been a bipartisan effort; the far right fears that the feds will impose "liberal" curriculum, while the far left resists accountability for teachers' unions.  But TNR highlights some headway in breaking that resistance:

[H]ere’s the most surprising thing: The movement to create national standards isn’t coming from Washington; it’s coming from the states themselves. Last week, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released a draft of rigorous common standards. These benchmarks would not be enforced by the federal government; rather, they would be voluntarily adopted by the states. An impressive 48 states participated in drafting the standards. (The predictable holdouts? Texas and Alaska.) Already, several have pledged to adopt them. And the National Association of State Boards of Education expects that half of the states will sign on by the end of the year.

Josh Marshall takes a pin to it:

I was in DC last week. And I was again struck, as I used to be when I lived there (1999-2004), by the powerful group-think that affects the place. It’s really no different than you’d see in any other company town. But it’s pervasive and hard to escape.

When I was training down I read an update from a campaign watcher whose work I normally greatly respect. He clearly believed that Health Care Reform was not only a catastrophe for Democrats but that the actual passage of the bill would have no political effect. According to him, we’re on pretty much a straight line between today and the November elections.

Again, I don’t want to paint any rosy pictures. And, as I said, I don’t want to hazard any predictions. But I think this conventional wisdom is quite mistaken. Hard fought victories don’t deplete political capital; they build it. And political wins themselves often have a catalyzing effect that shapes political opinion far more than we realize.

Yep. That’s why most of friends aren’t in politics and I escape every summer to Ptown. Oh, and almost never go to any parties.

Gizmodo reviews Beard Me:

If the internet and indeed, the iPhone, wasn't invented for the sole purpose to test whether your two year old looks better with a chevron or a balbo, then I give up.

Reihan sighs:

If you believe as I do that the president's health reform legislation will not perform as advertised, you can see it as a failure of the policy itself. Or you can see it as an inevitable consequence of the fact that the legislation was, as liberal wonks insist, a "moderate Republican bill," one that true progressives supported only very reluctantly. So to fix the legislation, we'll need to spend more money, further centralize the system, and impose tighter regulation and control. And if that doesn't work, well, clearly we need to spend still more money, centralize the system even more, and impose even tighter regulation and control. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Or, of course, if you make sensible and pragmatic suggestions from the right, you could improve it in a more market-directed fashion. Why don't conservatives focus on that? Why don't they now insist that they in Congress will make sure those Medicare cuts go through to save money – and hold Obama's feet to the fire. Because it might be good in the long term for the country and therefore bad in the short-term for the GOP?

Romney is furious about the passage of Romneycare Obamacare. Massie previews the 2012 race:

Romney is now pledged to running against his own record.

This is an unusual strategy but one forced upon him by a) his actual record and b) the temper of the Republican party and conservative movement. All this trouble over one tiny bill he signed when Governor of Massachusetts! Because Obamcare is, in the view of plenty of sensible observers, merely a souped-up version of the Romneycare Mitt signed into law in Boston – and that he boasted about during the 2008 campaign. Back then it was a case of "I can fix health care because I've done it in the Bay State". How times change.

Actually, nothing changes as fast as Mitt Romney's principles. He aims to please.

The Telegraph reports:

Campaigners had hoped that after his seven page letter on Saturday to Irish victims of child abusing priests in which he said he was "truly sorry" the Pope would use his weekly sermon to apologise in public. But he failed to do so and instead he asked Roman Catholics around the world to be "indulgent towards sinners and pray to God to ask for forgiveness for our failings." He used as an example the Bible parable from John's Gospel in which Christ asks people about to stone an adulteress: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Forgiveness is vital. But before forgiveness, repentance. And sorry, Holy Father, but not many of us have condoned and fomented child rape to defend a now-indefensible hierarchy.

If the Pope had the moral standards and personal responsibility of your average CEO, he'd resign. But once again, it's interests that matter – not the church as a whole, which is us.

Andrew Brown looks for clues in the pope's letter:

Much depends here on the meaning of "properly constituted tribunals", which are not glossed in the accompanying handout. But I think they must mean the secular courts as well as the religious ones. Support for this interpretation comes from a revealing interview earlier this week with the Vatican's chief prosecutor, Mgr Charles Scicluna, who worked under Cardinal Ratzinger at the CDF.

Scicluna says clearly that in Anglo-Saxon countries and in France, bishops are now instructed to report priests to the secular authorities if they are become aware of a crime (outside the confessional). This is obviously something he thinks regrettable – it is like "a parent denouncing his or her own son" he says. But it's there. He also says that in other countries, where the law does not require them to report offences to the civil authorities, the bishops should encourage the victim to report them instead.

This is a clear and welcome change of policy.

Jane Mayer effectively dismantles the massive lacunae of fact and logic in Marc Thiessen's book defending torture as the only thing that prevented a Qaeda homeland terror attack since 2001. Of course, there had been no such mainstream Qaeda attack from 1993 to 2001 either, with no recourse to torture and with intelligence enough to warn president Bush directly and bluntly that an attack was imminent:

In February, 2001, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, called Al Qaeda “the most immediate and serious threat” to the country. Richard Clarke, then the country’s counterterrorism chief, tried without success to get Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national- security adviser, to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda. Thomas Pickard, then the F.B.I.’s acting director, has testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft told him that he wanted to hear no more about Al Qaeda. On August 6, 2001, Bush did nothing in response to a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” As Tenet later put it, “The system was blinking red.”

Horton's comments here. Thiessen makes the usual – totally untrue – statements: that the methods seen at Abu Ghraib had nothing to do with the actions authorized by Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld (the Senate Committee begs to differ; that only one victim was subject to "inhumane" treatment – a fact denied by both the Red Cross, by countless witnesses, by photographs that were somehow not destroyed by the government, and by Bush's own prosecutor at Gitmo. The 2004 CIA report on the torture program described it as a failure, not a success; that's why it was largely ended in the last years of Bush. So was Bush endangering the nation as well?

Read the whole thing. Thiessen's book sounds like rationalization of the irrational, like the work of a criminal unable to confess or even recognize his crime, of a political hack who cannot endure a self-image as someone who really did betray the core values of his own country and the entire West – out of fear, panic, and ignorance. Well, he may need his own alternate reality to sleep at night.

But this subject is too serious not to see in the light of reality.