The Dish

Not a dumb-ass tea-party slogan – a Republican candidate for Senate. Seriously.

A reader writes:

What exactly was "smug, self-righteous" about Mo'Nique's speech? Mo'Nique is a large, dark-skinned Black woman — one of the most vilified images in this country for centuries — and that she won an Oscar for a supporting role (only the 3rd Black woman to do so in 82 years) is astounding, even with her other awards leading up to last night, because Oscars are known to flip the script (such as Geoffrey Fletcher beating Jason Reitman).

That she also won for a role that made quite a few in the Black community cringe was even more astounding. 

Her respect and knowledge of cultural history regarding her Oscar was such that she not only made reference to Hattie McDaniel as "Mammy" (for many, another cringe-inducing role) but that even her style dress and flower was reminiscent of first Black Academy Awards-winner, Hattie's attire on her Oscar night.

For me, her tone was on point; her reference to her husband convincing her to take a role that was not popular (and it so wasn't) was truthful; her giving love to fellow cast members/"Precious" family was correct; her acknowledging Oprah's and Tyler's roles in the movie's visibility was absolutely true; and her shout-outs to reps, etc. was standard acceptance speech fare. 

It looks like an impasse between Emanuel and Holder with little or no presidential leadership.

In the wake of last week's shooting, James Joyner begs:

Can we please stop with the political name-calling whenever one of these nuts goes off?

Look, we’re a big country.  There are over 300 million of us.  Almost everyone holds a position or two that’s way off the charts and a whole lot of people believe in 9/11 Trutherism, black helicopters, and all the rest.  Less than a handful of those people are out trying to kill people.    However stupid or loathesome a political view may be, the fact that some nut also holds it adds nothing to the counter-argument.

 

Megan Carpentier flags a new AARP study on older unemployed Americans:

An analysis of unemployment data from January 2000 to December 2009 shows that the number of unemployed Americans 55 and older increased by more than 331 percent last decade. Importantly, the analysis uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which does not count people as unemployed if they are retired or if they have ceased to look for work. That means that the more than 2 million Americans over the age of 55 who are unemployed are not retirees –  they are people actively looking for work but unable to find any.

The most illuminating, profound and brilliant piece on the effects of long-term unemployment on the American psyche, family, society and politics is Don Peck's riveting cover-story in the new Atlantic. Really: read it and you will read everything on this subject in the news in a different and more sobering light. It's one more reason I believe that old media print journalism remains as vital as ever. And one more reason why I'm so proud to work among so many brilliant and committed writers at the Atlantic.

Ackerman runs through the Bush loyalists decrying the "Al Qaeda Seven" smear.

Contra Juan Cole, Marc Lynch believes that while it matters who comes out on top "there's almost certainly going to be a coalition of some kind (fully inclusive or otherwise) and the differences probably won't be as stark as some people expect." He cautions:

[A] main headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process. The election campaign (as opposed to the results, which we still don't know) showed clearly that Iraqis are determined to seize control of their own future and make their own decisions. The U.S. ability to intervene productively has dramatically receded, as the Obama administration wisely recognizes. The election produced nothing to change the U.S. drawdown schedule, and offered little sign that Iraqis are eager to revise the SOFA or ask the U.S. to keep troops longer. Iraq is in Iraqi hands, and the Obama administration is right both to pay close attention and to resist the incessant calls to 'do more.'"

The whole post is worth reading.

Greg Scoblete comments on my debate with Tom Ricks. He thinks that "that Ricks' argument is going to win the day, not because it's terribly persuasive on the merits, but because it operates within the conventional wisdom about how the U.S. should interface in the Middle East":

The trouble with Ricks' argument, and the course Washington appears to be on, is that it is predicated on best-case scenarios. It is, fundamentally, a gamble that nothing major will go wrong inside Iraq that 50,000 U.S. troops cannot contain. If we bet wrong, there is absolutely no rationale for not sending in even more American troops. A commitment of 50,000 troops is essentially a commitment of 150,000, to be stationed in the country indefinitely.

In a response to Dowd, Goldblog acknowledges:

It is undeniably true that Jewish fundamentalists wield disproportionate power in Israeli decision-making; it is true that a small minority — fundamentalist settlers — has kept Israel entangled in the lives of the Palestinians on the West Bank; it is true that, because of the power of the Orthodox rabbinate, it is easier in some ways to be Jewish in America than in the Jewish state (Just ask women who try to pray at the Western Wall.) All this is not to say that Israel isn't still the most enlightened democracy in the Middle East, but there's not much of a competition. And it should be cause for deep worry when the Saudis — not especially known for their liberalism — have a point about illiberal Israel.

What I found telling was MoDo's more recent column in which she came up with the following brilliant formulation that reflects on the pro-Israel voices so over-represented in the MSM punditariat:

Obama created an obstacle for himself by demanding that Israel stop expanding settlements when it was not going to do so — even though it should — and when that wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs.

Got that? Now I have no idea what Maureen means when she says that a settlement freeze "wasn’t the most important condition to Arabs." Much that I've read seemed to suggest that the various Sunni Arab regimes were looking for precisely a freezing of further Israeli colonization of the West Bank as proof that Obama really was going to break from the whatever-Israel-wants policy of the previous eight years.

But notice that it is Obama's fault for asking an alleged ally merely to freeze – not reverse – construction settlement as a good faith gesture to the peace process and as a favor to the US in trying to recapture the role of an honest broker in the region. It is not Israel's fault – even though Maureen thinks Israel should have done it. 

Nothing illustrates better the total bizarreness of the US-Israel relationship. No one in Washington – apart from a few Likudniks and Palinite end-timers – actually supports more settlements or any settlements i the West Bank. At the same time, Washington exercizes a UN veto to protect Israel from international law, funnels a vast amount of foreign and military aid to the country, helped finance the pulverization of Gaza last year, provides absurd international cover for Israel's 150 nukes, has worked tirelessly to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capacity, and on and on.

In return? Fuck you, Obama. To which the overwhelming response in Washington is: Obama screwed up. 

There is something completely awry here and it has rarely been more evident than in the last twelve months.

Bruce Bartlett:

Some Pollyannas, like my friend Larry Kudlow, think we can just grow our way out of the debt by cutting taxes. But this is not really possible given the magnitude of our problem. First, increasing real growth doesn't have as much effect on the debt as one might imagine. According to OMB, raising the rate of productivity, the basic component of real GDP growth, by 0.5% per year over the next 75 years only reduces the long-run fiscal gap by 17%.

Moreover, raising productivity even that much would be hard; over the last five years the productivity growth rate has averaged 1.8% per year, so we would have to raise it by one-fourth just to reduce the projected debt by 17%.

He also explains why the debt can't be inflated away.