The Dish

by Chris Bodenner

Impressed by Palin's appearance on Leno, Richard Lawson proposes a win-win:

Despite her dumb politics, Palin has a certain TV-ready verve to her that could be well-harnessed by the soft touch, stiff chair confines of a daytime talk show. There she could spout forth about a whole wide variety of non-political topics — things like Weight and Sadness and Celebrity and America. Everything she said would still be annoying and, for the most part, categorically wrong, but it wouldn't really matter, because she'd just be a silly talk show host. Not some great governmental hope.

The Dish would certainly sleep better at night.

by Jonathan Bernstein

The important thing to remember about all budget gimmicks is that they there are really only two ways to change the federal deficit: raise more revenues, or cut spending.  The presidents and Congresses that have really wanted to cut deficits (most notably George H.W. Bush in 1990 and Bill Clinton in 1993, along with Democratic Congresses in both cases) have done so by actually supporting proposals that would change government revenues and/or outlays. 

Any time you hear someone propose a budget gimmick instead of proposing to raise revenues or cut spending, you can be fairly certain that it's just hot air.  The only exception I'd make would be for a pol who does both.  Barack Obama, for example, is putting together a commission which is purely a public relations gimmick, but he's also supporting a health care plan that will, if implemented, probably cut the long-term deficit quite a bit. 

(Commissions can work if everyone involved wants to do something but doesn't want to leave fingerprints; that's not the case with Obama's commission). 

In general, I'd probably be willing to speculate that the more distant the gimmick, the less serious the authors are about it.  So the one gimmick that actually might matter is the Democrats' PAYGO rules…although even there, the only real way it's going to matter is if Congress and the president abide by those rules, which means that the rules themselves are close to, although not quite completely, irrelevant.

Long wind-up to: the very least serious thing you can possibly do about the federal budget deficit would be to sponsor a Constitutional amendment on the subject.  Bruce Bartlett takes part two recent examples, the Blue Dog balanced budget amendment and the Pence-Hensarling spending amendment.  Bartlett nails it:

I’m starting to think that Samuel Johnson was wrong; patriotism isn’t the last refuge of the scoundrel, it’s a constitutional amendment. The only purpose of such amendments is to allow members of Congress to shirk their responsibility to propose and support meaningful deficit reduction measures now. Unless they are cosponsors of Paul Ryan’s detailed deficit reduction proposal, or have put forward one equally as stringent and detailed, they can’t be considered serious about the budget and should simply be ignored when saying anything about the need for constitutional changes to make them do what they should already be doing.

I'm not a deficit hawk…on deficits, I belong to the Brad DeLong school.  But for those of you who actually care about deficits — if you see a pol coming brandishing a Constitutional amendment, I strongly urge you to either run away quickly or laugh in his or her face.  At any rate, there are no procedural impediments that would make lowering deficits hard, so there's no reason to look for a procedural solution.

by Patrick Appel

Douthat defends his dream presidential contender against George Packer:

[T]he O.M.B.’s $60 billion estimate [for the Iraq war] anticipated “a conflict, a period of stabilization in Iraq, and the phased withdrawal of a large number of American forces within that six-month window,” which turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong. But the question is whether it was the Office of Management and Budget’s job to figure out in advance how wrong Donald Rumsfeld’s plan for Iraq would turn out to be. Daniels wasn’t the Secretary of Defense, and he certainly didn’t set the administration’s strategy; he took their strategic vision and tried to cost it out. He could have publicly questioned that vision, and issued sweeping 10-year cost estimates for what might happen if Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” plan sent Iraq spinning into chaos — but that isn’t what O.M.B. directors generally do.

by Graeme Wood

Moringa oleifera, a tree in northwest India, will feed you and clean your water, and it won't die in a drought.  A scientist at a Canadian NGO is urging the wretched of the earth to plant it and solve several problems at once.

I wonder, idly, what other plants have properties that will allegedly save the world.  (I realize this is an exaggeration of the powers claimed for the moringa.) Readers of this blog will no doubt know about the magical properties of hemp.  To these I might add the American sycamore and water hyacinth, which all-purpose genius Freeman Dyson suggested as plants that we might use to remove carbon from the atmosphere rapidly and arrest climate change. 

(Via Greenbang. Photo: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, from Wikipedia, whose full gallery can be found here.)

by Patrick Appel

Yesterday Jonathan Bernsteined reflected excessive voting. Joyner concurs. As does Yglesias:

Larry Bartels did a great paper once (PDF) about how in US political culture, the answer to every government reform problem is always that things need to be “more democratic” and this often proceeds without any real effort to think about what you’re trying to achieve. There’s obviously a sense in which subjecting more and more officials to popular election is “more democratic” but if you think that what’s good about democracy is that it creates accountability you’ll see that asking people to vote for Commissioner of the General Land Office is undermining accountability.

Ryan Sager adds his voice to the chorus:

Corruption is endemic to government. At a low level, it’s a cost of doing business. But if you want to reduce it even further, you’re going to need to go back to a system where fewer elected officials do a lot more appointing. That way, one man or woman is accountable when things go wrong. When everyone’s elected, no one’s accountable.

by Patrick Appel

Howard Gleckman moderated a panel that ran through several ideas.

by Patrick Appel

Lieberman has introduced it. The Advocate snags an interview:

“I think a guess right now — and this is really a guess — if this bill came to a vote tomorrow, we’d have over 50 votes and that’s saying a lot,” [Lieberman] said. “Do we have 60? Not clear yet, but possible.” But Lieberman also said he had spoken with Chairman Levin “preliminarily” about including the legislation in this year’s defense authorization bill before it’s passed out of committee.

by Patrick Appel

Joyner counters Ross:

It seems to me that the chief barrier to bloggers getting elected to public office isn’t so much their typically introverted personalities or lack of access to money but the mere fact that we’ve accumulated a long paper (pixel?) trail of recording every fool thought that’s passed through our minds over the last several years. Even bright, thoughtful, decent types like Douthat and Klein — and Lord knows, Kaus and Joyner — have written things that would kill a campaign dead, dead, dead if it showed up in an attack ad.

As Andrew's blogatical continued, Jonathan Bernstein predicted an eventual comeback for the public option, wondered why the Republicans didn't focus their attack on the individual mandate, surveyed the field of professional intellectuals in public office, vented over the excessive voting in Texas, and riffed on the role of the Senate parliamentarian. 

Alex Massie analyzed Labour's lines of attack, plucked some wise words from the Tory chair, honored the death of Michael Foot, highlighted the remarkable story of a Holocaust veteran, and reflected on the waning role of newspapers. Graeme Wood lauded Brooks' latest column and compiled some crazy Japanese MHBs. Patrick went another round with Larison over the Leveretts.

In other coverage, Obama defied the Cheneys by killing another terrorist leader, Cohn and Ezra sounded off on the president's HCR speech, Chait was cautiously optimistic about the bill, Marc Lynch debated war reporting, Ackerman took down Romney's foreign policy, and Palin lied again.

In marriage news, opponents failed to stop equality in DC (photos here). A Dish reader contrasted the Cheneys with the courage of John Adams. Others chimed in on Catholic Charities' latest craziness. Roger Ebert got some of his voice back. Patrick definitely does not like breast milk. And our MHB is blazing through the blogospheres.

— C.B.

by Jonathan Bernstein

Health care reform junkies: you're probably wondering right now…so, what's the deal with the Senate parliamentarian?  Should I trust Republicans who are telling me that the parliamentarian is just a partisan arm of the majority party?  Or should I trust Democrats that the parliamentarian is neutral?  Isn't there some unbiased source that can help me out here?  And, what is wrong with me that I'm actually thinking about — actually concerned about — the United States Senate parliamentarian?

Can't help you out with the last question, but for the first ones, see this item at the Monkey Cage for the abstract to a new paper by Tony Madonna.  I skimmed the paper so I can't really comment in depth on it but I can tell you that the opening paragraph has an anecdote that features John Randolph, John Quincy Adams, and John Calhoun, and other stories he tells within the paper feature a lot of other interesting, famous (or infamous) Senators, although I'm afraid to say that there's no appearance by Vice President George Clinton as a presiding officer.  Short story: since the Senate hired a parliamentarian, the rulings of the chair have stopped being partisan.

I should add, however, that for the most part this is really a red herring.  The parliamentarian would matter a lot if the Democrats were trying to put the entire bill through reconciliation, but they're not.  I'm not sure what's going to be in the bill and what isn't, but the most difficult issue of which I'm aware are lifetime caps (I don't think it was actually in the Senate bill, and if that's correct I'd think it would be in the patch bill)…do the Republicans really want a vote on that one?  More generally, as I've said before, the actual reconciliation bill is almost all ice cream, no spinach, and even if the Republicans do manage to knock out a couple of items it's not clear to me that it will make much difference in the grand scheme of things, although of course any provision in any law may have serious substantive effects on some people.