The Dish

Timothy Kincaid summarizes day eight of the Prop 8 trial:

After having previously petitioned the court as a deeply involved party, Mr. Tam now tried to downplay his connection to ProtectMarriage.com. (Frankly, his reluctance to answer honestly – even when the answer is obvious – does not credit his position.) Boies was able to show that Tam was involved with the Proposition 8 campaign since 2007 and before the proposition itself was written.

Tam testified that he believes that homosexuality is linked to pedophilia and that gays are 12 times more likely to molest children than heterosexuals and that gays want to legalize sex with children. Boies had to drag every admission from him. It was nasty.

Tam testified that he said that homosexuality is mutable based on what he had read at about Dr. Francis Collins on the NARTH website that “homosexuality is not hardwired” and has no genetic basis. (I hope that the plaintiffs have read Dr. Throckmorton’s website where he confirms that Dr. Collins said no such thing.) Tam said he never tried to find out what the APA says because NARTH is a better source.

Larison explains why Obama is described as far left and Bush was described as far right:

The impulse to label an opponent as an extremist is a common and tempting one. It is a very easy thing to do, provided that you are not concerned with accuracy or persuading undecided and unaffiliated people that you are right. These labels are not descriptive. They are a way to express the extent of one’s discontent and disaffection with the other side in a debate.

When some Republican says that Obama and his party have been governing from “the left,” he might even believe it inasmuch as Obama and his party are to his left politically, but what he really means is that he strongly disapproves of how Obama and his party have been governing. He may or may not have a coherent reason for this disapproval, but declaring it to be leftist or radical leftist conveys the depth of his displeasure. That is, it is not analysis of political reality. It is therapy for the person making the statement.

The same thing goes for progressives who were trying to find words to express how outraged they were by Bush. Inevitably, many resorted to using labels such as theocrat, extreme right, radical right and the like. These did not correctly describe the content of Bush’s politics, but they did express the critics’ feelings of disgust and loathing for Bush’s politics.

Dahlia Lithwick examines the Gitmo "suicide" story and the US MSM's refusal to touch it. Maybe someone somewhere can grapple with this narrative and investigate it seriously enough to verify if it really is as horrifying as it appears:

The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be discovered despite the fact that guards checked on prisoners at 10-minute intervals. Horton, reporting on interviews with four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, suggests that the men died at "Camp No" (as in, "No, it doesn't exist"), an alleged black site at Gitmo, and were then moved to the clinic. A massive cover-up followed. Official stories hastily changed from claims that the three men had stuffed rags down their own throats to the elaborate hanging plot. Rear Adm. Harry Harris, then the commander at Guantanamo, not only declared the deaths "suicides," but blamed the victims for "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." And every piece of paper belonging to every last prisoner in Camp America was then seized, amounting to some 1,065 pounds of material, much of it privileged attorney-client correspondence. The bodies of the three alleged suicide victims were returned home to their families, who requested independent autopsies, which then revealed "the removal of the structure that would have been the natural focus of the autopsy: the throat."

Greenwald comments here. Goldblog here. As usual, a total blackout on the right-wing blogosphere, apart from Carter's ad hominems. But look we do not have all the facts yet; but we certainly have enough to reopen this case and pursue it wherever it leads.

"Today, 30-second television ads may be the most effective way to convey a political message. Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds. The First Amendment does not permit Congress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech," – Justice Anthony Kennedy, marking the first time "blog" has been used in a Supreme Court opinion.

Reihan takes issue with me calling the Republicans nihilists. All I know is that their current proposals would insure no one and restrain costs at the margin. As for the Democrats who opposed social security reform in the Bush administration, I disagreed with them. I thought they were demagoguing a necessary reform.

But they did have an argument that social security could be reformed in ways that did not require opting out. And the social security crunch in that period was not as alarming as the healthcare crunch now.

If the GOP had been actively offering a series of alternatives to Obama's proposal that would address the scale of the problem it would be one thing. They haven't. In fact, Brown campaigned on no federal healthcare reform and tax cuts. In an era when healthcare costs are strangling us, and the GOP-debt is crippling us, that's nihilism.

[Apologies for the first headline typo.]

Glendale, California, 3.15 pm

How did Mark Penn make the cover of the Economist?

William Galston asks the President to make a choice:

If [Obama] still wants legislation, he should invest the full authority of his office to persuade the House to endorse the Senate bill, accompanied by a package of amendments to be considered separately under the reconciliation process.  If he has concluded that he has no choice but to take the issue off the table, he should say so. If he continues to utter hopeful banalities devoid of concrete meaning, the fragile reform coalition will collapse within days, with consequences that will endure for decades.

Amen. But this hanging back is pretty classic Obama. I’m waiting for the SOTU. It would be dumb to pre-empt it. But it doesn’t get more high-drama or high stakes than this. Look: I’m now old enough to remember when both Thatcher and Reagan at this point in their terms of office were being written off as failures. At this point Thatcher’s ratings were much lower than Obama’s and Reagan’s were roughly where Obama’s are and sinking to 39 percent. But that’s exactly the moment when they became the leaders they were.

Reagan made some small adjustments but insisted in retaining his core message of change. Thatcher, embattled by the opposiiton and her own party and massive public opposition, gave her famous “The Lady’s Not For Turning” speech. It seemed madness to many at the time – political suicide.

It was, in fact, political salvation. Obama has been given a gift with the timing of the SOTU. It’s in his hands now. And the position of so many of us who supported his unlikely candidacy from the very beginning is getting be clearer and clearer.

Fight, Mr President. Fight.

Daniel Indiviglio writes that yesterday's Supreme Court decision "won't harm democracy and should actually help it." Matt Welch loves it. Megan is unfazed:

And respectfully, one does not need to be an idiot savant from Introductory Ec class to think that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech" means that, well, Congress shouldn't make any law abridging the freedom of speech, even if that speech is done by corporations.  Nor is it crazy to think that as long as people have the right of exit, their decision not to exit legitimates the ability of organizations to speak for them.

I understand this point, just as I understand the resilience of the Second Amendment. But the theoretical defense leads, to my mind, to a practical nightmare, given the way our politics are now constructed in ways I don't believe the Founders would have intended.

That's why I haven't criticized the decision on constitutional grounds. I'm not enough of an expert on that. But the notion that there is no difference between an individual's inviolable right to speak or publish his or her own views and a corporation's right to flood the marketplace with advertizing to advance its own economic interests and to effectively buy off politicians' votes seems willfully perverse to me in the real world. I see the principle. But I'm pragmatic enough to believe this can be balanced by some good faith attempts to avoid the wholesale purchase of democratic speech by moneyed interests.

Emily Miller insists the magazine should at least be considered:

The Enquirer scooped the old-guard media for the better part of a year — even after it broke a blockbuster political story that should have piqued the curiosity of working journos at any big-time news organization. A couple of nagging questions present themselves: Would the reporters "on the bus" have pressed the staff for what they really knew of the rumored affair if the reporting had come from a mainstream media outlet? Even more troubling: Would a leading Republican presidential candidate have similarly escaped the media's scrutiny?

Well, Palin sure did. Ravi Somalya adds:

If the Washington Post, or the New Orleans Times-Picayune or any paper really, had broken a story of this magnitude their Pulitzer nod would barely be in doubt. Edwards called the Enquirer, while trying to disparage its claims he was cheating and had fathered a child "tabloid trash." That stigma is the only reason its investigative reporters will not be considered.