The Dish

More fun from the book "edited" by Adam Bellow and "written" by Sarah Palin. I have to say I guffawed out loud when reading her citations of Plato and Aristotle, when what she really meant to cite was Quote Garden. But she can't even get more folksy references correct. Geoffrey Dunn:

Perhaps the most embarrassing gaffe so far is her mis-attributed quote to UCLA basketball legend John Wooden. As the epigram to Chapter Three, "Drill, Baby, Drill," Palin assigns the following remarks to the Hall of Fame hoops coach:

Our land is everything to us… I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it–with their lives.

Only the quote wasn't by John Wooden. It was written by a Native American activist named John Wooden Legs in an essay entitled "Back on the War Ponies," which appeared in a left-wing anthology, We Are the People: Voices from the Other Side of American History, edited by Nathaniel May, Clint Willis, and James W. Loewen.

Ah, Quote Garden. Live by it; die by it. Will this be corrected in future editions? Will any of the lies and errors in this book? We know the answer. The book is published by Harper Collins and edited by Adam Bellow and Jonathan Burnham. They have as much interest in factual accuracy as Jayson Blair.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen ponders Islam's relationship to modernity:

Over the next few decades, it will not surprise me if major Muslim leaders begin emphasizing how Islam preserved the works of great philosophers and fostered scientific learning throughout the Middle Ages as evidence of their faith’s integral relationship with science and modernity. In fact, it’s already pretty common to hear similar talking points from moderate Islamic leaders in the United States and Europe. This narrative may not be completely accurate, but that’s almost beside the point. If the number of liberal Muslims reaches a critical mass, they’ll find ways to justify their political and cultural outlook within a rich theological tradition, just as liberal Christians have done in the West.

But it took centuries for that to happen within Christianity. The question today is whether in a world of weapons of mass destruction we have the same amount of time to withstand the fruits of murderous religious certainty.

"Many of us in the progressive movement just want to throw up. Democrats put one hand out to ask for money, and with the other they stab you in the back," – Steve Goldstein of Garden State Equality, New Jersey's gay rights group.

The best news in a long time comes via the Washington Post's new poll:

The GOP is a party that has become increasingly conservative, particularly on fiscal issues. Obama's stimulus package of nearly $800 billion, bailouts for banks and the auto industry, and a health-care bill with a price tag of nearly $900 billion over 10 years have aroused strong opposition on the right. Almost three-quarters of Republicans and GOP-leaners identify themselves as "conservative" on most issues, up sharply from a couple of years ago… On fiscal issues, the percentage calling themselves conservative has soared to more than eight in 10. More striking is that a majority considers themselves to be "very conservative" on fiscal issues, up about 20 points in two years.

The better news is that Republican voters understand that the GOP is also responsible for the fiscal mess:

Just 1 percent pick George W. Bush as the best reflection of the party's principles, and only a single person in the poll cites former vice president Richard B. Cheney. About seven in 10 say Bush bears at least "some" of the blame for the party's problems.

The problem, it seems to me, is that most sane people understand that offering no stimulus this year and no bank bailout and no auto industry bailout would have led to an unemployment rate far higher than we have now, and a much, much steeper recession which would have compounded the debt, not helped it. McCain could have opposed TARP in the campaign but didn't. Maybe a president could have just said: let it all collapse, it will revive soon enough. I just doubt that any actual president could ever have actually done that.

And the bigger problem is: what do we cut now? If we are ruling out any tax increases, then huge reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and defense are going to be essential. Who is proposing that among the GOP leadership? Not even Palin. And the base is far less interested in obstructing climate change legislation than expanding private health insurance through public subsidy. So polarization may actually decline next year if health reform passes. 

I'd say all this is grist for a third party Perot-style fiscal reform movement. Unless Obama gets there first and calls the GOP bluff on spending. But it isn't good news for the GOP. They have no serious leaders, no practical policies that can win a majority, and no coherent plan for actually reducing government and debt other than adolescent protests. Other than that, they're on a roll.

A contribution from the New Zealand Campaign Against Landmines (CALM):

Here's an interesting new data point in the debate about what constitutes support for Israel. The neoconservative position, it has always seemed to me, is that support for anything Israel does is the litmus test. There is no weighing of issues here; there is just a demand that whatever is the most "pro-Israel" position be embraced, even if many sincerely believe such a policy would hurt – and has hurt – the Jewish state.

In recent years, that means supporting the annexation of the West Bank in perpetuity for the Jewish state. Almost all neocons deny this, and almost all are being disingenuous. They are always anti-anti-settlements. And that's why Seth Lipsky's pro-settlement candor is so refreshing. My colleague Jeffrey Goldberg opposes those settlements. And he dared to worry about Sarah Palin's desire for more and more settlements as a way to win the forever religious war she favors against Islam. Lipsky is having none of this whining. Palin's statement to Barbara Walters was as follows:

“I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

Lipsky's response:

When I read her reply, I thought that it was wonderful.

In the two generations in which I’ve been covering the Middle East debate, it was one of the few times a public figure gave in response to a question about the settlements an answer that I would call ideal. It seemed to me courageous, in that Palin was going against not only the administration but many in her own party and the gods of political correctness. There was no shilly-shallying about the Oslo process and the Quartet and the United Nations. Palin didn’t seem particularly worried one way or another about how she might be perceived. She is just on Israel’s side.

So you see how, in fact, the neocons are at perfect peace with an alliance with Christianists to foment religious war and Greater Israel as a prelude to Armageddon. They don't buy the Armageddon stuff (many are atheists), but what matters to them is simply being "on Israel's side", as long as that side never contemplates any sort of negotiation or peace agreement with the enemy. Lipsky reads "Going Rogue" and is therefore thrilled:

I couldn’t find anything in the book that made me worry about the fact that even on the difficult issues she supports Israel.

Again: "supports Israel". That's the only criterion there is. There is a reason Bill Kristol selected Palin as his future Quayle/W. And it has a lot to do with the Middle East.

Jonah Lehrer yawns at some recent supercomputer news:

In the coming years, there will be many grand announcements about supercomputers that attempt to imitate the machinery inside the skull. One way to distinguish between such claims is to look at their cellular realism: Are these microchips really behaving like neurons? Or has the simulation taken a shortcut, and turned our neurons into dumb little microchips? Because we sometimes forget that the "mind is like a computer" metaphor is only a metaphor. The mind is really just a piece of meat.

The future of Scotland is actually fascinating right now. A terrific piece of analysis can be found here by Jackie Ashley. One looming alternative to complete independence is the Scottish Nationalist Party's proposal of "devo-max" which would ask Scottish voters to approve everything-but-independence from Britain:

It basically means the Edinburgh parliament and government getting control over everything except defense, foreign policy and macroeconomics. It would keep the pound, the British army and the Queen.

This may be particularly interesting if the next government is a Tory one dedicated to tough spending cuts (the kind the US Republicans are too dishonest to propose). Scotland gets a disproportionate amount of public spending – it's a red state in an American sense. Real cuts would therefore further inflame Scottish independence, even though David Cameron is a staunch unionist. But he is also a Tory.

And if Scotland's seats were removed from the Westminster parliament, the Conservative Party's structural advantage in England could tip the political balance decisively to the center-right. 

For my part, I increasingly find the union with Scotland an anachronism. Britain is a largely false construct of relatively recent origins, forged on empire and now without much of a purpose. For England to shrug off the fiscal burden of Scotland and Northern Ireland would be a huge gain for the over-taxed English. And Saint Andrew wouldn't be too miffed either.

(Painting: The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew – Caravaggio.)

Pago Pago, American Samoa, 11.39 am

Here's one small impact of ending the ban on HIV-positive tourists, visitors and immigrants: the International AIDS Society (IAS) will now hold the XIX International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2012) in Washington, DC, in July 2012. Finally, the US can take center-stage in the battle against this disease rather than remain the discriminatory pariah country it remained under Clinton and Bush.