The Dish

While arguing why the Senate's proposed "0.5 increase in the Medicare payroll tax on upper-income people: individuals earning more than $200,000, families earning more than $250,000" is unlikely to pass, Frum explains a basic political truth:

As payroll taxes become more “progressive,” the programs they support become more blatantly redistributionist. And smart Democrats from FDR onward have always understood that the secret of popularity for a government program is to appear non-redistributive: everybody pays, everybody gets. Then you can say: It’s insurance, not welfare. With this measure, Medicare becomes more welfare-like and therefore more politically vulnerable.

Which is a start.

Disco Stu has too much time on his hands:

Mark Thompson points out a left-wing ritual:

[T]hese particular FBI statistics are virtually useless for evaluating year-to-year trends – always have been, always will be.  This year, the FBI itself went out of its way to warn against such readings, stating “our Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program doesn’t report trends in hate crime stats—yearly increases or decreases often occur because the number of agencies who report to us varies from year to year.”

Yet in reporting an 11 percent increase in hate crimes against gays while lamenting a mere 1% decrease in race-based hate crimes, Think Progress and Feministing ignore this important disclaimer. 

This failure is significant because several hundred more law enforcement agencies participated in this year’s survey than last year’s survey: last year’s survey had the participation of 13,241 agencies, this year’s of 13,690.  Of those agencies, 2025 in 2007 and 2145 in 2008 actually reported any hate crimes.  This discrepancy in reporting agencies alone makes a worthwhile one-to-one, year-to-year comparison very difficult to make.  At a minimum, for the purposes of this year’s numbers, the discrepancy in reporting agencies accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the apparent increase in hate crimes against gays.

Released yesterday:

(1) Smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill
(2) Market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;
(3) Market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;
(4) Workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check
(5) Legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;
(6) Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;
(7) Containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat
(8) Retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;
(9) Protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and
(10) The right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership

Where to begin?

1) Are they saying that the archetypal spending bill they oppose would be a stimulus package in the worst recession since the 1930s? C'mon. Surely, a bill like Medicare D, unfunded and passed during a boom, would be a more apposite example. So on the first count, we have partisanship, not principle winning out.

2. "Government-run healthcare" is a talking point, not an analysis. Do they mean the public option? Or any attempt to help the working poor get private health insurance through government subsidies? And on this count, Mitt Romney is disqualified from being a Republican after his health insurance reform in Massachusetts.

3. They do not mention climate change, which is the entire fricking reason for cap and trade. And what are "market-based energy reforms"? Isn't cap-and-trade specifically designed to operate with markets, not against them?

4. Fine.

5. Utopian.

6. They want a surge in Iraq now? I thought we had one. And military-recommended troop surges? Are they saying that strategy in war should not be driven by the president, but by generals? And McChrystal offered various options for a "surge". Which one is the "military-recommended one"? And how can one reconcile 1. with 6. since the expense of these two endless occupations and exercises in nation-building is one of the biggest new expenditures the country has?

7. Containment of Iran? Well that's an interesting development. Except that it also means "effective action" to "eliminate" their nuclear weapons or weapons technology. Does that mean a military attack? Or sanctions? Or is this as vacuous as it sounds?

8. More with the gays.

9. They oppose denial of healthcare by the government but not denial of healthcare by the private sector?

10. Guns!

If a potential Republican candidate disagrees with more than two of the above, the RNC wants to deny funding. I'm not sure how anyone could agree or disagree with this crapulous mishmash of rhetorical degeneracy. But as a sign of intellectual health, it is depressing. It's a sign that denial is deep and a serious attempt to govern, as opposed to posture, is still far from the Republican psyche.

The Daily What:

Cancer-stricken Disney characters by MMS Recife for the Children’s Cancer Support Center. Copy: “Once upon a time a girl dreamed to be just like other children.” Hi-res: Little Mermaid; Snow White; Pinocchio.

Just one snapshot:

Megan warns:

[Government bankruptcy] is not inevitable; it is theoretically possible to raise taxes to cope with Medicare growth, though it would be extraordinarily painful to do so.   In the face of fiscal crisis, it might also be possible to make Medicare cuts that we have otherwise been unable to stick with.  But as any competent development economist will be happy to tell you, every dollar you add, or interest group you create, makes it less likely that this sort of resolution will happen.

Matt Steinglass counters:

Right now, Medicare cuts are politically off-limits. You need to have a countervailing political claim to make them possible. The need to create universal health insurance coverage is that countervailing claim. Our political system has never been able to approach the idea of cuts to Medicare. Until now. Barack Obama is the first president who may be able to pass Medicare cuts, because he’s doing it as part of a bid for universal health insurance.

The Kentucky State Police report:

The Kentucky State Police Post 11 in London, with the assistance of the FBI, the U.S. Forest Service, the State Medical Examiner’s Office and the Clay County Coroner’s Office, has concluded the investigation into the death of William E. Sparkman, Jr.

The investigation, based upon evidence and witness testimony, has concluded that Mr. Sparkman died during an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide.

While all the details of the investigation will not be released at this time, the unusual level of attention and speculation attributed to Mr. Sparkman’s death necessitates this release of information. The investigation indicates that Mr. Sparkman died of asphyxiation/strangulation at the same location where he was discovered in Clay County, Ky. Despite the fact that Mr. Sparkman was found hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, rope around his neck and the word “FED” written on his chest, analysis of the evidence determined Mr. Sparkman’s death was self-inflicted.

A thorough examination of evidence from the scene, to include DNA testing, as well as examination of his vehicle and his residence resulted in the determination that Mr. Sparkman, alone, handled the key pieces of evidence with no indications of any other persons involved. Witness statements, which are deemed credible, indicate Mr. Sparkman discussed ending his own life and these discussions matched details discovered during the course of the investigation.

It was learned that Mr. Sparkman had discussed recent federal investigations and the perceived negative attitudes toward federal entities by some residents of Clay County. It was also discovered during the investigation that Mr. Sparkman had recently secured two life insurance policies for which payment for suicide was precluded.

All tips and leads, including those from the public, were thoroughly investigated but were found to be inconsistent with any known facts or evidence. It is the conclusion of the Kentucky State Police, the FBI, the U.S. Forest Service, the State Medical Examiner’s Office, and the Clay County Coroner’s Office that Mr. Sparkman died in an intentional, self-inflicted act that was staged to appear as a homicide.

A reader writes:

It's very simple why women don't like her as much as men. Women saw through Sarah Palin and we saw through her quickly. Men are literal and are more likely to say what they mean  and mean what they say. Women are more nuanced and better able to persuade and manipulate others with their words. So it's quite natural for us to be able to look below the surface of another woman's words and grasp the intentions behind them. 

Sarah Palin is the peppy cheerleader in high school all the boys thought was so sweet but the girls knew was really a vicious shrew. She's the new girl in the office who wears tight shirts and three-inch heels, is super-friendly to her male superiors, ignores the other women, and gets promoted sooner than her more capable and hard working peers. She's the outgoing PTA mom all of the other women are scared to cross because they will find themselves put on the worst committees. Only a woman knows how to give another woman a sweet smile and at the same time cut her down to size with an artfully crafted "compliment" without male observers having a clue about what just happened. It's like a dog whistle.

After her convention speech that so many pundits raved about, I talked to a few of my Republican girlfriends and they all disliked her immediately, telling me things like, "she's mean", "who does she think she is putting Obama down like that" and "I just don't like her". And these were women who, all except one, ended up voting for McCain anyway, although much less enthusiastically than they would have before his VP pick. The one who switched her vote to Obama did so solely because of Sarah Palin. It wasn't really the attack lines the McCain camp gave her to deliver that had turned my friends off. It was the relish with which she delivered them.

The Republican women I know who love Palin are a great deal like her–simplistic thinkers who are always feeling victimized themselves. I have a feeling that if the McCain camp had spent more than a weekend checking Palin out, a woman on his staff (my money would be on Nicole Wallace) would have figured out what kind of person she was and none of us would know her name right now.

And let's face it: the straight men are also bedazzled by the beauty. Men are led first and foremost by an organ a little cruder than the brain. And Rich Lowry's starbursts – God love him – render him merely human. And blind.

(Photo: Sarah Palin holding her infant with Down Syndrome on a book tour stop in Roanoke, Virginia.)