The Dish

As Palin's marketing tour continued, Jessica Valenti targeted her double standards on gender, Kristol seemed to be scheming, and Larison countered Kristol. We chronicled another odd lie, and featured four near lies here, here, here, and here – the latter of which targets the Dish.

In KSM coverage, cognitive dissonance appeared strong on the far right, two former Bush officials voiced support of civilian trials, and David Feige worried about the implications of a "show trial." In other coverage, Andrew was aghast at the GOP's hypocrisy over healthcare spending, Suderman and Douthat dreaded the future debate, Crist looked like he might switch teams, a reader confronted Andrew over his federalist stance on abortion, and another sent word from Gilo.

"The View From Your Window" is becoming a big success. But there are less than 500 copies left at the special $16.25 price, so act now if you plan to buy one -  or 75.

— C.B.

Larison counters Kristol:

Were [Palin] to side openly with McCain in a primary against Hayworth, whose views match up a lot more closely with her supporters’ views, she would be seen as imitating McCain’s worst habits. She would be considered a worse sell-out than McCain. She would be doing exactly the opposite of what she did in NY-23. Her intervention may have failed to elect Hoffman, but rank-and-file conservatives generally loved her for it anyway. She would fritter all that away if she backed McCain.

Is Kristol worrying that Steve Schmidt may be right about her?

A reader writes:

I just received my order of six Window View books (paid the initial price of $29.95) and then ordered 75 once I saw them (at the new price of $16.25). I’ve seen mixed results from self-publishing places in the past, so I wanted to see a real example before I ordered many as gifts. I would imagine that there may be others like me who will order one for themselves and then order more for friends/family and business clients at Christmas once they see how impressive it is in real life.

Well: 75 is a lot. But I'm glad the reader sees just how beautiful the book turned out. Some might fear that print-on-demand makes for a cheaper cheesier book. But if that was true in the past, it isn't now. This book is as good a quality as any you'll find in any store. The low price reflects the power of outsourcing and also the Dish's decision to make no profit on this. I have a feeling we are going to have do another mass order given the strength of the demand so far. We'll report back on Monday. But if you want the $16.25 price in time for Christmas, supplies are fast running out …

John Sides throws a few handfuls of salt at that PPP poll. Sager tries to understand what the poll means:

Both 2000 and 2004 were close enough to justify some amount of paranoia. Now, perhaps, the Republicans are paying back the Democratic conspiracy mongering of the last decade with their own childishness. ACORN is the GOP’s Diebold, maybe. “Barack Obama is illegitimate,” is the Republicans’ version of “George W. Bush is going to suspend elections in 2008 and seize power as a dictator.” The difference, though, would seem to be how widespread this stuff is. I haven’t seen good polling on how many Democrats bought into the crazier theories during the Bush years, but it couldn’t possibly have been this widespread. Could it have?

A new poll shows a 43 percent swing against him in ten months. Why? Among other things, he believes Obama is a legitimate president. Moulitsas suggests:

If I'm Charlie Crist, I realize that I'm toast in the Republican primary. I note that a three-way race is a coin flip at best. But as a Democrat… switching parties and making an earnest transition on the issues would be the cleanest path to a Senate seat. It's clear that he's no longer welcome in his own party. And he has a choice to make — remain as a hated interloper in his existing party, or try to find a more hospitable home elsewhere.

It's hard to see how today's religious and angry Republican base can tolerate people like Snowe or Colins or Specter or Crist or Huntsman for much longer.

Surowiecki wants to reform the tax system:

A debt-ridden economy is inherently more fragile and more volatile. This doesn’t mean that the tax system caused the financial crisis; after all, the tax breaks have been around for a long time, and the crisis is new. But, as a recent I.M.F. study found, tax distortions likely made the total amount of debt that people and companies took on much bigger. And that made the bursting of the housing bubble especially damaging. So encouraging people to take on debt qualifies as a genuinely bad idea.

[…]

The clearest hurdle to these changes may be political, but the bigger hurdle is, in a way, psychological: because tax breaks on debt have been around so long, we can hardly imagine what it would be like if we changed them, and we tend to underestimate their influence in shaping our behavior. Subsidizing debt seems harmless simply because we’ve always done it. But the fact that you’ve had a bad habit for a long time doesn’t make it less dangerous. 

David Feige worries about the consequences:

In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that's where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.

At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will create will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

A reader writes:

This is a video of an ex-MMA fighter from Japan who is now apparently some sort of dance/singing star. I think it fits with what you normally put up.

A judicious take from a position of support.