The Dish

Eric Posner sorts through the KSM trial spin:

The main criticisms of Holder’s approach are that KSM and others will take over proceedings and use them for propaganda purposes, that secrecy will be compromised, and that the approach signals insufficient seriousness about the terrorist threat.  The first two concerns are actually irrelevant.  The DOJ will decide on a case by case basis, and if those concerns in any particular case are serious, it will opt for military commissions.  The last concern is harder to evaluate, but it boils down to the claim that a blunderbuss system that results in outcomes that people distrust is better, on symbolic grounds, than a surgical system that produces the same pattern of convictions but with higher overall credibility.  Why would the more intelligent approach signal lack of seriousness about terrorism?

Silver gives ten reasons:

Although I doubt that Palin can clear the conservative half of the GOP field, someone like a Huckabee could very well decide to go ahead and let Palin run her course, re-entering the field in a 2016 climate that is liable to be more favorable to Republicans.

 Mark Thompson counters Dreher:

[T]he conflict here is definitively not between gay marriage and religious liberty.  It is instead between laws regarding private discrimination and freedom of association, or perhaps between licensing laws and freedom of religion.  As they affect the private sphere and specifically religious organizations, gay rights, and specifically same-sex marriage, represent at most an expansion of existing conflicts rather than any new type of conflict.  Even here, the conflict arises not from whether or not same-sex marriage is permitted, but instead from whether or not statutory laws recognize sexual orientation as an impermissible basis for private discrimination (whether in an employment context, public accommodations context, or otherwise), which is independent of whether same-sex marriage is permitted.

E.D. Kain follows up.

An Australian senator, Nick Xenophon, calls for a criminal investigation of the Super Adventure Club.

Huckabee thinks that the Democratic party is finished if KSM gets off. Josh Marshall tackles the talking point:

Let's start with the idea that civilian trials have too many safeguards and create too big a risk these guys will go free. This does not hold up to any scrutiny for two reasons. First, remember all those high-profile terror prosecutions where the defendants went free? Right, me neither. It just does not happen.

The fact is that federal judges are extremely deferential to the government in terror prosecutions. And national security law already gives the government the ability to do lots of things the government would never be allowed to do in a conventional civilian trial. (People who really think this is an issue seem to base their understanding of federal criminal procedure on watching too many Dirty Harry movies, which, as it happens, I'm actually a big fan of. But remember, they're movies.) KSM is not going to be able to depose or cross-examine CIA Director Leon Panetta or President Bush or Vice President Cheney or anyone else.

Adam Serwer has more:

"They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain [KSM], one of which is the AUMF [Authorized Use of Military Force], because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language — the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants and are detainable under the AUMF," explains Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Center for American Progress. "Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them."

Tyler Cowen, who is against the current health care bill, lists his desired reforms. Austin Frakt adds:

Any health reform passed this year (or next) is unlikely to include Cowen’s cost-related suggestions or any other serious measures to reduce costs. That’s why the current debate over health reform is just the beginning–call it Health Reform Debate 1.0 (beta). Debate 2.0 will be about costs, specifically about payment reform.

Drum chimes in:

Agreed. Coverage first, cost controls second. It would be great to do it all at once, but politically there's really no alternative to the way we're doing now.

Douthat is on Cowen's side. I'd love a polity in which a real conservative told people that costs should be controlled first before anyone gets insurance extended to them. The idea is to make the prize conditional on the sacrifice.

But there is no conservative voice like that in American politics day, if by conservative you mean a politician eager to tell the public to take its fiscal medicine. The rot started with Reagan, but it has gotten steadily worse.

I had hope with Gingrich in 1994 but a decade later, with the GOP in full control of everything, they exploded spending and passed Medicare D whose unbudgeted costs (though better than expected) make Obama's fiscally neutral (according to the CBO) health insurance reform seem like peanuts. I long for an American Thatcher – someone with real brains, real courage and an ability to tell Americans they need to buckle under, pay more taxes and slash entitlement spending.

But we have no Thatcher. By default, then, I side with Obama. The GOP has no serious plan to expand insurance coverage and no serious plan to restrain costs. Obama at least says he's serious about cost control, there are some cost control mechanisms (that need strengthening) in the Senate bill, and we can hold him accountable for fiscal restraint in the coming year and thereafter.

In politics, it's always the least worst option. And in my judgment on that criterion, given a need to do something, Obama is simply the only credible one we have. Give him a chance but hold him accountable for the fiscal results. And soon.

TNR and Slate are on the job.

A reader writes:

Um:

When she got off the bus, wearing her familiar uniform of black skirt, high heels and red blazer, she waved with one hand and held her son Trig, dressed in a striped green sweater, in the other. The group erupted in applause. She walked to a small platform in the middle of the crowd, said "Thank you so much for showing up," and handed Trig to an aide.

What is the point of carrying the baby to the platform and then handing him to an aide? Why not leave him on the bus with an aide? Is he just a prop?

Of course he's a prop. Treating a child this way is a political decision. Just as publicly calling the father of her grandson a porn star is a political decision. And that tells you a lot about this person's character and what really motivates her.

Damon Linker calls out the Dish and other Palin obsessives:

Criticism has its place, of course. And yet, on Palin I’ve come to favor a different approach—one that refuses to collude with the media-driven farce. To respond to an opponent, even harshly, even rudely, is to accord her a certain respect—to treat her as worthy of a response. But Palin is worthy of no such thing. She stands for nothing beyond her own self-promotion. She craves attention, and negative attention is a form of attention. Even ridicule can be a form of flattery. Better to bow out, to decline the provocation, since responding to her perpetuates and legitimates the illusion that she’s a serious player in our nation’s politics. I, for one, refuse to play that silly little game. And I wish more of her critics felt the same way. Instead of wasting their analytical and polemical talents on the topic, they could work to change the subject to something more substantive and deny Palin what she most greedily craves: the spotlight.

In general, I agree. But for three things.

The first is that she remains a very powerful force in American politics, the de facto leader of the opposition, and, in my mind, the likeliest nominee of either the GOP or a George Wallace style third party in 2012. This means that her attempt to recast her image, finesse her past stories and blame the McCain camp for her own errors and nuttiness should be engaged by those of us whose job it is to subject the powerful to scrutiny.

Secondly, does Damon really think that if the Dish ignored her, she would not be in the spotlight? Once you’re on Oprah, somehow the Dish’s little niche is irrelevant.

Thirdly, it’s riveting stuff. Watching someone this delusional and this uninformed and this narcissistic strut around the world stage telling empirical untruth after untruth is a car wreck worth rubber-necking. The book is so weird, and its fiction so bad, and its facts so non-checked, you’d have to have every single journalistic bone in your body removed to be indifferent to it.

But anyway, I’m tired of all this meta-journalism. Does examining her make me look obsessed? Does not examining her make me look cool? Who gives a fuck? She’s a great story, a truly bizarre creature, an international woman of mystery, and completely off her rocker.

Just get on with it, my fellow hacks. Know your place. It’s cold and lonely work, but we chose this profession and we should get off our high meta-horses and do it.

 
Bagram Air Base, 50 kms north of Kabul on November 17, 2009. Afghan survivors of a November 16 rocket attack on a market in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians as a French general met local leaders nearby are certain that they were not the intended target. A total of 28 other Afghan civilians were wounded in the attack in Tagab district, Kapisa province, just northeast of Kabul, deputy provincial police chief Abdul Hamid Hakimi told AFP. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty.