The Dish

Still an option.

Ambers parses Palin's latest numbers:

Assessments can and do change, rapidly. But unfavorable ratings are hard to dislodge. Since Palin's is based on her perceived lack of experience, one presumes that she would do well to gain experience if she wants to run for president.

My take here.

John Cook counts the bodies:

Scientology has a long history of spastic, sweaty spokespersons with creepy laughs who eventually crack under the pressure and leave the organization. There was Robert Vaughn Young, who publicly renounced the church in 1989 after decades in its leadership. He was followed by Mike Rinder, an unhinged Australian bulldog who decided to stop lying for church leader David Miscavige last year and spoke out publicly about the cult’s bizarre and arbitrary cruelty in June. The latest inheritor of Young and Rinder’s mantle as the unsettling public face of scientology is Tommy Davis, the head of the cult’s Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles.

Cook explains why Davis “probably won’t last long”:

The Nightline interview was another in a string of embarrassments for the church, and Paul Haggis’ high-profile defection over the weekend—announced in an open letter to Davis—is likely not sitting well with Miscavige. Davis’ job is to “handle” anyone who would do harm to the church’s reputation, and his tenure thus far has been marked by a string of pile-ups—angry confrontations; Haggis’ defection; John Travolta’s acknowledgment that, contrary to church dogma, autism is real; the St. Petersburg Times‘ devastating series detailing the revelations of high-profile defectors about Miscavige’s violent and insane regime. He also has personal relationships with people who’ve left the church—he worked with Rinder, and was close friends with Beghe—and has left the reservation before. How much abuse and lying can he take before he follows them out the door?

The NBC/WSJ poll today tells me a few things. The first is that Barack Obama remains more popular than his policies. This can give either party some encouragement. It tells the GOP that they do not have a hopeless cause, exactly, (and warns the Dems about the risks of over-reach). But it also suggests to me that evicting a personally popular regular guy from the White House after one term will not be easy. Moreover, Obama’s actual policies, while less popular than he, do command solid backing. On the biggest domestic issue, health insurance, a clear majority favors change – even if it means higher premiums. There’s understandable anxiety about the effects, but greater anxiety about doing nothing. On the public option, there’s a 70 percent majority saying it is an important or very important aspect of change. On the next big domestic issue, Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal still wins a 48 – 43 plurality, even when explicitly linked to higher energy bills (although it’s been slipping). On the biggest foreign policy question – Afghanistan – the most popular position (10,000 more troops and a civilian based surge in a geographically limited counter-insurgency) is also the one Obama seems to be leaning toward. But the public is persuadable on a range of options – including swift withdrawal of occupation forces, which commands a whopping 45 percent backing.

If I were a GOP strategist, I’d obviously urge an independent-focused message based on skepticism of government mixed with a real practical agenda for change. I’d focus on the Congress, not Obama. Alas, the base wants a Christianist-conservative appeal, demonization of Obama and abstract contempt for government, and the Congressional leadership is in the news. The public view of Congressional Republicans is grim.

On social issues, the emerging pattern is clear: Americans are increasingly troubled by abortion on demand (although a plurality clearly favors legal abortion), they are increasingly hostile to gun control, and they are increasingly supportive of gay equality. These trends appear to be real and holding over time. It makes me feel quite the centrist. For the GOP, the message is pretty clear: mellow a little (but not much) on abortion. stick to your, er, gins on the Second Amendment, and for goodness’s sake, stop the gay-bashing.

No international inspection of allegations of torture – milder than that authorized by the US under Bush-Cheney.

The defections from the GOP accelerate:

Is that facial hair?

21 editors at the NYT Magazine.

That's what some are saying, after the latest bomb attack. This sentence says a lot:

The key to future stability is to bring the army, civilian government and the opposition onto one page with a common agenda to fight extremism, while amicably resolving other internal disputes, but so far that looks extremely unlikely.

Exum says that Karzai's brother being on the CIA's dole is the most significant news of the week:

[If] this is true, and if the CIA is empowering Ahmed Wali Karzai at the same time in which NATO/ISAF is saying abusive local power-brokers are a threat to mission success, then this is yet another example of NATO/ISAF carrying out one campaign in Afghanistan while the CIA carries out another — with both campaigns operating at cross purposes to one another. I should say here that I am in no position to confirm or deny this report. I can, however, say that numerous military officials in southern Afghanistan with whom I have spoken identify AWK and his activities as the biggest problem they face — bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban. And so if AWK is "the agency's guy", that leads to a huge point of friction between NATO/ISAF and the CIA.

Ya think? Look: you can pore over these details for blame-targets all you want. The bottom line is that all occupations of countries as corrupt and as broken as Afghanistan will lead to such a complex network of bribes, threats, unholy alliances and unintended consequences that almost any neo-imperial power will at some point be working against itself. And the US is a neo-imperial power in effect if not in motivation. Tom Friedman's migration toward minimalism mirrors my own:

What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after.

Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video. And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.

The logic of empire is the logic of the welfare state. You begin by helping; you end by fomenting dependency and corruption. The conservative insight is that the solution can be worse than the problem. In Af-Pak and Iraq, it still is.