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Everything You Need To Know About The Health Care Debate... In One Post!

Health Care Summit

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The Obama Method

Jon Chait nails it:

I still find it strange how little understood President Obama's political method is. The first person I know who identified it is Mark Schmitt, over two years ago. At the time, many liberals viewed Obama's inclusive rhetoric as a sign that he intended to capitulate the liberal agenda for the sake of winning Republican agreement. Schmitt disagreed. Obama's language is highly conciliatory, he wrote, but the method isn't:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put ‘em on a committee.

Last year I wrote a column making a similar point. Obama uses a similar approach toward Republicans as foreign enemies like the Iranian regime: take them up on their claim to some shared goal (nuclear disarmament, health care reform), elide their preferred red herrings, engage them seriously, and then expose their disingenuousness:

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Obama health care summit is a classic example of the Obama method. Once again, skeptics are viewing it as a plot that depends on securing Republican cooperation... That's not the point. Obama knows perfectly well that the Republicans have no serious proposals to address the main problems of the health care system and have no interest (or political room, given their crazy base) in handing him a victory of any substance. Obama is bringing them in to discuss health care so he can expose this reality.

I'm not saying this is some kind of genius maneuver. I'm not even saying it will work. (I wouldn't bet against it, though.) I'm just saying that this -- not starting over, and not pleading for bipartisan cover -- is what Obama is trying to accomplish.

I'm constantly baffled by this too. Its not as if he has kept his community organizer model a secret, right? The problem, I suspect, is that if you asked most DC media people what precisely a community organizer does, they'd have no idea what to say. Or worse, they tell you that its all about bringing people together to hold hands, share their feelings, and sing songs.

But of course its not. There's a reason the right alternates between fear of Alinsky and attempts to co-opt his approach to politics. And trust me, its not because he's some sort of hippie dippie liberal. He's South Side Chicago, for god's sake, and there's nothing DFH about the South Side.

Republicans Respond to the Health Care Summitt

Following up on this weekend's post, it looks like the Republicans have formally responded to Obama's call for a televised health care summit. Ezra Klein breaks out their key questions to the President:

1) "Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over?"

2) "Does that mean he has taken off the table the idea of relying solely on Democratic votes and jamming through health care reform by way of reconciliation?"

3) "If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?"

4) "Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills?"

5) "Will the President be inviting officials and lawmakers from the states to participate in this discussion?"

6) "The President has also mentioned his commitment to have 'experts' participate in health care discussions....Will those experts include the actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who have determined that the both the House and Senate health care bill raise costs?"

7) "Will the special interest groups that the Obama Administration has cut deals with be included in this televised discussion?"

8) "Will the President require that any and all future health care discussions, including those held on Capitol Hill, [be televised]?"

Here's Ezra's advice to the administration:

I think the administration should release a counter-proposal. They will agree to literally every one of the GOP's demands -- including the ones that don't make any sense -- in return for one, simple promise: The final legislation is guaranteed an up-or-down vote in the House and the Senate. No filibusters. No delays. No procedural tricks. If the GOP wants a clean process, I bet a deal can be struck here.

Steve Benen has something similar in mind:

Tell you what, GOP. You take the filibuster off the table as a "show of good faith" and I'm sure Democrats would be willing to take reconciliation off the table as a "show of good faith." What do you say?

If the Obama Administration doesn't counter with this, I'm gonna be pretty disappointed. Because the Republicans most definitely have set themselves up here.

"We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan"

I wrote about this yesterday on Twitter, but its worth expanding a bit here. First, the background:

Racheting up efforts to call the GOP’s bluff on bipartisanship, Obama made a surprise announcement moments ago that he’ll be holding a summit of sorts with leading Republicans at the White House to discuss their ideas on health care reform — and possibly to move forward on legislation with them.

“They’re gonna be coming into the White House next week,” Obama told CBS’s Katie Couric moments ago, in a reference to Republicans, adding that they will be asked to “put their ideas on the table.” This meeting had already been announced.

But then Obama continued that after the recess, he would hold a second “large meeting” of “Republicans and Democrats” to see if there’s a way to find common ground on health care.

At this second meeting, Obama said, the White House, Dems, and Republicans would determine whether there was a bipartisan way forward on specific legislation. He said he wanted to “look at the Republican ideas that are out there” on lowering costs and insuring the 30 million uninsured.

“If we can go step by step through a series of these issues,” Obama said, then “procedurally there’s no reason why we can’t do it a lot faster than we did last year.”

Next, the Republican response, which tells you everything you need to know about why this strategy will almost surely be a success:

In a statement, House Republican leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) said that he looks forward to the discussion, and that he is "pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care. . . . The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access."

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said he welcomed "the opportunity to share ideas with the president," adding that "we know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf."

White House aides quickly rejected the idea that Obama wants to start over after nearly a year of contentious legislative haggling among members of his party. Officials said the president will come to the health-care summit armed with a merged version of the two bills that Democrats strong-armed through the two chambers with almost no GOP backing.

"This is not starting over," one White House official said, who requested anonymity in order to discuss administration strategy. "Don't make any mistake about that. We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan."

Ezra's response is part of what I expect we'll hear from Obama during the event:

The GOP spent much of yesterday scrambling to answer Barack Obama's invitation to a televised White House health-care summit. They came up with a dodge. "We know there are a number of issues with bipartisan support that we can start with when the 2,700-page bill is put on the shelf," volunteered Mitch McConnell. "The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills," said John Boehner.

Well, the best way to get to write the underlying legislation is to win the previous election, or maybe the election before that. And the second best way to write legislation is to have enough votes to block passage of the legislation the other party writes. But Republicans didn't win those elections and they don't have those votes. They've got the second-smallest minority in the Senate since the 1970s and they're down 40 seats in the House. It's neat how they think positive thoughts all the time, but the situation is what it is: They can write the legislation when the American people say they can.

The Republicans might want to act like they're the majority, but they remain the minority. That's why they're afraid of this summit: They know that the majority can still pass a bill, and it's in the majority's interests to pass a bill, and they want to keep that from happening. But they can't. Only the Democrats can.

As long time readers know, I've argued for more than a year that Obama's bipartisan outreach strategy was likely to produce one of two results: Either some of the more moderate Republicans will join Democrats to craft the legislation on the President's agenda, or the GOP will work to obstruct everything in a high-risk, high-reward strategy that I am convinced is almost certain to fail over the long term. They chose the second option, and now, after a year of apparent short-term successes, we're about to find out how it all looks in retrospect.

Why? Because no matter how much they might pretend otherwise, Republicans have no health care plan. Sure thing, they've got some fairly small bore proposals for reforming the system, but most of them are already contained within the Senate bill. Obama is calling their bluff. And he's going to do it on national teevee.

As good as that is, it actually gets better. Rep. Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the Budget Committee, has helpfully proposed a budget that among other things abolishes Medicare and privatizes Social Security. And although some of the party's leaders are running from it, the more radical members are actually embracing it. Michelle Bachmann, for example, has suggested that it would accomplish her long sought goal of "weaning" the country off Social Security and Medicare. Today Ryan is doubling down on this proposal, a move that will no doubt accelerate the Democrats plan to force a floor vote on his insane and totally unnecessary proposals (I've written about this a bunch in the past but don't have time for it now - sorry!)

Expect all of this to be featured prominently by Democrats during the upcoming meetings. Because having just spent the better part of a year suggesting that Dems are dangerous because they want to rearrange, and in some cases even reduce, Medicare spending, Republicans have now done a total about to suggest the program be eliminated entirely!

All of which is a long, roundabout way of getting to my main point: Up until now its been impossible to get Republicans on the record with what they stand for. We know what they are against - whatever the Democrats are for, up to and including their own proposals! But now, at long last, they've set down a fairly detailed explanation of what they would do if returned to power. And the Tea Party partisans may think they like it, but trust me, no one else will.

Here's a bit more on the upcoming meetings from around the 'sphere:

Jon Cohn:

Republicans have been complaining that Democrats locked them out of the process. And large swaths of the public seem to agree, even though the argument seems plainly untrue, given the exhaustive efforts Obama and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus made to accommodate Republicans. The public forum will give the GOP one more, high-profile opportunity to air their views--and, no less important, it will give the public a chance to see which approach to health care they really prefer.

Greg Sargent:

A lot to chew on here. Republicans will spin this as proof that Obama has shelved reform, wants to start again, and will only pursue a bill that GOPers sign onto. Liberals will be dismayed at the apparent suggestion that Obama seems to actually be saying that such common ground could form the basis of anything approaching real reform — and that he’s leaving open the possiblity of doing “compromise” legislation with Republicans.

It’s possible, though, that this is all about laying the groundwork for pursuing a Dem-only reconciliation solution later. Such an effort, should it happen, will inevitably be portrayed as yet another partisan back-room effort to ram reform through. So perhaps the White House hopes a very public gesture of bipartisanship and transparency now will undercut those attacks and allow Dems to argue that they had no choice but to move forward alone.

Kevin Drum:

Republicans didn't get 100% of what they wanted. There's no real tort reform in the Democratic bills, at least not the kind that Republicans want, and the other three items are more limited than the original Republican proposals. Still, with the exception of tort reform, I think it's fair to say that GOP negotiators extracted quite a few concessions during the Gang of Six negotiations with Max Baucus. Certainly as much as any party should expect that controls only 40% of Congress.

Barack Obama wants a chance to make that clear to the country on national television. Republicans, understandably, are rejecting his invitation to meet because they're scared silly that he might succeed. But if they refuse to meet at all, they play into his hands as well.

I'm still not convinced this is the right way to go, but there's no question that Obama has put the GOP into a tough position. And since it's basically a PR move, it's largely going to succeed or fail based on how well Democrats and Republicans are able to make their case in the media. Stay tuned.

Steve Benen:

If the summit is really about striking a new compromise, this would seemingly be pointless. But if the summit is about delving into these plans, exploring what is and isn't in the proposal, and making it clear for all to see that Republican ideas have been considered -- and in several instances, embraced -- the gathering has the potential to change public attitudes and score a key public-relations victory.

Indeed, I can imagine a scenario in which the president spells all of this out explicitly -- writing out which provisions are included that make Dems happy, which provisions are included (and excluded) that make Republicans happy, and declaring the whole package a triumph of bipartisan compromise. The GOP will still almost certainly balk, but the result will give Democrats cover and put Republican intransigence on full display.

More Ezra:

I'd expect to see some concessions made to Republicans at the summit. I'd also expect the president to emphasize how many of their ideas are already incorporated into the legislation. But this isn't about the ideas. The White House isn't holding a study session because they're worried they don't have the right answers for the final test.

This is, first and foremost, about defusing the lines of attack that have scared the hell out of Democratic legislators. If you talk to people on the Hill, there's relatively little concern about the substance of the likely compromise, but there's enormous anxiety over the public's belief that the bill is thick with noxious deals, which is fed by the idea that the process has been hidden from the American people. After all, people reason, if the bill was so good, why wouldn't they let C-SPAN into the negotiations? The White House hopes this summit will be a clean break with that narrative.

Second, and more importantly, this creates a next step for health-care reform. The House and the Senate have not been able to agree on a path forward. The president, of course, cannot hold a vote for them. But by setting this summit, he's bought them a few weeks to figure out how to hold a vote themselves. That won't be easy, but it'll be easier with the White House summit giving some structure and narrative to an effort that had collapsed into murky chaos.

Jon Chait:

President Obama's bipartisan health care panel, which he unveiled yesterday, serves two basic purposes. The first is to expose the GOP as lacking any feasible solutions to the problems of access and cost control. The second is to help answer the "backroom deal" perception.... clearly Democrats are spooked by the fear that using reconciliation to patch the Senate health care bill will be seen as somehow sneaky or undemocratic. That's what Obama's panel is about. You have something that's open and televised, and demonstrate that his plan was arrived at because it's the most minimalistic way to achieve what most people see as necessary changes to health care. Then you take out the Cornhusker kickback, fix the House-Senate disagreements and pass the thing.

"I'm not going to walk away on any challenge"

"The easiest thing to do right now would be to just say, 'Oh, this is too hard. You know, let's just regroup and, you know, lick our wounds, try to hang on,'" the president told the party officials and activists. "We've had a long and difficult debate on health care, and there are some, maybe even the majority in this town, who say perhaps it's time to walk away.

"But here's the thing, Democrats -- if we walk away, we know what will happen. We know that premiums and out-of-pocket expenses will skyrocket this decade and the decade after that and a decade after that just as they did in the past decade. More small businesses will be priced out of coverage. More big businesses will be unable to compete internationally. More workers will take home less pay and fewer raises. We know that millions more Americans will lose their coverage. We know that our deficits will inexorably continue to grow -- because health care costs are the single biggest driver.

"So just in case there's any confusion out there, let me be clear: I am not going to walk away from health insurance reform. I'm not going to walk away from the American people. I'm not going to walk away on this challenge.

"I'm not going to walk away on any challenge. We're moving forward. We are moving forward. Sometimes, we may be moving forward against the prevailing winds. Sometimes it may be against a blizzard! But we're going to live up to our responsibility to lead."

Much more here from Tom Schaller. I'll post the full video when I find it. In the meantime, here's the transcript.

Also, Too, More Like This Please!

TPMDC:

Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) "roadmap" budget plan -- which calls for balancing the budget in 50 years by privatizing Social Security and Medicare -- could become an excellent political tool for the Democrats, says former Clinton adviser Paul Begala.

Begala, in an interview today with TPM, said Democrats should force the GOP to bring their ideas into the public eye.

"Why don't we put Mr. Ryan's budget up to a vote?" he said. "Make them vote on it."

Democrats, he argued, should stop calling Republicans the "party of no."

"They have ideas, and lots of them. And their ideas ruin the country," Begala said.

What the Democrats have to do, he said, is make the 2010 elections a choice between Democratic and Republican ideas, instead of a referendum on just the Dems. (A point Chuck Todd made earlier this week.) The way to do it, he said, is to highlight those GOP ideas.

Begala said the White House has already begun to do this, with both President Obama and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag mentioning Ryan's budget.

And Congressional Dems have seized on the opportunity to call out the provisions that would privatize Social Security. Reps. Chris Larson and Linda Sanchez have introduced a resolution opposing such privatization, which would force Republican lawmakers to vote on the idea.

And this!

Obama Speaks!

Obama speaks! And the blogosphere wrings its hands.

I don't get it. What's wrong with this?

Mr. Obama said he would first work with Congress to enact a jobs package that would encourage new hiring, which he said was “the thing that is most urgent right now, in the minds of Americans all across the country.” But he also said that he would take the time to refute false statements and misunderstandings about the health care legislation and to hear alternate ideas from Republicans.

After “several weeks” of work, he said, he would be prepared to live with whatever decision is made by Congress, but he also warned that voters, too, would be watching and would decide at the polls in November whether lawmakers had made the right choice.

Mr. Obama still did not chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress...

At the fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee later on Thursday, however, Mr. Obama said that once Congressional Democrats had worked out their differences and settled on a final bill, he would push for a vibrant, public debate over the health care legislation. He said he planned “to call on our Republican friends to present their ideas.”

“What I’d like to do is have a meeting whereby I am sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health care experts and let’s just go through these bills,” Mr. Obama said. “Their ideas, our ideas. Let’s walk through them in a methodical way, so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense. And then I think that we have got to move forward on a vote. We have got to move forward on a vote.”

Mr. Obama said that Americans were apprehensive about the health care legislation because there was too much misinformation that he would now work to clear up.

“They are certain that they would have to go onto a government plan, which isn’t true,” the president said. “But that’s still a perception a lot of people have. They are still pretty sure that they would have to give up their doctor. They are still pretty sure that if they are happy with their health care plan, that it’s bad for them. They are still positive that this is going to add to the deficit. So there is a lot of information out there that people understandably are concerned about.”

He continued, “That’s why I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks, and then let’s go ahead and make a decision. And it may be that if Congress decides, if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. And that’s how democracy works, and there will be elections coming up and they will be able to make a determination and register their concerns one way or another during election time.”

At one point, as the president insisted that he would continue to fight for the health care bill, the crowd chanted, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the Obama's approach to the presidency is his desire to see congress reemerge as a co-equal branch of government. For people who want action! this can be extremely frustrating, particularly when at most moments it seems Congress isn't up to the task. But let's be real about this, people. It is the Congress, and not the President, that is supposed to be the most powerful brach under our constitution. And although this all may be very frustrating to watch, there's nothing about modern American politics that suggests to me that our presidents have been too weak.

We desperately need Congress to reassert itself in our political system. We desperately need more, not fewer, checks on the executive branch. But I promise you, people, if we get what we need we'll end up with a system that is far more noisy, rude, chaotic, and messy than what we currently have now.

Democracy isn't supposed to be pretty. Its not supposed to be neat. Or tidy. Or fun to watch. It is supposed to require work. And effort. And near constant input from the people. But its been so long since we've lived with anything even remotely approaching a pre-eminent congress that literally no one alive remembers what it might look like.

I hope Obama continues to force Congress to lead. I don't want a president - even one I support! - to be able to dictate to Congress. And I hope Congress continues to get its act together. That's right, I said "continues." Because where you see chaos I see baby steps, and where you see the end I see the beginning. But its a long damn walk from there to there. That change you believed in? It won't come overnight. You're gonna have to keep working, keep fighting. You're gonna have to get back out there this Fall. And then again in 2012. And again in 2014. We're a long, long way down an awful hole, one that took decades to dig, and it'll take at least as long to climb out as it did to empty out.

So call me crazy, but I think this is precisely the right approach to take with the Congress. You wanna hammer Obama on something? Hammer him on his pledge to engage Republicans directly. Hammer him on his pledge to hold a public debate. Hammer him on his promise to "refute false statements and misunderstandings." Make him do it on a daily basis. He's your president. Make him work. Because that's how our system of self-government is supposed to work.

UPDATE: Worth noting - Jon Chait understands the short-term politics of this. The public debate proposal is a "heads we win, tails the GOP loses" proposal. Jon Cohn gets it too. So maybe I should take back. Nice to know I'm in good company here!

Great Quotes

Loads of stuff stacked in the Clippings folder. Let's clear it out:

Steve Benen riff's on partisanship and political disagreement reminds me of something that a partisan newspaper editor would have written during the 1790s. The elites wanted comity; the rabble wanted them to fight! The rabble won then, and I have no doubt they will win now. It just won't be pretty getting from here to there. But who said it should be! Steve's take:

The goal for congressional Republicans isn't to find "common ground" or "bipartisan solutions" with those they completely disagree with; their goal is to fight for what they believe in, opposing the majority's agenda.

The remarks should make it pretty clear that Republicans have no interest in working with Democrats on finding solutions to pressing policy challenges. But here's the thing that so often gets lost in the discourse: Republicans are the minority party, which means it's their job to oppose the majority's agenda.

"There aren't that many places where [the two parties] can come together"? Well, no, of course not. Democrats and Republicans perceive reality in entirely different ways, and advocate for wildly different solutions to various problems (they don't even agree on which problems exist).

Political Scientist John Sides, on the myth of political "independents" that just WILL NOT DIE:

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

As a fellow political scientist, I totally appreciate his need to scream about this. Independents are NOT a vast middle ground, both because they are neither vast nor in the middle. Just because someone describes themselves as independent doesn't mean they actually are. Deeds, people, not words. Deeds.

Greg Sargent offers a nice short chronology of the use of reconciliation under Republican rule:

* The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which passed through reconcilation;

* The Marriage Tax Penalty Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000, which passed through reconciliation; and

* The Taxpayer Refund and Relief Act of 1999, which passed through reconciliation.

Wait, I forgot. Its OK If You Are A Republican. My bad.

Professional Congress watcher Norm Ornstein corrects perceptions of the Democratic Congress:

Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.

The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.

Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill.

Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children's health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders' bill of rights and defense procurement reform.

The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul. Financial regulation is working its way through the Senate, and even in this political environment it is on track for enactment in the first half of this year. It is likely that the package of job-creation programs the president showcased on Wednesday, most of which got through the House last year, will be signed into law early on as well.

Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate -- an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.

The only ways to think this Congress has been a failure are if you either disagree with these policies or if you aren't paying attention.

Back on bipartisanship, check out this great riff from one of James Fallows' readers:

"The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else's approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before -- even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

"The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party's tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party's choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that's about it.)

"I've missed almost all the punditry this past week... but what I've seen seems almost like a lot of misleading fluff designed to fill the void that should follow an understanding of the foregoing, at least on the subject of 'why no bipartisanship?' There's really nothing more to be said about "why no bipartisanship," once one recognizes the GOP party discipline. On this issue, it's absolutely astounding to blame Obama or even the Congressional leadership (although Pelosi and Reid leave much to be desired otherwise). It's doubly astounding that the GOP did it once before, less perfectly, but with a very large reward for bad behavior in the form of the 1994 mid-term elections. Yet no one calls them on it effectively, and bad behavior seems about to be rewarded again...

"Ironically, the one thing that might lubricate some bipartisanship -- earmarks, or their functional equivalent in specific amendments of general policy -- is becoming unavailable just when needed, and when it might help."

Steve Benen explores how Reagan is so badly mis-remembered:

Reagan's first big tax cut was signed in August 1981. Over the next year or so, unemployment went from just over 7% to just under 11%. In September 1982, Reagan raised taxes, and unemployment fell.

We're all aware, of course, of the correlation/causation dynamic, but as Krugman noted, "[U]nemployment, which had been stable until Reagan cut taxes, soared during the 15 months that followed the tax cut; it didn't start falling until Reagan backtracked and raised taxes."

Want to know what conservative policies look like on the local level when fully put into action? Check out Colorado Springs:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

People hate taxes! And they hate government! But only because they don't realize all the wonderful but largely invisible benefits that government provides.

What would Jesus do? Andrew Sullivan explains:

Christianity, after all, was founded on a culture of marginalization, persecution and martyrdom, not political mastery and imperium. Jesus saw true faith in those without power - the marginalized and despised and powerless. You could argue, in fact, that Constantine's adoption of Christianity as a state religion was an original sin from which Christianity has still not recovered.

The truth is: if your faith is strong, you are indifferent to worldy power and influence. You try to live your faith - which is hard enough - and leave the rest to God.

Jesus repeatedly, insistently refused the political option. Others may be changing the culture in different and disturbing ways; and a Christian will bear witness to this - but primarily by example, not through enforcement on others of a particular doctrine others may not share.

Totally unrelated, but also from Andrew, a great quote from the Judge presiding over the trial of Shoe Bomber Richard Reed:

We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before.

There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice.

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist.

You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist.

To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature.

Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.

So war talk is way out of line in this court. You're a big fellow. But you're not that big. You're no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders. In a very real sense Trooper Santiago had it right when first you were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were and he said you're no big deal.

You're no big deal...

It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom's seek that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their, their representation of you before other judges. We care about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties.

Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bear any burden; pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow it will be forgotten. But this, however, will long endure. Here, in this courtroom, and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

The very President of the United States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out evidence on which specific matters can be judged, and juries of citizens will gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and refine our sense of justice.

See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom. You know it always will. Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.

Pwnage!

Full Video:

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If Not You, Who?

Had I more time to respond to the SOTU myself, I hope I would have written something like this. Andrew Sullivan:

I've lived in Washington for twenty years. I saw in Obama the real hope that something constructive could emerge from the corruption and decline of the recent past. I saw last night the civil tone that marks a responsible politics, rather than the glib cynicism and mock heroism that has marked us in much of the new millennium.

I saw in the civic spirit - especially among the young - a means of renewal for the republic. And I remain convinced that those who want to "reset" Obama's agenda to the old forms with which they are comfortable have waged a take-no-prisoners war on real change and real reform.

So this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses - or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it. My faith in this country - so strong in the past - is not as strong as Obama's now.

But I sure as hell believe in fighting for it, and for him, against the forces at home and abroad that would truly end this experiment in self-government while pretending, of course, that everything is exactly the same. I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe - because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force, but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.

Those, in my view, are the stakes. Are you ready to get back into the arena and fight? And if you don't, who will?

Great Quotes

I was hoping to write a fairly significant response to the State of the Union (SOTU), but I'm down in DC for my grandmother's funeral, and won't likely get the time for a few days. But there are loads of good things being said today, and I've got a ton of posts saved up from the past week or so for comment. And since I've got a few hours and need to distract myself, let's do some quotes.

First, a post from Political Scientist John Sides on the role of "independents" in our political system. Know this. Understand this. And repeat it constantly whenever you are discussing politics with your friends:

I want to yell.

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

OK, now some SOTU reactions:

CBS News:

83 percent said they approved of the proposals the President made. Just 17 percent disapproved

CNN:

48 percent of speech watchers had a very positive reaction, with three in 10 saying they had a somewhat positive response and 21 percent with a negative response.

Mark Blumenthal on a Democracy Corps dial test:

The shifts there are very extraordinary. On the issue of whether he puts Wall Street ahead of the middle class, it was a 50 point shift on people saying that [doesn't describe him] well. There was a 40-point shift...on fighting special interests. On banking reform, on support, it was a 38 point shift in favor of that. And that's clearly, far and away the place where he showed the greatest strength and clarity.

Andrew Samwick:

I give President Obama high praise for the parts of his speech this evening where he chastised his own party in the Congress for its ineffectiveness and for telling the Senate Republicans that if they are going to insist on supermajorities to get any policy passed, then they are going to have to share in the responsibility for governing. Good for him. Nobody's perfect, but I cannot help but think that the conduct of the Congress in recent years, and the Senate in particular, would be enough to make a Founding Father vomit.

Kevin Drum:

Obama was dead serious most of the time, but he also seemed loose and engaging, at times even sparring good-naturedly with the Republican side of the aisle. My guess is that this is a combination that works pretty well. At the very least, he didn't seem freighted down with the burdens of office, and that's an accomplishment all on its own given the events of the past couple of weeks.

James Fallows:

One moment when I couldn't believe what I was seeing: the Roberts-led stare whatsis? Supreme Court sitting directly in front of the President and being equally-directly dressed down by him, while the politicians right next to them in the chamber leapt up and cheered. Don't recall any moment quite like that before.

Steve Benen:

Given the public's palpable frustrations and the struggles the nation endured in 2009, there was a sense that the president would have to be vaguely apologetic during the address. He'd have to explain himself, acknowledge mistakes, and lay a new course for the year ahead. The pundits' use of words like "reboot" and "scaled back" were ubiquitous going into the speech.

The president, though, decided not to follow the conventional script. When he was supposed to be meek, he showed confidence. When expected to be contrite, Obama seemed proud. When Republicans sought deference, the president responded with strength. Indeed, while the GOP believes electoral winds are at their backs, Obama didn't mind teasing, confronting, challenging, and even mocking them in a good-natured way.

The fear that the president might shrink from the moment was backwards -- Obama stepped up and seemed larger than ever.

Matt Yglesias:

Obama seized the mantle of responsibility, pragmatism, and seriousness while challenging the GOP to show some good faith and willingness to be a constructive partner in government. But what he’s never been able to do is to generate the kind of specific, concrete political pressure on incumbent Republican senators that inspires them to vote “yes” on his bills or confirm his nominees.

Jonathan Chait:

I haven't seen a convincing explanation as to why it's so awful for Republicans to disagree with a presidential speech. The answer is "decorum," but to me, decorum suggests giving latitude to the opposition. The State of the Union, remember, was originally delivered elsewhere in order to avoid the appearance of a president dictating to Congress. Forcing Congress and the Supreme Court to defer to the president as a ceremonial head of state, rather than the head of a co-equal branch of government, runs counter to the deepest spirit of our form of government.

Moreover, it represents the Washington establishment's prudish aversion to debate. I can see why a loud outburst might be objectionable -- though I'd prefer a feisty back-and-forth, like in Great Britain -- but to scold Alito merely for moving his lips in such a way as to show disapproval seems to be taking the prudishness to a new extreme. Yes, he's a Supreme Court Justice and we're supposed to believe he has no political beliefs or agenda, but in the post Bush v. Gore world it's a little late for that.

Andrew Sullivan responds to Clive Crook, who asks "What does it matter who caused the problem?":

Let me try to explain: it matters who caused the problem and why because if we do not understand the causes we cannot fix the problem and it matters because any adult judgment of a politician's first year that does not take into account the inheritance he was bequeathed is impossible.

It matters because the most important fact in American politics is the worst presidency in modern times that preceded Obama.

Two failed, unwinnable wars that continue to destroy lives and cripple our finances, a massive splurge in entitlement and discretionary spending, a huge increase in defense spending and massive tax cuts: this we now have to forget? This context should be removed from the picture?

It matters too because the very people who gave us this mess are now adamantly refusing to do anything to get us out of it, and pledge to return to exactly the same policies that got us there in the first place: more tax cuts, more war, more entitlement spending, more debt, no health insurance reform, no action on climate change. Clive acts as if there were some viable alternative out there. There isn't.

I'm not saying that Obama should not be held responsible for actions he has taken; I am saying he should not be held responsible for actions he did not take and an appalling inheritance he was forced to grapple with. Removing that context, as the GOP has largely done, and Crook now endorses, is to rig the entire debate so that Obama cannot win. It is a function of the kind of punditry that is, in fact, far more of a problem for the country than anything Obama has done - because it bases political judgment on unreality, and distorts the body politic's capacity for reasoned argument. It treats all of this as a game.

And some non-SOTU related thoughts:

Matt Yglesias on taxes:

As long-time readers know, I’m a big believer in taxes. The American people are big believers in government services, but they like them to be paid for by magic. The political system thus often winds up directing policy in a weird direction—doing policy through tax subsidies and “credits” and regulatory mandates rather than simply taxing and spending. This is bad, in my view, but the people don’t seem to agree.

There are, however, two recent little glimmers of hope. One is that in Oregon a ballot measure to enact sharply progressive increases in income taxes on high earners passed. The other is that in last night’s State of the Union address the idea of a new tax on large banks was a big applause line. The President put it front and center, and many members of congress stood and cheered for it. Neither of those things fundamentally gets us to where I want us to be, but they’re both steps in the right direction.

Steve Benen on the role of Republicans in the vote against the budget commission they proposed:

Six GOP senators co-sponsored the legislation to create the commission, and then voted against their own idea. Asked for an explanation, the Republicans said the commission -- which was intended to push policymakers to make uncomfortable decisions -- might have told them what they didn't want to hear, and should therefore not exist...

These six Republican senators said they'd welcome a commission -- it was, after all, their idea to co-sponsor the bill -- just so long as the GOP isn't asked to make concessions or compromises at all.

We've heard plenty of rhetoric of late about how President Obama just needs to reach out more to Republicans to strike bipartisan compromises. But how can anyone take such an approach seriously when leading GOP lawmakers oppose their own ideas because they may be asked to accept bipartisan concessions?

Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, on his son Bill Kristol:

My poor son has got it wrong again

Kate Sheppard reports on Frank Luntz recent findings on the need to reframe the climate change conversation:

Luntz suggests less talk of dying polar bears and more emphasis on how legislation will create jobs, make the planet healthier and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. Advocates should emphasize words like "cleaner," "healthier," and "safer"; scrap "green jobs" in favor of "American jobs," and ditch terms like "sustainability" and "carbon neutral" altogether. "It doesn't matter if there is or isn't climate change," he said. "It's still in America's best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe."

Ron Brownstein on our dysfunctional political system:

We are operating in what amounts to a parliamentary system without majority rule, a formula for futility.

Lanny Davis (I cannot believe I'm quoting him on this, but he's right, so...) on the need to refram the health care debate:

The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?

Matt Yglesias on voting in the United States:

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely. That creates more scope for corruption. What’s more since campaign money has diminishing marginal returns, the proliferation of elected makes money matter more than it otherwise would.

A big country like the United States is never going to have public officials who are as well-monitored as the ones in a place like Denmark. But we make the situation much, much worse by proliferating the quantity of elected officials to the point where most people have no idea what’s happening. How many people can name their state senator? How many people know what things their school board has authority over and what things their mayor decides? And this is all without considering the absolutely insane practice of electing judges.

And last but not least, a few must-reads that are quite difficult to quote:

Matt Yglesias on the Marginal Cost Pricing For Mass Transit

NPR on the role of the bail bond industry in our messed up criminal justice system.

Imagine if the United States redrew its political borders by population size. James Fallows explains.

Bipartisanship!

Check out this report from Nicholas Beaudrot:

The Senate amendment to enact statutory pay-as-you-go passed 60-40. By agreement among members of the World's Laziest Deliberative Body, this amendment required 60 votes to pass. Zero Republicans voted for it. This meas deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg, John McCain, George Voinovich, and moderates such as Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe couldn't bring themselves to support it. Had Scott Brown been sworn in, unless he had a sudden bout of conscience, the amendment would not have passed.

The commitment to PAYGO was probably the singular most important instrument in driving down the deficit during the 1990s. It forces Congress to make actual decisions about budgeting, not fantasy Republican decisions as we saw during the Bush years. But since it might be a back-door way of making it slightly more likely that taxes might be increased a smidge, or since it might be some sort of legislative victory for Democrats, every single Republican remained opposed to it.

I hope that the Peterson Foundation and other balanced-budget types keep this in mind the next time they think there's a bipartisan commitment to get the deficit under control.

I don't know how many more times this has to happen before, a) our nation's pundits figure out that the Republicans have no interest whatsoever in governing or solving problems; and b) Republicans aren't even remotely serious about budget deficits. Reagan and Bush created massive deficits. Clinton fixed the problem. Bush II and the GOP Congress then made them worse than anyone could have possibly imagined. And once Obama got in office they flip flopped back to pretending they cared about the mess they just finished making!

Except, as this vote shows, they don't actually care! It's all just a big political game for them. For god's sake - they are voting against their own proposals!

UPDATE: Oh thank god! More like this, Mr. Axelrod, please!

"It's time to put up or shut up," Axelrod said. "We will put the other party to the test and they will have to explain why they are standing in the way."

On a similar note he criticized 7 Republican senators including John McCain for voting against a debt commission measure they had co-sponsored.

"You can't pretend to be deficit hawks and then be chicken when the votes come up," Axelrod said.

He also highlighted that last February just three Republicans voted for the stimulus plan, which had 25 different tax cuts.

"We're going to put the onus on them, we're not going to let them sit it out," he said.

I Got This!

Once upon a time, roughly a century and a half ago, partisan newspaper editors had the ear of the President. you've heard of Jackson's Kitchen Cabinet, right? They were newspaper editors or printers, and were in some very real ways more powerful than the President's formal cabinet. That era, the era of the partisan press, lasted more than a half century, and was eventually killed off by the rise of the supposedly nonpartisan urban newspapers.

Although my dissertation has many moving parts, at the end of the analysis is the argument that we are returning to an era much more like the Jacksonian one than anything we've seen in the last 150 years. It will obviously be very different in very many ways, but in a few crucially important ones - the ability and interest of average citizens to engage directly in the public sphere, the importance of partisan news outlets and editors, and a deeply polarized political system - I believe it will be strikingly similar.

The transition is only just now beginning. But for the sake of both my country and my dissertation, I hope it dramatically accelerates tonight. Because the White House, Congressional Democrats, bloggers, and the pundits who work in the old world of the corporate media really need to read this post from Josh Marshall. And then they need to act on it.

Josh Marshall - What's The Prez Made Of?

The central problem the president is laboring under is the fact that the economy remains in a shambles. And unemployment remains at a toxic 10%. Beyond that though the Democrats are suffering because they have shown voters an image of fecklessness and inability to deliver results at a moment of great public anxiety and suffering. Big changes provoke great anxiety, especially in such a divided society. But Democrats are not just having dealing with the ideological divisions in the country -- which is what the Tea Party movement is about. They're also losing a big swathe of the population that is losing faith that the Democrats can govern, that they can even deliver on the reforms and policies they say are necessary for the national good. As I wrote earlier, this is about meta-politics. If the Democrats, either from the left or the right, walk away from reform, they will get slaughtered in November. They'll get it from the people who want reform, from the people who never wanted reform and from sensible people all over who just think they can't get anything done.

What the Democrats -- and a lot of this is on the White House -- have done is get so deep into the inside game of legislative maneuvering, this and that 'gang' of senators and a lot of other nonsense that they've let themselves out of sync with the public mood and the people's needs.

The president needs to find way to say, we've heard you. We've gotten so focused on working the Washington channels to get this thing done that we've lost a sense of the public's mood and urgency. Well, we've heard you. We're going to stop playing around and get this thing done. And then we're going to work on getting Americans back to work. We know the urgency of the moment and we know you expect results.

...This is the biggest testing time the president has yet faced. It could be a key turning point in his presidency. Over the next forty-eight hours the president is going to come under withering pressure to walk away from reform. It'll come from the left and the right, and in various different flavors. It will come from shocking directions. The president is going to have to find a way to say, No. We're doing this. He'll need to stand down a lot of cowardly and foolish people in his own party. He'll have to stand down the vast and formless force of establishment punditry and just say, No. We're going to do this. And he's going to have to make the case to the public, not necessarily convince all those who have doubts about health care reform but make clear that he thinks this is the right direction for the country and because he thinks it's the right thing to do that he's going to make it happen.

In most moments, the power of the presidency is vastly overestimated. This is not one of those moments. For the next 48 hours, rhetoric is action, and words are deeds. One special election in one state a crisis does not make. Take a deep breath, relax, and then step back up and fight like hell to finish this battle. And then move on to the next.

Mr. President, this is why we elected you. This is why so many of us worked so hard for so long. We trusted not just that you were the right man for the job, but that you were the right man for a moment precisely such as this. None of us thought this would come easy. Least of all you. You knew the test would eventually come. Here it is. You got this. No worries. No worries...

Great Quotes

Some quotes collected over the past few days around the blogosphere that deserve your attention:

Pres. Obama on the fight in 2010 and 2012:

So, I know everybody in the media is all in a tizzy -- "Oh, what's this going to mean politically?" Well, let me tell you something. If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have. (Applause.) If their best idea is to return to the bad policies and the bad ideas of yesterday, they are going to lose that argument. What are they going to say? "Well, you know, the old system really worked well; let's go back to the way it was"? That's not going to appeal to seniors who are now seeing the possibility of that doughnut hole finally closing and so they can finally get discounts on their prescriptions. (Applause.) That's not going to appeal to the small businesses who find out all the tax credits that they're going to get for doing right by their employees -- something that they have been wanting to do, but may not have been able to afford. It's not going to be very appealing to Americans who for the first time are going to find out that they can provide coverage to their children, their dependents, all the way up to the age of 26 or 27.

And that's why I'll be out there waging a great campaign from one end of the country to the other, telling Americans with insurance or without what they stand to gain -- (applause); about the arsenal of consumer protections; about the long-awaited stability that they're going to begin to experience. And I'm going to tell them that I am proud we are putting the future of America before the politics of the moment -- the next generation before the next election. And that, after all, is what we were sent up here to do: standing up for the American people against the special interests; solve problems that we've been talking about for decades; make their lives a little bit better; make tough choices sometimes when they're unpopular. And that's something that every one of you who support this bill can be proud to campaign on in November.

Now, I know that some of the fights we've been going through have been tough. I know that some of you have gotten beaten up at home. Some of the fights that we're going to go through this year are going to be tough as well. But just remember why each of us got into public service in the first place -- we found something that was worth fighting for. There was something we thought was important enough that we were willing to stand up in the public square, risk loss, risk embarrassment, because we knew in our hearts that something wasn't right, that we weren't in some measure living up to the American ideal, and that we thought that if we got involved and engaged in the democratic process, somehow we could make it a little bit better.

Jon Chait on the history of banking regulation in America:

Daniel Gross recently wrote an excellent piece for Slate about why we should ignore the banking industry's warnings about the bank tax. Basically, Gross argues that they are probably wrong now because they've always been wrong (at least about the dangers of regulation):

This rule dates almost to the beginning of American history. Many commercial banks in the United States opposed the creation of the first and second national banks of the United States in the late 18th and early 19th century. They saw the proto-central bank as competition, since it was essentially a congressionally chartered private bank that would compete with them. As a result, the United States, in contrast to economic rivals England and France, lacked a central bank in the 19th century—despite periodic banking panics and failures, the severity of which could have been mitigated by a central bank. It was only after the Panic of 1907 that forces were set into motion for the creation of a central bank. Would it surprise you to learn that many bankers and their political allies opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve? Didn't think so.

So to what can we attribute their cluelessness?

The simple explanation is that these guys don't know the first thing about their business, regulation, or history. Then again, maybe there are important factors of organizational psychology at work here. Industries, as a rule, don't like regulations that they didn't come up with on their own. They like to control their own environment. (You can praise the deliciousness of steak until you're blue in the face, and your 6-year-old will pronounce it "blech." Then one day, on his own, he decides to eat it and pronounces it "yummy.")

Matt Yglesias on why there's nothing new about neo-conservatism:

Robert Farley’s account of how national security hawks around the world re-enforce each other’s position, with each country’s version of Charles Krauthammer insisting that one more demonstration of implacable will can scare the other guys off, is a must-read. It’s also a reminder that there’s really nothing that’s “neo” about neoconservative foreign policy thinking.

Obviously, as a matter of historical fact it’s the case that a certain number of former liberals reacted to the dovish turn of the post-Vietnam Democratic Party by adopting more conservative ideas. But there’s nothing actually new in “neoconservative” thought. Their take on China, or their take on Iran, or their take on the Soviet Union, or their take on Saddam Hussein, is all the same and the same as the general take that the nationalistic right has in all countries—the enemy du jour is uniquely awful and compelled toward irrational and aggressive behavior, therefore we ourselves must behave in an irrational and aggressive manner lest we be overrun

Generals Krulak and Hoar on detention interrogation (via Attackerman):

A lone Nigerian caught with a bomb in his underwear is no match for FBI interrogators and skilled federal prosecutors – without resorting to torture, which violates our laws and subverts our values. Some assert that once suspects like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab get “lawyered up,” it will be impossible to get information from them about plots in progress. But FBI interrogators routinely crack tough suspects, even those with high-priced lawyers.

The assertion that suspects with lawyers never talk is simply wrong. Lawyers routinely encourage their clients to cooperate, especially in cases where suspects have been caught red-handed. And terrorists have proven eager to brag about their grand plans and al-Qaeda connections. Questioning in such cases has led to vital intelligence in the past – about sleeper cells in the United States, training camps in Afghanistan, and high-level terrorism suspects such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Kevin Drum on the health care excise tax compromise:

Our story so far: one of the funding mechanisms for healthcare reform is an excise tax on expensive health plans, popularly known as the "Cadillac tax." As policy, it's a good idea: by taxing expensive plans, you provide an incentive to keep their costs down. As politics, though, it sucks: union health plans, which are often pretty rich, would get hit by the tax. And Democrats like unions.

So yesterday everyone compromised. The excise tax is still in the bill, but the cutoff for the tax was raised from $23,000 to $24,000, dental and vision were excluded, and implementation was delayed a couple of years to give unions more time to renegotiate their contracts. In other words, a policy beloved mostly by wonks and deficit hawks stayed largely intact and unions got only a few crumbs. Nonetheless, John Boehner (R–Ohio) thundered that it was the "latest in a long line of backroom payoffs and sweetheart deals." Sarah Palin tweeted that workers "should oppose their UnionBOSSES backroom deal." Even some liberals bought the framing: "I'm not about to pretend that the union deal was anything but interest group politics," said Ezra Klein.

But except for the sense in which everything in a democracy is interest group politics in one way or another, I don't buy it. This compromise doesn't give unions anything. All it does is slightly moderate a basically anti-union tax. If Democrats were really cutting backroom deals with union bosses, they never would have proposed the excise tax in the first place. Or they would have exempted union contracts completely. There are plenty of other ways to fund healthcare reform, after all. But we've gotten to a point in the United States where anti-union sentiment is so widespread that (a) proposing a tax that falls largely on unions, and then (b) reducing it a bit, is considered a grubby giveaway even by some lefties. Yeesh.

Last but not least, this:

Great Quotes

I'm going to try and do posts like this once every few days. I wish I had time to respond to all of these. I don't but I don't want you to miss them. So...

Matt Yglesias:

It’s the miracle of capitalism!

Two guys are in the woods and they spot a vicious bear. One starts tying his sneakers. The other says “you’re never going to outrun that bear.” The first says, “I only need to outrun you.” And yet our society is so determined to worship money and success that this idea has developed that guys like Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein who managed to outrun the other guy actually outran the bear.

ThinkProgress:

Temperatures in “most places” are actually “above average for this time of year.” Record high and low temperatures are set every year, but there have been consistently more highs than lows in recent decades, as the National Center for Atmospheric Research demonstrates:

Ezra Klein:

According to Congressional Quarterly, President Obama "did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position." That is to say, if Obama told Congress he wanted X, Congress was more likely to give him X than any president in the past 60 years.

On the one hand, you could take this as evidence that Obama is an awesome president. But I'd say it's a bit more complex than that.

You're seeing the triumph of three things here. First, an uncommonly large Democratic majority. Second, a long-standing historical trend toward party discipline. And third, the White House's relentless strategy of focusing on what it can pass rather than what it thinks is needed.

The American people, via CNN:

Please tell me whether you agree or disagree that Barack Obama has the personality and leadership qualities a President should have.

Agree 64%
Disagree 35%

David Axelrod, via the National Journal and Steve Benen:

"It's almost impossible to win a referendum on yourself," Axelrod insisted. "And the Republicans would like this to be a referendum. It's not going to be a referendum."

Asked what has to happen in the next 10 months to produce the best possible result for Democrats in November, Axelrod didn't hesitate in identifying his top priority: an economy that is adding, rather than losing, jobs each month. "I think job growth is certainly number one," he said. "I think that's how most people measure a recovering economy."

To nudge that process along, he says, he expects Congress to quickly conclude legislation to promote job growth: "We have to take that up right away," he said....

"They want to stand with the insurance industry on health care and protect the status quo, then let them defend that in an election," Axelrod said. "If they want to stand with the banks and the financial industries, and protect the status quo, then let them explain that in an election. If the party that over eight years turned a... surplus into the most significant growth in national debt by far in the history of the country and left this president with a $1.3 trillion deficit when he walked in the door and an economic crisis, let them campaign on fiscal integrity. You know... we're certainly willing to have that discussion. The difference is that we'll have that discussion in the context of a campaign, and we haven't, in the midst of a crisis, tried to campaign every day in the halls of Congress."

Paul Campos:

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are "unacceptable," and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Conservative think tank AEI:

The real economy also responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

Steve Brill:

“Over the last 50 years, the ratio of top pay to average pay at public companies has multiplied roughly 11 times (24:1 to 275:1). That’s more pay in one workday for the chief executive than his average employee makes in a year.”

He Is Who We Thought He Was [Updated]

Obama, today:

Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don’t hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust. That is exactly what our adversaries want, and so long as I am President, we will never hand them that victory. We will define the character of our country, not some band of small men intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Greg Sargent has a great roundup of today's pantybomber news.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan continues his quixotic campaign to get someone - anyone! - fired for the mistakes that were made, blaming the tendency of "Big Government" to protect its own for the lack of accountability.

Look, I'm all for holding people responsible when mistakes are made, but... shouldn't we first make sure we know who is responsible before we start throwing people out the door? Or is this supposed to be a symbolic exercise, one where the firing itself serves, in Andrew's words, as "incentive to get things right" in the future? Because it seems to me that if we choose the later route, we risk accidentally firing the people most capable of preventing future mistakes.

Governments, like the human beings that populate them, are not perfect. They cannot be. Thus, even on matters of immense national importance, mistakes will always be made. Of course how we react to those mistakes matters, and in most cases, the people responsible for them can, should, and must be reprimanded or fired. But firing simply for the sake of firing gets us nowhere. And sometimes, whether Andrew like it or not, it will be the system, and not any one individual, that is to blame for a mistake. In those instances, rather than fire specific individuals, we should focus on reforming the system to the best of our imperfect abilities.

Firing for firing's sake isn't bold leadership. Hell, its not even leadership. Its just mindless reactionaryism. Surely we can do better than that.

UPDATE: I will agree with Andrew on this. Thank god the White House doesn't think like this anymore:

Pathetic doesn't even begin to describe that answer, and the mindset it revealed. Particularly when compared to this:

But on the whole "Fire someone! Now!" thing, well... I'm with John Cole.

UPDATE II: Great point from one of Josh Marshall's readers:

I haven't seen any mention of how quickly the administration tried to release as much info as it could to the public vs. Bush's endless stonewalling when it came to releasing any info that could prove politically damaging. Could you imagine Bush offering up this kind of report to the public without a subpoena?

Yet another of many, many examples why I'm so glad Obama won in 2008.

Rethink Your Criticism, Or Rethink Your Conclusion (Part II)

Three updates to the previous post seems enough. But let's keep this thing going here....

Matt Yglesias:

Insofar as stepped-up security makes flying both more expensive and more annoying, and therefore pushes more people to drive long distances, we’re going to cost lives rather than save them. And at the end of the day, you have to understand that terrorists are not going to weaken America by killing us all a hundred at a time with bombs. They do much more to weaken America by inducing us to waste money and strangle our economy.

The last point I would make, raised by DanVerg on Twitter, is that even if airplanes were completely secure you could always kill people by detonating a bomb in some other crowded place. For example, you could blow something up in a crowded airport security line.

One of the most important parts of counterterrorism is to try to ensure that our society is robust against the possibility of successful attack. Which is to say that if people are murdered by terrorists we need to mourn them, catch and punish the perpetrators, and move on. We need to keep moving people and goods around the country. We need to keep producing and purchasing goods and services. We need to keep our foreign policy focused on the big picture. Hysteria is the goal of attacks, and it’s a shame to see that goal being served in the name of partisan politics.

This just adds to my initial assessment that we have vastly overestimated the threat we face.

If, as so many conservatives love to claim, there are thousands upon thousands of radical Muslims who have dedicated their lives to killing as many Americans as possible, what precisely are they waiting for? Why aren't there bombings on subways? And at malls? And in airport terminals? And movie theaters? And sporting events? And on and on and on.... If they are truly dedicated to their ideals and capable of acting upon them, why aren't they acting?

Yes, there is a threat, it is serious, and we must act as a nation to protect ourselves. But unless we understand what the terrorists actually are actually capable of and willing to do we are destined to overreact. Which, of course, is the point of terrorism. It is a form of asymmetrical warfare that uses fear to provoke your opponent into doing to themselves what you cannot. As Matt writes, "They do much more to weaken America by inducing us to waste money and strangle our economy."

Until we understand and internalize that we will be doing their jobs for them. It may not be easy or pleasant to admit, but it is the truth.

He is who we thought he was

Yet another major change that will go almost entirely unnoticed by both the people and the press, save for this one day story:

President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.

In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information public if possible, including by requiring agencies to regularly review what kinds of information they classify and to eliminate any obsolete secrecy requirements.

“Agency heads shall complete on a periodic basis a comprehensive review of the agency’s classification guidance, particularly classification guides, to ensure the guidance reflects current circumstances and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified,” Mr. Obama wrote in the order, released while he was vacationing in Hawaii.

He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to speed the process of declassifying historical documents by centralizing their review, rather than sending them in sequence to different agencies. He set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million-page backlog of such records that includes archives related to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.

Yet another of the many reasons I worked so hard to get this man elected.

Rethink Your Criticism, Or Rethink Your Conclusion

Over the last few days, I've been reading and hearing this a lot: via Andrew Sullivan, Maureen Down:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

Here's the problem:

If Dowd is right and our nation is truly unable to catch even the most inept terrorist, then by definition nearly every terrorist plot since the TSA was created has found at least this level of success. And yet in that time there have only been two incidents on airplanes, including this one. Rather than question whether or security is too lax, doesn't this mean we should question whether all the time, money, and effort we're spending is necessary?

Or, for those who don't like that approach: Given that both incidents have involved explosive devices that were ineffective precisely because they had been elaborately designed to evade security, doesn't it mean that the system has so throughly changed terrorist behavior that it is actually working?

Either the system is a joke and so is the threat, or the threat is real and the system is largely working. You can pick one or the other, but not both. Nate Silver provides the context for those who doubt:

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six [Ed: Nate is including 9/11 in his calculations], we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

To repeat myself: Either the system is a joke and so is the threat, or the threat is real and the system is largely working. You can pick one or the other, but not both.

UPDATE: Also worth noting here.... the underwear bomber was in many, many ways similar to the shoe bomber. Similar solo actor using the same explosive material similarly stopped by passengers and not the TSA. One major difference is who is in control of Congress and the White House.

I'd love to know how many of the Republicans - you know, the party that used to unanimously say that criticism of a president during a time of war was treason? - who are now criticizing Obama aired similar criticisms of Bush the first time around. Oh, wait, I know the answer to that: None.

Not that I'm even remotely surprised by this. Of course they have different standards when the President is a Republican. And of course the talking heads on my teevee happily follow along behind them. Because like America, Republicans and their pundits can do no wrong.

UPDATE II: I can barely believe my eyes. Politico has actually noticed the double standard!

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate.

That stands in sharp contrast to the withering criticism President Barack Obama has received from Republicans and some in the press for his reaction to Friday’s incident on a Northwest Airlines flight heading for Detroit.

Democrats have seized on the disparity and are making it a centerpiece of their efforts to counter GOP attacks on the White House. “This hypocrisy demonstrates Republicans are playing politics with issues of national security and terrorism,” DNC spokesman Hari Sevugan said. “That they would use this incident as an opportunity to fan partisan flames…tells you all you need to know about how far the Republican party has fallen and how out of step with the American people they have become.”

The Democrats’ counterattack is aimed largely at two Republican congressmen who have been particularly critical of Obama, Reps. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and Peter King (R-N.Y.). But neither GOP lawmaker concedes applying a double standard to Obama.

But the similarities between last Friday’s incident and the attempted shoe bombing in 2001 are striking.

This year’s attack came on Christmas. The attempt eight years ago took place on Dec. 22. Obama was on vacation in Hawaii when the suspect, Omar Abdulmutallab, allegedly used plastic explosives in his try to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight. Bush was at Camp David when Reid used similar plastic explosives to try to blow up his Paris-to-Miami flight, which diverted to Boston after the incident.

Like the Obama White House, the Bush White House told reporters the president had been briefed on the incident and was following it closely. While the Obama White House issued a background statement through a senior administration official calling the incident an “attempted terrorist attack” on the same day it took place, the early official statements from Bush aides did not make the same explicit statement.

Bush did not address reporters about the Reid episode until December 28, after he had traveled from Camp David to his ranch in Texas.

Democrats do not appear to have criticized Bush over the delay. Many were wary of publicly clashing with the commander in chief, who was getting lofty approval ratings after what appeared to be a successful military campaign in Afghanistan. The media also seemed to have little interest in pressing Bush about the bombing, or the fact that the incident had revealed a previously unknown vulnerability in airplane security — that shoes could be used to hide chemicals or explosive devices.

But as John Cole points out, this story comes less than 24 hours after the Politico itself criticized Obama for acting too slowly.

UPDATE III: And now the Republican Party is using the incident to raise money. No doubt had the Democrats thought to do likewise with the show bomber, Republicans would have thought it just fine.

Happy Health Care Day!

It's been nearly a month since I've posted an update here - blame my dissertation! blame Twitter! blame the slow pace of progress in the Senate! - so long that I've now got 100's of items saved in my Feed Reader for future comment. At this point, there's obviously no way I can get to all of them, but given that the end of the decade is fast approaching... and given the historic nature of today's vote in the Senate... I feel like I have no choice today but to try. So let's get to it!

On Health Insurance Reform:

We're nearly there people! The bill's not perfect, but no bill ever is. Social Security was far from perfect when it first passed. Medicare and Medicaid were far more modest than they are today. Civil Rights legislation was nowhere near perfect when it was first adopted. It took decades of fighting to create robust protections for our nation's parks and forests. Why? Because this is how democracy works. It is a method and a process, not an outcome. We fight. We argue. We talk. We convince. We stand up. We act. And then we do it all over again, each and every day, until it is time for the next generation to take the lead in the fight.

Is it messy? Yes. Is it contentious? Yes. Because it is supposed to be. Because it needs to be. If the fight was easy, it wouldn't be a fight. The status quo, no matter how wretched, never easily gives way. Creating change requires more energy than defending stasis. Know this. Understand it. Accept it. And never, ever let it prevent you from doing what needs to be done.

I understand why some people on the left are unhappy with this bill. But I cannot for the life of me figure out why they think its smart politics or policy to oppose it, or worse, to join with the most hideous elements on the right in an effort to see it killed. On that count, I'm with Nate: "Progressives Are Batshit Crazy To Oppose The Senate Bill." And with Josh: "In real politics, there are no opt-outs, only cop-outs." And with Max, with a nod to Matt, who wrote:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth--that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.

To repeat myself, this bill isn't perfect. But it is, as John Chait wrote today, "the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades." And, as KDrum wrote, "the biggest progressive advance in my adult life." And, as John Cohn wrote, "the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation." And, as Ezra wrote, "arguably the most important piece of legislation the body has passed since 1963." This is an enormous achievement. Do not let your quest for your idea of the perfect blind you to the immense good that is happening right in front of your face. We're winning one of the most important political fights in more than a generation.

And while we're on the subject of Ezra, Jon, John, Kevin, Nate, and the rest of the wonky progressive bloggers around the 'sphere, let's be sure to also acknowledge just how much these guys have done to enlighten our nation's political debate. A decade ago, citizens who wanted to follow the ins and outs of our nation's policy debates quite literally had nowhere to turn. TV and print media covered the people and the politics, but they never - and here I am using that word quite deliberately - dug into the details of policy in anything even remotely approaching the level of detail that these bloggers have. Once, maybe twice during a debate you'd get a giant, multi-thousand word piece that attempted to cover the subject, but that's about it. And god help you if you happened to miss that day's edition, because there were no archives for you to return to.Today? Today you can read thousands of words a day, all part of an ongoing conversation that this nation's citizens are having with themselves. Ezra and Jon and Nate and others are leading a national clinic, and in so doing, are helping to re-democratize our nation's public sphere.

Nothing like this has ever existed before. What we are doing, what we are creating together, is something entirely new. The consequences for our system of government are immense, even if they aren't yet clear. Don't believe me?

But back to health care before moving on.... Do not underestimate what an historic achievement this will be. Ignore the cable teevee pundits. This issue represents a HUGE win for the left and for the Democratic Party. Some parts of the party are unhappy right now, but this will pass. Remember how divided we supposedly were during the primary? Remember how everyone said the wounds would not heal in time for the fall campaign? Remember how wrong all of those people were?

I know its fashionable to claim that Democrats don't know what they are doing. Ignore this too. With the help of the people - both activists and average citizens alike - the party is finding its soul and its spine again. Its leadership is rising to the occasion. Health care reform will be a huge issue next fall, and again in 2012. And I promise you, it will be an issue we will win on, both because we have the people on our side and because our opponents are so far beyond lost I don't have the words to describe them....

On the Continuing Collapse of the GOP:

State Attorneys General from several Southern states are planning to mount legal challenges to the law - never mind that the clause of the constitution they are citing makes explicit reference to ports

Congressional Republicans plan on making their opposition to health care the centerpiece of the upcoming campaign - never mind that their opposition comes without any positive proposals of their own.

Republican pundits, the people opinion polls consistently ID as the real leaders of the Republican Party, continue to hyperventilate about how this bill will end civilization as we know it - never mind that this tactic utterly failed them in the fall of 2008.

And its newest leading light, a morning zoo DJ turned political movement leader, is set on leading the effort to remove all the "Marxist code words" from the Bible. Because God knows his Son wasn't in favor of helping the poor. Or the sick. Or the downtrodden. Or the outcast. Or the weak. Or minorities. Or anyone other than himself, right?

Mark my words: The Republican Party is collapsing. If it does not pull itself out of this tailspin soon, it may soon cease to exist as a truly national political power. No political party is forever. The Federalist Party collapsed in the early 1800s under the weight of its own contradictions. The Whigs followed suit in the decade before the Civil War. The Populists misjudged their era and disappeared at the turn of the 20th century.

And then... something changed, and the two "major" parties reached a form of stasis. What was that change? In large part, I believe it was the rise of top down, national broadcast networks, a new system of political communication that privileged those in power over those now forced to watch from the outside. And that system of communication is dying. As a vertical system of one-to-many communication gives way to a horizontal system that interconnects the many unto itself, the elites are losing control. The information infrastructure atop which the last great party system was built is disappearing. And as it goes, it is entirely conceivable that it will take one of our nation's parties with it. It has happened before. It will happen again. And yes, that's precisely what my dissertation seeks to show.

Like the Federalists before it, the modern Republican Party is on the wrong wide of every major issue facing this country. It is opposed to universal health care. It is opposed to climate change legislation, even if it helps create jobs. It is opposed to any and all forms of non-punitive Immigration reform. It is opposed to the use of science in the creation of public policy. But its for tax cuts! And wars! And white people! It stands, in short, for the past, no matter how obviously disastrous that past is.

Political parties do not live forever. Like all living things, they must evolve or they must die. Denying the power of evolution does not make it go away.

On Realignments:

Republicans are becoming Democrats, and Democrats are becoming Republicans. Will this help the GOP find its way? I doubt it. But only time, of course, will tell.

Meanwhile, OFA, the organization that we built for the Obama campaign, is still out there, alive and well. We made 1 million calls to Congress over the past few months. We held more than 25,000 events in congressional districts. And now, our opponents are beginning to copy us. The future? Why, I think its already here.

On Obama:

Not surprisingly, I cannot say it better than this: Meep Meep, mutha fucka....

On the Filibuster:

Its nice to see people across the political world finally turning their attention to just how absurd and undemocratic this rule really is. James Fallows, Matt Yglesias, Mark Schmitt, and eventually even Pres. Obama himself have commented at length recently.

For me, its simple. The Senate is already ridiculously undemocratic. Despite the fact that California's two senators represent more than 12% of the US population, their votes count for only 2% of the US Senate. Meanwhile, despite the fact that the smallest 20 states have a population roughly equal to that of California, they hold 40 of the chamber's votes. Add Connecticut, and you've got enough under current Senate rules and practices to block any and all legislation.

Let me repeat myself: The smallest 20 states + Connecticut = a filibuster.

I think I'll leave it there for now.

On Climate Change:

Im running out of time for this update, so let's go to the links:

Uncertain about uncertainty? Read this.

What the hacked ClimateGate emails do - and do not - show.

Scientific American offers Seven Answers To Climate Contrarian Nonsense

How Science is supposed to work.

A climate skeptic's conversion.

Bits and Bobs:

Zen and the Art of Politics

A solution to the black carbon problem?

The Bright Side Of $26 Drone Hacks? Makes me wonder if it wasn't intentional.

Michelle Bachmann is a welfare queen!

Teddy Roosevelt is still a badass.

RedState's Erick Erickson is still a moron.

Donald Duck loves taxes.

Even in Obama's socialist utopia, taxes are still at historic lows.

And Obama, no matter what pundits might say, is still, in the one way that matters most, like Reagan. Believe it.

I'm out. Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. Peace....

Deep Thought

I'm old enough to remember a time when Republicans endlessly screeched about how criticism during a time of war, particularly over the conduct of the war, emboldened our enemies and undermined the morale of our troops.

I'm also old enough to remember when Republicans thought that news organizations that printed such criticisms were committing treason

In fact, I'm old enough to remember this very guy saying those very things.

What?

You mean he didn't mean what he was saying? He was just using the war as a partisan political weapon?

Say it isn't so!

Behold the Wisdom of the Village

Obama is too rational! Too smart! Too tough! Too weak!

All in a single Politico article.

If that's not the definition of ridiculous, I don't know what is.

Weekend Bits + Bobs

Got a ton of posts saved in the clippings folder. Might as well clear 'em all out while watching some football....

+ I keep hearing from all my conservative friends that deficits are going to be Obama's undoing. Ignoring for the moment that conservatives have absolutely no credibility whatsoever on this issue... and ignoring for the moment that the current federal debt as a percentage of GDP is only slightly higher than it was at the end of the first Bush presidency... Obama hasn't yet completed his first year in office. He's got plenty of time to tackle this problem. And - shocking! - he's already planning to!

+ This might fall under the "things you already know" category, but its still worth a review. Attackerman offers this conclusion from a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation on how bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001:

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.

+ Meanwhile... Socialism!

"We need to start thinking like the Chinese," [Glenn] Beck said at a recent rally. "I’m developing a 100 year plan for America."

But its Obama we're supposed to be afraid of, right?

+ Sen. Lieberman won't appear on Rachel Maddow's show because she has a "point of view." Good to know. So I assume from now on he will only do interviews with robots?

+ Why are bills so long? Combine this, this, and this and you have the answer.

+ This one is for my California people. Ummm... What the hell is wrong with you? Would you please do something about this?

+ Tom Schaller offers a great response to the Tea Party / Tenthers here.

+ This tweet from Sen. Claire McCaskill is a few weeks old, but it deserves a second look:

After you do one really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad, I don't think anybody's excited about doing another really, really big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad

I hear this all the time from politicians, and no matter how many times it is repeated, it never makes any sense. What's the point of getting elected to office if you don't want to do hard things? No one forced you to run for office. It was your choice to run now, during a time of economic crisis, and not later. If the country has lots of "really, really hard things" that need to be done, its your job. Suck it up and deal! As Ezra says, "they can solve fewer problems when there are fewer problems to solve." Which, you know, is what will happen if they actually do the job they were elected to do.

And please... don't come back to me with this "I might not get reelected!" nonsense. The point of getting elected isn't to enable some future reelection effort. Its to get things done. I'd love to have a permanent Democratic majority, but not if it doesn't actually lead to policy change.

+ Via Andrew Sullivan, this is the best fact check I've yet seen of Palin's new book:

“That is the most cockamamie bullshit. She didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, and she didn’t know what it was about," - Dave Oesting of Anchorage, lead plaintiff attorney in the private litigants’ civil case against Exxon and its successor, Exxon Mobil Corp.

+ This, however, is the quote of the month:

"I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time," - Utah Senator Chris Buttars, explaining his opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.

+ Back to Andrew Sullivan for a strange but nevertheless typical defense of states' rights:

Because these are areas of deep and principled disagreement and this is a vast and diverse country. Getting Massachusetts and Alabama to agree on a deep moral issue is almost impossible. And I remain a conservative who wants to see necessary change occur as far as possible with as broad a consensus as possible and who believes that decisions made closest to the ground are the least worst ways of avoiding massive errors or hideous unintended consequences.

He's right about the problem of settling deep moral issues in a country as large and diverse as this. But... why are states the best political unit in which to locate these decisions? Why not counties? Or metro areas? Or some other, much smaller political unit? State lines, after all, weren't originally drawn up along demographic lines. They were entirely arbitrary decisions made by people who weren't even remotely local. What the lines drawn by King George, for example, have to do with today's political questions? I'll tell you what: Nothing. And yet you hear this sort of thing from states' rights people all the time. I just don't get it.

+ And last but in no way least... two must read posts from TNC. Here's a fantastic take on the role of the MC and the DJ in hip hop culture. And here's a must-read on how Palin supporters misunderstand the role of fear in politics. It's so good I have to quote the conclusion:

People misunderstand fear. It doesn't always cause your foes to cower in a corner. Sometimes it causes them to beat the crap out of you with a bag of rusty nails.

He... Could... Go...

Pray for Obama—Psalm 109:8

Background on the "joke" here. Attackerman nails the response:

If this were a different religion, the individuals responsible would the subject of massive government surveillance and possible prosecution. The Qu’ran would be cited as a blueprint for murder, as Pat Robertson implied earlier this month. Instead, this will be treated as a harmless joke.

You can't have it both ways. Either religious extremism is bad, or it is not. Either a religious text can be judged by its worst moments, or it cannot. Either you have to take everything theocrats say seriously, or you do not. Either you have to stand behind the President during a time of war, or you do not. Either you are in favor of a system of situational morals and ethics, or you are not. This stuff is binary.

For the record, here's the source of "the joke":

1 O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent, 2 for wicked and deceitful men have opened their mouths against me; they have spoken against me with lying tongues.

3 With words of hatred they surround me;
they attack me without cause.

4 In return for my friendship they accuse me,
but I am a man of prayer.

5 They repay me evil for good,
and hatred for my friendship.

6 Appoint [a] an evil man [b] to oppose him;
let an accuser [c] stand at his right hand.

7 When he is tried, let him be found guilty,
and may his prayers condemn him.

8 May his days be few;
may another take his place of leadership.

9 May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow.

10 May his children be wandering beggars;
may they be driven [d] from their ruined homes.

11 May a creditor seize all he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor.

12 May no one extend kindness to him
or take pity on his fatherless children.

13 May his descendants be cut off,
their names blotted out from the next generation.

14 May the iniquity of his fathers be remembered before the LORD;
may the sin of his mother never be blotted out.

15 May their sins always remain before the LORD,
that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.

16 For he never thought of doing a kindness,
but hounded to death the poor
and the needy and the brokenhearted.

17 He loved to pronounce a curse—
may it [e] come on him;
he found no pleasure in blessing—
may it be [f] far from him.

18 He wore cursing as his garment;
it entered into his body like water,
into his bones like oil.

19 May it be like a cloak wrapped about him,
like a belt tied forever around him.

20 May this be the LORD's payment to my accusers,
to those who speak evil of me.

21 But you, O Sovereign LORD,
deal well with me for your name's sake;
out of the goodness of your love, deliver me.

22 For I am poor and needy,
and my heart is wounded within me.

23 I fade away like an evening shadow;
I am shaken off like a locust.

24 My knees give way from fasting;
my body is thin and gaunt.

25 I am an object of scorn to my accusers;
when they see me, they shake their heads.

26 Help me, O LORD my God;
save me in accordance with your love.

27 Let them know that it is your hand,
that you, O LORD, have done it.

28 They may curse, but you will bless;
when they attack they will be put to shame,
but your servant will rejoice.

29 My accusers will be clothed with disgrace
and wrapped in shame as in a cloak.

30 With my mouth I will greatly extol the LORD;
in the great throng I will praise him.

31 For he stands at the right hand of the needy one,
to save his life from those who condemn him.

Mid-Week Bits + Bobs

Lots of interesting things going on out there that are too long for a Twitter post and too short for their own blog post. And no, I don't need no damn micro-blog either. Something like this works just fine:

+ Let's put this right up top. John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, has just written a book that provides evidence that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney provided false testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Even worse, he uses FAA and NORAD records to show that the Bush Administration sought to alter official government records to make their performance on 9/11 look much, much better than it actually was.

Wondering why you haven't heard about this yet? The NYT buried the story in its Sunday Book Review. Isn't it crazy how liberal that newspaper is? And how biased against conservatives?

+ Via Ezra Klein, a great quote from Rahm Emanuel on the pragmatic politics behind health reform:

“Let’s be honest. The goal isn’t to see whether I can pass this through the executive board of the Brookings Institution. I’m passing it through the United States Congress with people who represent constituents... I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute — my brother being one of them — who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.”

+ Meanwhile, Republicans continue to drive themselves off an ideological cliff. Political Wire / CNN / Ezra:

The poll indicates that a slight majority, 51%, of Republicans would prefer to see the GOP in their area nominate candidates who agree with them on all the major the issues even if they have a poor chance of beating the Democratic candidate. Forty-three percent of Republicans say they would rather have candidates with whom they don't agree on all the important issues but who can beat the Democrats."

In constrast, Democrats polled "seemed to place a slightly higher priority on electoral victory: 58% say that they would like their party to nominate candidates who can beat Republicans, even if they don't agree with those candidates on all the issues."

A party ceases to be a national political party when its members care more about ideology than about winning elections. Why? Because the only purpose a political party has is to win elections. It serves no other purpose.

+ Via Kevin Drum, a great example of SoCal conservative thinking:

It's like living in a Third World country not to have sewers. But nobody wants to pay that sort of exorbitant fee. If we need a sewer system, you expect government to provide that service.

Those fees the gentleman is complaining about? They are otherwise known as taxes. This approach is very typical of conservatives, particularly in California. Government ought to provide the services middle class people need to live a middle class lifestyle, but it must never ever collect money from middle class people to do so. Nor from small business. Nor from big business. And that, in a nutshell, is why the budgets of both CA and the USA are such a disastrous mess.

This really is quite simple: Taxes pay for the things that the people ask their government to do on their behalf. Without taxes, no services. No police. No fire fighters. No military. No 911. No public hospitals. No courts. No jails. No prisons. No roads. No public parks. No sewer systems. No food safety. No public transportation. No street lights. No national forests. No air traffic control. No airport security. No public universities. No public schools. No NIH. No bank deposit insurance. No... are you getting my point here?
Here's the less ranty version from CBO director Doug Elmendorf

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services.

Without taxes, there is no government. Period. Full stop. The end. No government whatsoever, including all of the things that we take for granted, and that in the words of this jackass, separate us from the "Third World."

+ Not to turn this into all taxes, all the time, but this from a recent Attackerman guest blogger is just too good to pass up:

A key part of living in a democratic society is accepting the fact that a majority of your fellow-citizens might favor a policy that you’re opposed to, morally or otherwise. Hell, a key part of living in a democratic society is accepting the fact that the government will grant certain rights – like reproductive freedom inclusive of abortion – that you find deeply immoral. Now, as a full person within said society, you can work and lobby to restrict the extent to which that right can be exercised. But what you can’t do is force the government to abandon rights or responsibilities that you find distasteful. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of bloated defense budgets or open-ended imperial adventures, and ideally, I would not want my tax dollars to support said projects. As a society however, we’ve agreed that I am not allowed to not pay taxes because I don’t like a particular action. Instead, I have to convince my fellow citizens that my stance is the correct one, and watch it go from there.

That's just one of two ways that the recent debate over insurance coverage for abortions highlights some very basic misperceptions people have about how money works in both our economic and political systems. Here's another, this time from Steve Benen:

As we talked about this morning, all the RNC has done here is opt out of abortion coverage for RNC employees. RedState wants an explanation of how this went unnoticed for 18 years.

But more important is the underlying logic. The new-and-improved RNC policy will insure its employees through Cigna, and Cigna will still pay for abortions, just not for RNC employees. In other words, RNC premiums will go to the company, and the company will then use its pool of money to pay for abortions. That's the "fix" RNC Chairman Michael Steele scrambled to make.

RedState and the Republican National Committee support the Stupak amendment, and according to its reasoning, the RNC will still be indirectly subsidizing abortions with its premiums. Leon H. Wolf wants an explanation for the previous mistake, without realizing that very little has actually changed here.

One of the most very basic qualities of money is its fungibility. Since all dollars are equal, any dollar collected by a single organization is the same as any other. Once its been collected, it can't be separated out. Any one dollar is interchangeable with any other.

For hard core pro-lifers, this should present a very serious problem. If abortion is so evil that it cannot be supported, then pro-lifers cannot buy insurance policies from companies that provide abortion coverage to anyone. Their individual policy is irrelevant. When their insurance company collects premiums, it puts all of the money into one giant pool. That's true with all financial transactions in general, but its specifically true with insurance, which is built entirely around the idea of pooling risks and costs across a giant group of people.Thus, if you are pro-life and you purchase insurance from a company that provides even one person with coverage for abortion, you have supported something you find morally abhorrent. If you really are as serious about this as you say, you will cancel your insurance right away. Right?

+ Here's a second great example of the bizarre contradictions in what passes for modern conservative thought. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) recently suggested that Carrie Prejean, the beauty queen turned anti-gay marriage activist turned conservative hero turned sex tape star, might make a good candidate for office. His reasoning:

[Carrie] has the ability to draw crowds and if she has a strong message to go with that, who knows what she can do? She has star power which can open doors.

We’ve all made mistakes when we were 17. [The sex tape] is going to be an impediment, but people are excited about her convictions and her beliefs.

Sure thing, she's done something that conservatives abhor. And that might be a problem. Except she says all the right things! And people like her! So no matter. After all, morals are about what you say, not what you do, right? Its words that matter, not deeds. Just like Jesus wanted. Wait. Hang on...

+ Andrew Sullivan writes about the real lessons of both 9/11 and Ft. Hood:

The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.

Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.

Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place. Yes, Muslim-Americans have not joined Jihad the way many Europeans have. Yes, we have gained some small benefits from ousting the Taliban, and Saddam ... although at terrible costs. But we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far. The biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.

And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help.

+ Marc Lynch follows on:

The grand strategy of al-Qaeda and its affiliated ideologues is, and has always been, to generate a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West which does not currently exist. Their great challenge is that the vast majority of Muslims reject their theology, ideology, strategy and tactics. That's especially true of American Muslims. They therefore feel the need to change the environment in which Muslims live in order to change their calculations about the appropriateness of extremist identities and ideologies and actions.

Terrorism is a means towards that end. The object is to create a violent, polarized environment in which Muslims are forced to embrace a narrow, extreme version of Muslim identity. They want Muslims to accept a master narrative in which the Islamic umma is existentially threatened by Western aggression, and the only theologically and strategically appropriate individual response is to join the jihad in the path of god (as they have defined it).

+ Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier (via Kevin Drum) takes on our nonsensical approach to preventing terrorism:

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards.

....Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

....Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities — both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur — and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.

The arrest of the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (airplanes) and tactic (liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless.

+ TNC nails why Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best games of its generation. And yes, I've already completed one play though. As a Dalish 'you can take our lives, but you will never take our freedom!' Elf, thank you very much.

What They Said

Attackerman, responding to Sarah Palin's freakout over the news that we're going to try KSM in NYC:

What’s an actual insult to the victims of 9/11 is the idea that America is not strong enough to withstand the blatherings of a mass murderer. For me, the prospect of KSM grandstanding at his trial falls into I-wish-a-motherfucker-would territory. I want to hear how KSM builds a case against America, because everyone will hear how laughably conspiratorial and clownish it is. Think of what a cathartic moment it will be when America sees the face of the man considered to be UBL’s most efficient henchman and he delivers a pitiful harangue to a bank of cameras. No one will be emboldened to do anything but laugh. The only downside will be his inevitable discussion of how CIA operatives tortured him.

My hope for the KSM trial is that it does more than all this. It should forever shatter the pernicious myth that al-Qaeda is composed of supermen — supermen against whom America has no choice but to alter its character and most precious laws in order to confront. I suspect we’ll have an Eichmann-in-Jerusalem moment — and sorry for the unfortunate Nazi/al-Qaeda analogy; al-Qaeda are not the Nazis; but I couldn’t really think of any other parallel — except instead of the banality of evil, we’ll see the lunacy and vanity and self-absorption of it. That’s because al-Qaeda’s weltanshauung depends on a myth that holds America to be implacably determined to snuff out the glory of Islam. In reality, most Americans couldn’t give a fuck about Islam and only started to know the first thing about it because of 9/11. But that America — an America bearing no resemblance to the actual America — will be what KSM seeks to counter-indict. It’s farcical, and farcical in ways that can only benefit the real America.

Which leads to Glenn Greenwald's take:

...the Right's reaction to yesterday's announcement -- we're too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country -- is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorists." It's the same fear they've been spewing for years. As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn't allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country's 2004 train bombings. The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London. Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali. India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents. In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.

It's only America's Right that is too scared of the Terrorists -- or which exploits the fears of their followers -- to insist that no regular trials can be held and that "the safety and security of the American people" mean that we cannot even have them in our country to give them trials. As usual, it's the weakest and most frightened among us who rely on the most flamboyant, theatrical displays of "strength" and "courage" to hide what they really are. Then again, this is the same political movement whose "leaders" -- people like John Cornyn and Pat Roberts -- cowardly insisted that we must ignore the Constitution in order to stay alive: the exact antithesis of the core value on which the nation was founded. Given that, it's hardly surprising that they exude a level of fear of Terrorists that is unmatched virtually anywhere in the world. It is, however, noteworthy that the position they advocate -- it's too scary to have normal trials in our country of Terrorists -- is as pure a surrender to the Terrorists as it gets.

Yglesias:

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder. It’s true that if al-Qaeda were something like the “blowing up train stations” arm of a major country with which we were otherwise at war, it might make the most sense to think of al-Qaeda as fitting in with spies and saboteurs; criminal adjuncts to a warrior enterprise.

After all, do we really want to send the message to the world that a self-starting spree killer like Nidal Malik Hasan is actually engaged in some kind of act of holy war? It seems to me that we don’t.

Last but in no way least, this:

“It is of utmost importance to me that those who were responsible for the attacks of 9/11 face a court,” says Adele Welty in the video. Her son was a New York firefighter killed at the World Trade Center.

“It’s very important to me that we get the right people,” says John Leinung, whose stepson was killed while working in the Twin Towers. “That the right people are punished or held to account for what happened on 9/11.”

Pat Perry, whose son was a police offer killed on 9/11, says she would rather see the Guantánamo detainees who have been held without charge “appear in open court where we can all sift out what we feel is really the truth and the judges can make a decision based on our Constitution.”

These 9/11 family members all say they agree that holding detainees without charge in Guantánamo is a betrayal of American values and they look forward to true justice being served in federal court.

“My son gave his life to save those trapped in the Twin Towers,” Welty says, “and it does not honor him that we violate our Constitution in retaliation for what happened on September 11.”

High Brodersim

This might be one of Broder's best lines yet. On Afghanistan, he writes:

The more President Obama examines our options in Afghanistan, the less he likes the choices he sees. But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose -- and he has stretched the internal debate to the breaking point.

It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right.

I mean, my goodness.... people are leaking stories to the press! Its a flood! Doesn't Obama know that the American the damage he is doing? Doesn't he see how this is tearing the country apart? If only he would hurry up and make a decisions. The president doesn't need to be right, after all. He just needs to be fast!

Please, someone... anyone... make Broder retire. He's just embarrassing himself now.

So Let Me Get This Straight

So let me get this straight: attending a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base to honor the fallen is "narcissistic," but landing a jet on an aircraft carrier while dressed in a flight suit to proclaim a war that has only just begun over is the height of patriotism?

So this is narcissistic:

And this is patriotic:

Good to know.