Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy

"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.

"I have a condescending attitude toward this op-ed"

Also, too, go read Matt. I'm gonna be laughing for the next 10 minutes about that one.

On Republicans and Budget Deficits

Why on earth would this surprise anyone?

A new Rasmussen poll supplies a very interesting data point in the ongoing debate about the budget deficit: As it turns out, Republican voters would prefer having a deficit if it meant they can get more tax cuts, instead of raising taxes in order to balance the budget.

The national poll of likely voters asked: "Would you rather see a balanced budget with higher taxes or a budget deficit with tax cuts?" A 41% plurality would rather have budget deficit with tax cuts, with 36% calling for higher taxes and a balanced budget. The internals of the poll show Republicans favoring deficits and tax cuts.

"The partisan differences on the questions are notable," says the pollster's analysis. "While 50% of Republicans would rather see a budget deficit with tax cuts, a plurality (46%) of Democrats favor the opposite approach - a balanced budget with higher taxes. Voters not affiliated with either party are evenly divided on the question."

A separate question asked: "Is it possible to balance the federal budget without raising taxes?" Here the answer was Yes 37%, with a No plurality of 42% saying that it is not possible to balance the budget without raising taxes. In the internals, 47% of Republicans think it's possible to balance the budget without raising taxes, to 53% of Democrats who do not think so.

Another Rasmussen number finds that only a very small minority knew the correct answer to this one: "Is the following statement true or false? Most federal spending is spent on only three programs--Social Security, Medicare and national defense." The correct answer is "True," but only 35% answered that way, with a 44% plurality saying false.

"These figures highlight a massive failure of leadership from both Republicans and Democrats among the nation's political elite," Scott Rasmussen wrote in the analysis. "Given the amount of political chatter about the budget in recent years, it is almost beyond comprehension that neither party has seen fit to highlight the basics so that the American people can make reasoned choices on the fundamental issues before them."

Were people not paying attention from 2000 to 2008? Hello? Is this thing even on?

The Best Blogger On The InterTubes

Seriously, kids. No one - and I mean no one - can hold a candle to Ta-Nehisi Coats. Stop what you are doing are read this. I'm just... wow.

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.

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.

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....

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.

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.

Still Not Sexist

I've faced a good bit of pushback from my argument that the Newsweek cover featuring Palin isn't sexist, so I thought it might be worth a minute or two to clarify what I meant. Two things:

First and most obviously: Palin posed for those photos. She chose those clothes knowing she would be in a photo. She chose to pose, to allow the picture to be taken, to be used in a magazine, and apparently, to allow the photographer to retain the rights to the photo's use and distribution. As a full equal human being, that is her right. As a fully equal woman, that is her right. I have no problem with that whatsoever. There is nothing wrong with those clothes. Or that pose. Or that flag. Or that Blackberry. Or anything else about that photo. Because as a fully equal human being she chose all of those things.

Second, the context: Palin claims the photo is being used out of context. Most of the blogosphere, even the progressive blogosphere, seems to agree. I do not. To understand why you need look no further than the text that accompanies it. It reads:

How do you solve a problem like Sarah? She's bad news for the GOP-and everybody else, too.

Sarah Palin is a beauty queen turned political celebrity. No one denies this because this is true.

The job of a beauty queen is to look pretty and smile. That is the sum total of their responsibilities on this Earth. They aren't experts in policy. They almost universally know nothing about government. If you have ever watched a beauty pageant, you already know this. And this is perfectly fine, because beauty queen are not public officials!

If you believe that government matters, and that politics requires that a person amass at least a small bit of policy knowledge, the idea that a beauty queen would become President is absurd. Not because there is something generally wrong with beauty queens, but because they very specifically don't have the skills and knowledge required to be a public servant.

The problem with Sarah Palin? It is not that she is attractive. Or that she likes to run. Or hunt. Or have kids. Or that she was once a beauty queen. It is that she is a beauty queen who is being taken seriously as a political candidate. And sure, she can spew conservative talking points with the best of 'em. But like a beauty queen she has no ideas of her own.

How better to illustrate this whole thing than with an image taken while she was Governor of Alaska that shows her striking a beauty queen pose while standing next to an American flag and holding a Blackberry? If there's a better way to do highlight the problem with her becoming the leader of the Republican Party, I cannot imagine what it might be. The mere existence of this photo is a near-perfect illustration of the problem.

If you have a problem with being a beauty queen, then don't become one. If you have a problem with magazines taking pictures of you posing like a beauty queen, then don't pose for them. If you want people to take you seriously, than be serious. And if you want people to respect your thoughts, then have some.

UPDATE: And what of the claim that a man wouldn't be treated like this? Imagine for a moment Arnold striking a Mr. Universe pose in weightlifting clothes while Governor of California. Does anyone doubt it would make him a laughingstock?

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.

A Losing Strategy

For the past week or so, I've been unable to figure out what to write about the special election being held in NY-23. But the news that the Republican Party's candidate, Dede Scozzafava, has dropped out to make way for the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, has fixed that.

The district should be a safe seat for the GOP. The party's nominee, Scozzafava, is actually to the right of the median member of her party in the NY State Assembly. Hoffman, meanwhile, doesn't even live in the district. And his party is mostly a joke. Here, for example, is the entirety of their position on NATO, one of the 20 major issues listed in their drop-down menu:

"NATO must redefine its mission or we should deem it an institution that outlived its usefulness."

But once a weird collection of national conservative activists got involved, Scozzafava's campaign tanked and Hoffman's took off. And the result? The GOP is now rallying behind the Conservative Party candidate.

Looking back over the entirely of American history, there are plenty of examples of a strong majority party co-opting the ideas, ideals, and language of a small third party that posed a threat to its coalition. But its hard to find an example where a party that had recently badly lost a series of national elections found their way back to the majority by embracing the candidates and ideologies of a fringe third party. In fact, so far as I know, there aren't any examples of that. And my guess is, this won't be the first.

The point of a political party is to build an organization that can bring together a diverse coalition of peoples and groups to win elections, at the state, local, and national levels. You don't do that by having out of state activists overrule the decisions of leaders at the local level. You can try it if you like, but in the end you'll discover I'm right. It won't work.

UPDATE: Well, okay then. Apparently Newt Gingrich agrees with everything I just said.

UPDATE II: And then Scozzafava endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens. Here's her statement:

"You know me, and throughout my career, I have been always been an independent voice for the people I represent. I have stood for our honest principles, and a truthful discussion of the issues, even when it cost me personally and politically. Since beginning my campaign, I have told you that this election is not about me; it's about the people of this District.

"It is in this spirit that I am writing to let you know I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.

"It's not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh's lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress. John and I worked together on the expansion of Fort Drum and I know how important that base is to the economy of this region. I am confident that Bill will be able to provide the leadership and continuity of support to Drum Country just as John did during his tenure in Congress.

"In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

"Please join me in voting for Bill Owens on Tuesday. To address the tough challenges ahead, we must rise above partisanship and politics and work together. There's too much at stake in this election to do otherwise."

This is exactly, precisely why the party purification strategy that hard core conservatives are pursuing will drive their party further into the minority. You cannot grow if you insist on purging anyone at the margin of your party that's closest to the center.

And while I'm updating... several of you wrote me to ask how this is different from the strategy the Netroots pursued from 2004-2008. One or two even suggested that I'm being hypocritical. But no, I'm not.

The Netroots pursued a "more Democrats, better Democrats" strategy, which meant that you first expand the size of the party by welcoming in people at the rightward edge of the coalition, then you improve your candidates by nominating people who better represent the party's core values. Or in terms of voters, first you convince them to vote with your party, then you convince them to vote with you on the issues.

Conservatives have inverted this, and are instead pursuing a "better conservatives, more conservatives" strategy, and that won't grow their party back into the majority.

“I feel relevant.”

“I feel relevant.”

That quote comes from Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who in three words has perfectly captured the absurdity of his approach to representing his constituents.

Hey Joe? It's not about you. It's about them.

Good to know that CT is still a Federalist stronghold, even after all these years.

UPDATE: This from Lieberman a few days ago is also worth highlighting:

There’s a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans. There’s a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them — and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who’s not a Democrat.

The first quote perfectly captures Lieberman's neo-federalism. This one perfectly captures Village Politics. Partisans, according to the good Senator, don't "want to see the right thing done" and don't "want something good done for this country." They must be ignored! But the mass of people in the middle! They are virtuous! And wise! And intelligent! Just like Joe.

If I didn't dislike the state so much, I'd consider moving there in 2012 just to help the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party knock this pompous ass out of the Senate.

The Point of Bipartisanship

I've been hammering this point for nearly a year now, but after having spent the better part of the last month reading about the election of 1800 and its aftermath - I'm embarrassed to admit I had no idea why Jefferson considered it to be the revolution that saved The Revolution - I think I have a new, much more concise way of getting to my point.

In times of intense partisanship, bipartisan outreach does two things. First, it clearly identifies which members of the other party you can work with by drawing them closer to you. Second, it clearly identifies which members of the other party are beyond your reach, pushing them further away from you. If done properly, these two outcomes are likely to realign the parties along new lines, increasing the size of your majority while driving your opponents further away from the political center.

Ezra Klein sees it:

...one or two crossover Republicans may not make a bill look bipartisan, but they probably make the rest of the Republicans look partisan. And for the purposes of congressional Democrats, that may be almost as good, or even better.The only thing worse for Democrats than Republican opposition is popular Republican opposition.

So does his friend Matt Yglesias:

You can think of the aftermath of the stimulus vote. Securing the votes of three moderate Republicans didn’t lead anyone to characterize the bill as a bipartisan endeavor. Instead, it simply served to delegitimize the “real Republican” credentials of the three Republicans who voted for it.

That is the point of bipartisanship. To simultaneously pull friendly politicians into your orbit while delegitimizing the rest. Jefferson did it in 1800, so much so that the Federalist Party had entirely disappeared within a decade or two. Whether Obama knows it or not, he's pursuing a strikingly similar strategy in 2008.

Will it work? We won't know until 2012. Until then, remember this: Ronald Reagan and his party were deeply unpopular heading into the 1982 midterms. And then, all of a sudden, it was morning again in America.

Ignore the polls. Ignore the chatter on cable TV. Focus on the work that needs to be done to make sure that dawn comes.

So Much For States' Rights

This story form the Watertown Daily Times, via TPM, is pretty hilarious:

A flustered and ill-at-ease Mr. Hoffman objected to the heated questioning, saying he should have been provided a list of questions he might be asked. He was, if he had taken the time to read the Thursday morning Times editorial raising the very same questions.

Coming to Mr. Hoffman's defense, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who accompanied the candidate on a campaign swing, dismissed regional concerns as "parochial" issues that would not determine the outcome of the election. On the contrary, it is just such parochial issues that we expect our representative to understand and be knowledgeable about, if he wants to be our voice in Washington.

Hoffman is the Conservative Party candidate that all of the conservative die-hards are supporting instead of the so-called moderate that their actual Republican Party has nominated in the three-way NY-23 special election.

You gotta love it when the small government, states' rights people are attacking questions about local politics as parochial, regional, and therefore unimportant. That's brilliant.

Friday Night Bits + Bobs

No reason not a guy can't watch baseball and blog at the same time....

+ Jon Chait comes around to my "if you take the longview, Obama's doing just fine" point of view.

+ Moments like this are precisely why I have no - and by no I mean none, zero, zip, zilch, nada - worried about the 2010 or 2012 elections.

+ Peter Beinart, however, is still clueless. To suggest that liberals should "lay off Obama" is to completely misunderstand how progressive politics work. Our system was designed to make change very, very hard. Without constant pressure from the left, conservative forces will inevitably dominate. So as always, please ignore Beinart.

+ I've never paid much attention to Alex Castellanos, both because I very rarely watch CNN and because I think Castellanos' is a dick. Hunch confirmed.

+ Why don't I watch CNN? Yglesias nails reason #1. Ezra nails reason #2.

+ Why do polls say that Americans think crime is on the rise? If you ask me, its because polls no longer, and perhaps have never, accurately measured how the public feels about anything beyond how they plan to vote. I mean, what to make of this poll from FoxNews? Does anyone anywhere actually think this is measuring a pre-existing attitude? Of course not. And that's one of the big problems with polls - the evidence that they measure pre-existing attitudes is almost entirely nonexistent. And yet people spend millions on them.

+ Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), meanwhile, is straight up insane. Expect much more of this as we move into a new, 1790's partisan political system.

+ Oh look! Here's more! But again, everyone should start getting used to this sort of thing. Because in our new world of hyper-partisan media (like this blog!), this is going to become the new normal. Which is what my dissertation is all about.

+ Also, this! The more hyper-partisan the media gets, the more we will see parties moving towards their respective bases. So this study should be seen as a sign of a beginning, not an end. The problem for the GOP, as Eric Kleefeld implies here, is that the positions of the great uninformed middle are much, much closer to those of the Democrats than of Republicans. To which I would add: the GOP needs to be very, very careful about where it heads the next few years. Should they take the Palin path, I suspect they may find themselves facing a similar future to the Federalists and the Whigs. When was the last time you had a chance to vote for one of them?

+ Last but not least, just because:

OK, back to the game.

Neo-Federalists Everywhere

I don't care what party you belong to. If you are a neo-Federalist, you gotta go:

At this point, I kind of hope Rangel is guilty. There's no room for this sort of behavior in a system of self-government. Rude? We, the people, can never be 'rude' in demanding accountability from our elected representatives.

Once upon a time not all that long ago - think 1790's, people - there were two political parties in this country. On the left, the Democratic-Republicans, who were led by Jefferson and Madison and committed to the ideas and ideals expressed by the Decleration of Independence. On the right, the Federalists, who believed it was the duty of the masses to leave politics to their betters in the upper classes, and who abhorred any attempt by 'the mob' to comment on the behavior of the gentry. Why and how the Federalist spirit came to infiltrate both parties is a tale for another day. For now, its enough to say this:

Charlie, you've done good work in the past. But its time for you to get out. Go home. Retire while you've still got some of your dignity left.

He who is not with the people is against the people. Believe it.

Going Rogue

Since Sarah Palin has apparently decided it is a word that defines the story of her life, I thought I might as well get everyone up to speed on where the word comers from. Wikipedia:

The word "rogue" was first recorded in print in John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), and then in Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566).

In England, the 1572 Vagabond Act defined a rogue as a healthy person who has no land, no master, and no legitimate trade or source of income; it included rogues in the class of idle vagrants or vagabonds. If a person was apprehended as a rogue, he would be stripped to the waist, whipped until bleeding, and a hole "about the compass [circumference] of an inch" would be burned through the cartilage of his right ear. A rogue who committed a second offense, unless taken in by someone who would give him work for one year, could face execution as a felon. A third-offense perpetrator would only escape death if someone hired him for two years.

The 1598 Vagabond Act banished and transplanted "incorrigible and dangerous rogues" overseas, and the 1604 Act commanded that rogues be branded with the letter "R" on their bodies.

Good luck getting that mental image out of your head.

Big Bird Bashes Obama!

Check it.

Weekend Update

I don't expect to have any time to blog this weekend, and since its been awhile.... some thoughts:

+ Video of the Week: In case you haven't already seen it:

Josh Marshall responds:

With Sen. Kyl pointing out that men have no interest in having insurance cover child birth, no doubt women will note that they have little interest in covering prostate and testicular cancer. And surely men will get back into the act and want to get out of under the cost of covering breast cancer, which very few men get. Indeed, you can see how everyone should probably insist on special customized insurance policies which cover the ailments they plan on getting and avoid paying for the ones they don't. As long as everyone plans well and makes good predictions everyone should be able to save a lot of money.

+ The Paranoid Style: Hendrik Hertzberg is dead on in his description of the GOP as a party led not by politicians but by talk radio personalities. But the rest of this post? Nonsense. Anyone who thought that Obama wouldn't face this kind of backlash has forgotten the 2008 campaign. And the idea that "lunatic paranoia" has always been confined to the fringe is equally ridiculous. It only appeared to be on the fringe because that was where our top-down, elite driven media placed it. But it was always at the heart of the Southern Strategy, and the Southern Strategy is at the heart of Republican success for more than three decades. So much so, in fact, that the South is all they've got left.

But Hertzberg's conclusion is dead on:

The boorish South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” at the President after he said, truthfully, that reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” did the public weal a favor by underlining bipartisanship’s futility. A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans. And that’s no lie.

What I don't understand is why people don't see that this was always understood by Obama's team as one of the possible outcomes of bipartisan outreach. Calling your opponents obstructionist is nothing more than name-calling if you don't first give them a chance to obstruct!

And - shocking! - although this seems to be something that neither our talking heads nor most of our elite bloggers understand, the American people get it. Greg Sargent reports on the results of a new CBS/NYT poll:

The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64% think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65%, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans — even if they think it’s right for the country — and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers.

This shows, I think, that Democrats have convinced the public that the GOP wants Obama and Dems to fail at all costs. But they’ve failed to make the case to the public that GOP obstructionism may leave them no choice but to go it alone in order to realize reform.

Senator Chuck Schumer has been privately telling Dem colleagues that much more needs to be done to lay the political groundwork for doing health care alone through the “reconciliation” process, should it come to that. The numbers above suggest he’s right.

Greg frames that as a problem, but I don't see why. The Democrats have won the argument on its merits. They've also convinced the public that the Republicans aren't serious partners in reform. Now, and only now, can they move on to the final stage of convincing citizens that the GOP has left them no choice but to go it alone.

We're almost there, people. Almost there.... Oh, and for the record: I was right about what all the teabagging would do for public opinion. Oh ye of little faith....

+ Speaking of Talk Radio: Ezra Klein:

“In the course of a few years," writes Michael Gerson, "a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes. The adaptive use of new technology was central to this achievement."

That party? The Nazis. That technology? Talk radio. But Gerson's subject is not talk radio or the Nazis, but the vast expanses of the Internet. "User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice," writes Gerson, which is interesting, as I thought it consisted of porn and teenagers holding party cups. "The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others," he continues. "The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness."

That doesn't describe the Internet I know (unless, for some reason, you don't think Autotune the News is a serious voice), but the Internet is big, and Gerson might visit parts I miss. "The exploitation of technology by hatred will never be eliminated," he concludes. "But hatred must be confined to the fringes of our culture -- as the hatred of other times should have been."

What's striking is that this doesn't really describe the Internet. Hateful voices remain on the fringe. And they stay on the fringe. The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe. Controlling a Web site or a blogspot domain is not like controlling a radio station or a television network.

Gerson's examples, in fact, come from comment threads, which virtually disproves his thesis. But there is a major medium where the hateful voices sit firmly in control of the content, and it's the same medium that begins Gerson's remarks: talk radio. And, to a lesser extent, cable news. That's where society's most hateful conspiracy theories sit and fester, where its most explosive lies are recounted and amplified, where its least responsible elites have control of the means of production. I don't worry about jewhater429, the 97th entrant in a comment thread. I worry about Beck and Limbaugh and Savage.

Look, this is really simple: Authoritarian political systems need hierarchical, top down systems of media to propagate their ideologies. Bottom up, decentralized networks are a direct threat to everything they stand for. You cannot build a system of absolute control atop something that is fundamentally uncontrollable.

Was the Nazi system built atop talk radio? Absolutely. Because talk radio is both hierarchical and centralized. It doesn't actually allow citizens to communicate with one another, or with their leaders. It, like TV, only makes it appear to others as if there is a conversation going on. And that appearance is part of what makes their system so seductive. It convinces you that you and your hatred are part of a vast, previously silent majority. But its a trick. An illusion. Nothing more than a funhouse mirror reflecting back a single image as if it were from a million unique sources.

"The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe." Think on that. Deeply. If you want to understand how the world has changed, you must understand this. Stop thinking of the world in 20th century mass broadcast terms. The center of the media universe is gone, and it is not coming back. In its place we now have a million centers. Like the ever expanding universe, no matter where you stand you are at the center, looking out on an infinite horizon that is moving away from you at the speed of light.

Gerson doesn't get it. Limbaugh doesn't get it. Beck doesn't get it. The empire they have built is an illusion. They scream into the void. Sometimes the void screams back. But in the end, all they are doing is screaming at themselves. Our national conversation? The real one that's happening between average citizens day in and day out? It is moving further and further away from them. Here's why:

+ It's About TIme: I'm really late getting to this one, but TNC had the best of all possible responses to the "Limbaugh blames high school bullies on Obama" ridiculousness:

For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

It's intensely grating to live say, in Atlanta, and have some dude in Harlem crowned as your unelected leader. It's even more grating if said dude's agenda seems, in large measure, come down to standing in front of cameras and tweaking his opponents. It's no mistake that O'Reilly and Sharpton would break bread together at Sylvia's--they feed each other.

But Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance.He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West--the way he says, "He's a jackass." He sounds like one of my brothers. And that's the point, because that's what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it's driving them crazy.

It's about time.

If everything is now the fringe, then there are no longer shadows in which demagogues can hide. Once upon a time they could mask their hatred by wearing a mask whenever they spoke to the wider world, only revealing their true natures when appearing before "friendly" audiences. But you cannot control who hears and sees you anymore. There still may be many publics, but the lines separating them are now so porous as to be virtually nonexistent.

TNC is right. None of this is new. What's changed is that it is all now being exposed. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it isn't the decentralized nature of our newly reborn public sphere. But if not this, what? What else explains this change if not our new grassroots system of communication?

+ The Coalition Cracks: The birthers and turning on one another. The talk radio hosts are turning on one another. This is what happens as a multi-decade coalition collapses into itself. And yes, as TNC just said, it is intensely gratifying to watch. Stay focused on the very long view and you'll see what I mean.

+ Making the Trains Run On Time: Speaking of the birthers, Glen Beck called them and their fellow travellers to DC a few weeks back, and a whole bunch of them came. Not a million. Not even close. But still... When they got back home, guess what? They complained that Metro - you know, the DC area's "public option" for ground transportation - wasn't properly prepared for their arrival. Because nothing says "die hard anti-tax conservative" like demanding low cost, high quality public transportation in the congressionally controlled District of "taxation without representation" Columbia. Morons.

+ Just Say No To PROPAGANDA: My "favorite" lowlight from last week's Texas Board of Ed meetings on rewriting the US history curriculum.

Propaganda is a "negative" so we shouldn't use the word, she says. She even cites our nation's experience under President Wilson as the reason for her plea. Ummm... OK. For the record:

Pres. Wilson hired George Creel to head the United States Committee on Public Information during World War I. Here is how Creel defined his mission:

Not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the "propagation of faith."

But since that word is too "negative" (you know, like on the SAT's!), students in Texas won't be allowed to hear it. Brilliant.

+ Somewhere Mr. Jefferson Is Smiling: If I had to describe my religious beliefs by fitting them into a single tradition, I'd almost certainly say I am a deist. I would have thought I was largely alone in this. But wow... as many as 1 in 5 of my students would be right there with me.

You want to know what the Founders really thought about God? Start here. If you understand what you find there - and much more importantly, what you do not find - you'll be a long way towards understanding the faith of our fathers.

+ Tipping Points: There are 9 climate change tipping points. All of them appear to be irreversible. For those who want to go deep into the weeds, Science has an in-depth set of articles on CO2 sequestration. Sadly, you either need a subscription or access to a university library. Here's the conclusion for those who cannot click thru:

On the 10-year time scale, it is not technology, but legal permission, business development, and public opinion that will determine whether CCS experiments and demonstration plants are built sufficiently rapidly for CCS to be deployed in 2020. On the 20-year time scale, these initial demonstrations must enable a new CCS industry to be born. Low-cost reliable capture at clusters of CCS power plants must emerge, and national pipe networks must be developed, delivering to aquifer storage capacity that must have been validated. CCS also needs to be built and operated in developing economies with high national but low per capita emissions. If CCS is difficult to afford now in Western economies, then it is even more so in India and China. Additional payments for CCS demonstrations will accelerate the above-mentioned actions.

Simply pricing carbon in a market is not enough to encourage CCS or to enforce decarbonization. During peak demand, venting of CO2 will be commercially beneficial. If the price of carbon is set very high to avoid such effects, that taxes the whole economy, not just dirty electricity. Additional policy levers will be needed to enforce CCS operation. Lessons from previous clean-up technologies applied to power plants—such as SOx and NOx removal from flue gases—show that voluntary codes do not work, but clearly signed and enforced rule changes do.

New power plants can now be built "capture ready," to be converted when CCS is established. This is the death-or-glory test of governments, as there is industry pressure to build new coal and gas plants now, increasing CO2 emissions, and perhaps convert to CCS later. Substantial difficulties can be anticipated in government-enforced plant-by-plant conversion. Another regulatory route is the introduction of emissions performance standards, expressed as amount of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. These standards are conceptually simple and directly address the issue. Care will be needed to avoid unintentionally incentivizing gas-fuelled plants, which are not fitted with CCS but lock-in CO2 emissions. A permitted emission amount decreases through time, enforcing innovation. A key difficulty is that firm rules and dates cannot be applied to technologies that do not yet exist.

Coal and gas combustion can become more sustainable. To change black fuel into green energy, the acceleration and scale-up of CCS is required, from tens of power plants within 5 years, to hundreds of large plants by 2025, and then to thousands of small power plants by 2035. This progression can defer climate change problems and buy time. To do this, bold policies of clear vision to include CCS emissions reductions must be explicit. CCS may be the single most effective and direct climate action available. It is not yet too late, but good words need to be matched by hard actions and good money; the present level of committed funds is too low and needs a 4- to 10-fold increase in order for this climate mitigation to be successful.

+ Julian Sanchez gets positively medieval on FireDogLake and other lefty blogs cheering on the DEms get tough approach to DOJ hearings:

So it looks as though Al Franken reading the Fourth Amendment to DOJ’s David Kris has blown up on lefty and/or privacy-friendly blogs. Look, I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  I want to see Senators reciting the Fourth Amendment to representatives of the executive branch every time there’s a hearing.  I want them to tattoo it on their legislative aides’ foreheads and have it played as a background soundtrack in Dirksen like subliminal Brave New World programming. But for the serious? David Fucking Kris does not need to be schooled on the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements by Stuart Smalley.  I spent Thursday afternoon reading the chapter David Kris wrote on how the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement applies to FISA taps in his ginormous reference book on national security surveillance.  If  the name doesn’t ring a bell, Kris is the stone cold killer who put a bullet in the head of the legal sophistry invoked to justify Bush’s warrantless wiretap program without breaking a sweat. Alternatively, you may recall him as the guy responsible for exposing the bogus claim that investigators needed broad new powers in order to be able to eavesdrop on wholly foreign conversations. Or the guy who torpedoed the dishonest technological argument for expanding FISA wireline intercept powers.

His job is now to defend the renewal of roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. But you know what? There should be roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. No sane person says there shouldn’t.  No, really. Call the ACLU or CDT and ask. The surveillance hawks want the debate to be “should this power exist or not?” because—since it should—that means they win. The real question is whether there should be clearer limits on roving applications to ensure that if a warrant gets to “rove” across communications “facilities” (e.g. disposable cell phone numbers) you at least have to specify an individual target precisely and follow robust, enforceable minimization procedures to guarantee you’re only picking up your target’s communications. When I hear Kris saying we shouldn’t implement that reform, I’ll shed a single sad-clown tear for the smart man we’ve lost to the Sarlacc Pit of government work. What I’m actually hearing so far are offers to work with Congress to fix the insane legislation that—who now?—oh yes, Congress passed when a different bunch were running DOJ.

Memo to Democratic legislators: The people there now are relative friendlies.  They’re extending olive branches, which you should probably stop setting on fire. You’re just giving Bushie dead-enders an excuse to paint this as “civil liberties hippies vs. the Brave Americans Fighting Terror.” I watched John Conyers spend a good chunk of Tuesday’s hearing on the House side being a condescending dick to Todd Hinnen, one of the fiercest critics of Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. This just leaves smarmtastic bottom-feeders like Jim Sensenbrenner and Jeff Sessions to cast themselves as solicitous Grima Wormtongues by contrast. It makes for an awesome YouTube clip on Firedoglake, right up until the part where you fucking lose.

Let’s write a new script.  I call it “Civil libertarians and sober intel people trying to craft good policy together, thereby depriving psychotic executive branch maximalists of the cover they need for their fearmongering.”  Not, admittedly, a particularly pithy title.  It’ll never be a Regnery bestseller.  But we’re talking C-SPAN here; work with me people.

+ The Future Is Crowdsourced: People are often skeptical when I tell them that crowdsourcing is the future of commerce. Not e-commerce. Commerce. But check it out: CBS Radio agrees with me. They're getting set to launch a Last.FM powered radio station. No DJs. Just the wisdom of the crowd. If that doesn't kill off satellite radio, nothing will.

Welcome To The Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy Project

A month or two back I changed the name of this blog from "Good People Better Rise Up!" to "Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy." At the time, I promised that it would be the first of several big changes to the blog, and today I'm going to start making good on that promise.

As most of you know, for the better part of the last 2 decades electronic music has been the soundtrack of my life. What began as a passion turned into a hobby, and before I knew it, that hobby had turned into a career. But then came 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush Administration. In a matter of months, the life I built in the music industry just didn't seem like enough anymore. I decided to shift focus.

The new direction I chose was actually an old one. Politics runs deep in my family, one way or another, and that is no doubt what led me to study politics as an undergrad at Mr. Jefferson's University back in the early 1990s. Returning to school in 2004 to work on a PhD in political science may not have been the fastest way to make a difference, but I knew it was the right way for me.

Not knowing how hard grad school would be, I hoped heading in that I'd be able to continue DJing and producing music, even if at a somewhat slower pace. I see now how utterly insane that was, but I swear I didn't know it at the time! Over the past few years, the gigs were fewer and further between, and I find myself now in a situation where I haven't played out for over a year.

But in a way, that time away has helped me see a new way forward. And this is that way.

Welcome, my friends, to the Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy project. The website is over here. The podcast over there - with both audio and ipod ready video versions just as soon as I can get them uploaded. The YouTube channel is that way. And for those too lazy to click, the video is below.

Do me a favor... please... if you like this, let me know. Better yet, let your friends know. Please. You have no idea how much work I put into this, and although the act of creating it was enough, I wouldn't mind if well, you know....

So without further ado...

Episode One: The Dream Shall Never Die

Moral Relativism, Torture, And The Religious Right

Here's another example of people misunderstanding their own religion.

Do me a favor... Find the part of the Ten Commandments that mentions "intent." I'll wait. Go on....

You shall not murder, unless you do so with the right intent?

You shall not steal, unless you believe it necessary?

You shall not commit adultery, unless you're certain you really, really need to?

I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember not only when conservatives opposed torture, but when they decried moral relativism, too. Now they are explicitly using relativistic arguments - "intent is integral to determining whether and when certain techniques, including water-boarding, are morally permissible. - to defend our use of torture.

So what now... as long as your intent isn't sadistic... as long as you are doing it for what you believe to be a good reason... then it is the Christian thing to do? Really? Really?

How precisely does this argument differ from the one offered by religious extremists in defense of terrorism? I'll tell you how: it doesn't.

God's law is relativistic. I guess I really have heard everything now.

On Politicization

Given the endless back and forth we're likely to see over the next few days about the politicization of Kennedy's death, I'd really like to know....

The man dedicated his entire life to the political causes he believed in. Given that, how are we supposed to talk about him without being political? And wouldn't doing so dishonor everything he fought for? What precisely about Kennedy's life makes anyone think he would have a problem with anyone using his story to advance the causes he believes in? WTF?

Also.... this.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Sen. McCain deserves some for this:

I'd love to know precisely what Obama has done that makes people think he doesn't know we have a constitution.

Institute a torture regime?

Cut out Congress' role in executive oversight?

Create a massive extra-legal domestic surveillance system capable of capturing all phone and email traffic inside the country?

Argue that the VP's office represents a fourth branch of government?

Monitor the activities of groups like the Quakers for anti-American activities?

And pretending for a moment that he is doing all of these thing, I'd then love to know why, if the constitution and the rule of law are their concern, these people didn't object when Bush was doing them?

Hmm... Or maybe is there something else that bothers these people so much about Obama?

Quote of the Day

From one of Sen. Grassley's town hall forums:

“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”

Not to beat a dead horse here, but.... as scary as that sort of sentiment is, it is exactly, precisely what both the 1st and 2nd Amendments were designed to protect. You may not like it. I don't like it. But them's the facts.

The Torture Feedback Loop

Spencer Ackerman has been all over today's release of the Justice Dept. reports on torture, so much so that I can't even begin to summarize everything he has written today. Knowing him, he'll likely have a full summary for us tomorrow. Until then, I want to point you to this one bit of analysis in particular:

Ah, CIA analysts: they can’t participate in interrogations, but they can ensure that the interrogations remain brutal. According to the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture, the CIA didn’t know a tremendous amount about al-Qaeda to inform its interrogations. Quoth the report, “This lack of knowledge led analysts to speculate about what a detainee ’should know,’ vice information that the analyst could objectively demonstrate the detainee did know.”

What did that lead to? More torture. In the absence of information, “the assumption at Headquarters” became that if a detainee wasn’t giving interrogators what they wanted, it was because the detainee hadn’t been sufficiently tortured. “Consequently, Headquarters recommended resumption of EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques].” There became no way for a detainee to prove that he didn’t know something. In that way, once torture was introduced, a prudential interrogator calculation — he probably knows more — became a license to continue the torture. Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan has alluded to that in his testimony about the gradual descent into torturing al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah in 2002.

They knew so little about al Qaeda that they simply assumed that detainees "should" have they information they were looking for. Working from that assumption, when the detainee didn't provide it, they assumed he was holding out, thus necessitating torture. Brilliant.

Remind me again what separates this from the Spanish Inquisition?

And for an explanation on why the GOP is still defending the indefensible, see my previous post.

UPDATE: And what of Cheney's claims that these docs would "prove" that "torture worked?" Marcy Wheeler's got that on lock down. Spencer follows-on here.

Now the GOP Loves Medicare? Of Course!

If there has been one constant in Republican politics over the past 50 years, its been their party's insistence that Medicare is the leading edge of socialism. Given that, their opposition to any heath care reform that includes new forms of government regulation or talk of a public plan makes perfect sense.

Except, of course, now they are standing four square behind Medicare.

Why?

Because they don't actually stand for anything. Other than opposing whatever it is that Democrats want, of course.

6 months ago Medicare was socialism and needed to be cut. Now it is as American as apple pie.

1 year ago they were for torturing people in the name of preventing terrorism. Now they are running around proudly calling themselves right wing terrorists determined to use any means necessary to stop Obama's brownshirts.

18 months ago, massive domestic surveillance programs with no legal or congressional oversight were necessary to protect the republic. Today, when the White House asks citizens to send in email examples of health care misinformation, it is the beginning of a totalitarian state.

2 years ago, speeches by politicians that were delivered overseas and even vaguely hinted at opposition to Bush administration foreign policy were a threat to national security. Now they are a sign of patriotism and leadership.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: These people do not stand for anything other than their own political power. Which shouldn't surprise anyone, because they have been admitting it for years.

So should Obama stop negotiating with them? Absolutely not. Why? Because only by attempting to negotiate can you demonstrate just how hollow your opponents ideas and rhetoric really are. Negotiate. Expose. Ignore. Repeat.

Reform isn't supposed to be easy. Realignments are supposed to be hard. And the election of 2008 was the beginning of the fight, not the end.

UPDATE: More like this, please!!!

Bits + Bobs

Lots of things this past week that I could have posted on. Here are the short versions of a bunch of them:

+ On Bipartisanship: You can't prove that your opponents aren't negotiating in good faith if you don't negotiate with them first. Had Obama ignored the Republicans and tried to simply do thing "his way," he would undermined every narrative he built about himself during he 2008 election, thus playing right into his opponents hands. By calling their bluff, he can now run against them as obstructionists in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

+ On the Public Option: It doesn't matter if it is in the Senate Finance Bill. It doesn't even really matter if it is in the final version that comes out of the full Senate. All that matters is that it survives the conference committee process. And there's nothing that has been said by anyone in the administration that should make anyone think that Team Obama isn't going to do everything they can to make sure it comes out of conference.

+ On Sebelius' Sunday Misspeak: For nearly two weeks the media had been focused obsessively on the non-existent death panels. Then Sebelius goes on one of the Sunday talk shows and "accidentally" says that the public option isn't "essential." Then progressive bloggers and politicians go nuts, and the media shifts their focus on to them. Then, nearly two full days later, the White House clarifies that she made a mistake. To believe that this wasn't a planned event designed to refocus the debate, you would need to a) believe that no one on Rahm Emmanuel's staff or in the entire White House watched her appearance and understood how important her statement was until a full day later, and b) believe that Sebelius, one of the most stereotypically quiet and guarded politicians to come out of the Great Plains in a long time, misspoke and then refused to correct herself on the single most important political issue facing the country today. And before you answer, remember that these people are skilled enough political operatives to have made it all the way to the top of a very tough game. So yes, I'm with Noam Scheiber on this one: these guys aren't idiots, and they knew what they were doing.

+ Guns and Town Halls: I made this point once before, but I feel like I should make it again. If the Second Amendment stands for anything, it is the right of the people to take up arms against politicians they believe have become tyrannical. Thus, if there is anywhere people should have a right to openly carry guns, it is at town hall meetings. Don't like that? Think its crazy? Amend the constitution.

+ Don't Tread On Me: Every time I see a picture of some protestor holding a Gadsden Flag at a town hall meeting (you know, the flag with the don't tread on me snake?), I can't help but wonder if they have any idea what the flag actually means. It's origin? It came out of Franklin's "Join or Die" campaign during the French + Indian War, and thus was originally used as a call for political unity. A bit later, it was adopted by the US Navy during the Revolutionary War, serving as a standard flown during the fight to interdict British ships carrying war supplies. Once again, a call for national strength and unity. Eventually, however, some historically illiterate people picked it up and started waving it around as some sort of symbol of patriotism, and then.... then it turned into something American citizens use against one another? That's about as stupid as using the Stars and Bars as a sign of American patriotism. Oh, wait.....

+ On Thousand Page Bills: Many people, including some supposedly very smart ones, complain that the bills coming out of Congress are "too big." I do not understand this. We live in a nation of 300+ million people who produce more than $14 trillion in economic activity each year. The diversity and complexity of the problems and issues facing a nation of that size are almost unimaginably complex. Unless you either plan to adopt an "every man for himself" attitude towards society (i.e. reject the idea of a nation entirely) or intend to push for a dissolution of the union (i.e. reject the idea of this nation in favor of many smaller ones), you are going to have to get used to the idea of very large bills. In the meantime, can we please stop assuming that big round base 10 numbers have some sort of special meaning? 1000 only appears to be important because our system of counting is rooted in the fact that we have ten fingers, and last time I checked, the number of fingers on the human hand has no bearing whatsoever on what makes legislation "good."

+ On Super-Super Majorities: Sen Chuck Grassley, among other Republicans, has recently demanded that any health care reform must meet a new, 70-80 vote threshold before it can be considered either legitimate or bipartisan. Because yes, if there is one thing the patriots at Lexington and Concord were fighting for, it was the idea that nothing should ever happen unless and until a super-majority of well heeled elites achieve near-universal agreement on the most contentious issues facing their country. Or something. But seriously... this is what passes for serious argument among Republicans these days? That votes don't count unless some of their people get what they want? What are they all, 8 years old?

+ On Government Surveillance: This one was totally predictable. When Bush was president, conservatives thought that the domestic surveillance system couldn't be big or powerful enough. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, they are terrified that he might use the White House web site to collect email addresses of people engaged in dissent. So for the record: I was opposed to domestic surveillance then. I am opposed to it now. But collecting email anti-reform emails in an effort to rebut some of the nonsensical criticism that's out there? If the White House really wanted to round up dissenters, it wouldn't have to use such an inelegant model. It could just use the system Bush built. You know, the one that collects every email and phone call that travels across our nation's telecomm networks? The one that you guys said was both necessary and harmless? That's the system you should be afraid of. And its the one you conservatives built.

+ On Polling Data: There is a fairly extensive and well-establishd literature within political science that shows that policy-specific opinion poll data is likely to be, well... more than a bit unreliable on most issues. When asked, people will not only frequently contradict themselves and offer opinions on things they have no prior knowledge about, they will offer firm opinions about programs and proposals that don't even exist! Nevertheless, politicians, pundits, and all heads on my teevee treat tiny fluctuations in policy-related polls as if they actually tell us something. But... they don't. So please: stop reading them! They might work for gauging electoral support, but when it comes to policy, they are only slightly better than useless.

+ On LaRouchies: The point isn't whether they want to be Democrats or Republicans. The point is that they have always been deemed nutty, and yet their rhetoric on health care is literally indistinguishable from all of the leaders of the GOP. Generally speaking, if you find all of the crazy people lining up behind you because they firmly believe in your ideas, well...

+ On Color-Coded Terror Alerts: Former DHS Secretary Ridge is finally telling us what we in the Netroots already knew - that the Bush Administration manipulated the terrorism threat level system in an effort to scare the crap out of people in the months prior to the 2004 election. As many, many other bloggers have pointed out today, all of the Very Serious People in the Village that is DC saw the widespread acceptance of this idea among the Netroots as a sign of how "crazy" and "fringe" we all were. Only - gasp! - for the 5,427th time, we were right. And no, Mr. Ambinder, we weren't driven to say the things we said because we hated Bush. We hated Bush because of the things he did. Because among other things, as Atrios points out, "using the threat of terrorism to try to achieve political goals is, you know, what terrorists do

+ On Fiji Water: Please don't drink it. Please.