Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Calling All Republican Politicians...

Abraham bargained YHWH down to promising that He would not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if Abraham could find ten righteous people in the two cities. Can anybody help me find ten righteous Republican office-holders who will say that the people of Iowa really, badly need to elect a different representative than Steven King?

Anybody seen even one?

Faiz Shakir:

Think Progress: King’s New Rationale For Voting Against Slave Labor Resolution: It Wasn’t ‘A Balanced Depiction Of History’: Yesterday... right-wing Rep. Steve King (R-IA) was the lone dissenter on a House vote to acknowledge the role that slave labor had in constructing the U.S. Capitol. The resolution would merely authorize the placement of a marker inside the new Capitol Visitor Center to acknowledge the work of slaves. In an attempt to quell the criticism, King spun his vote as an effort to defend religion. He said in a statement that he opposed the slave labor resolution because it was put up for a vote before the depiction of “In God We Trust” could be considered in the Visitor Center. But in an interview with Radio Iowa yesterday, King offered a new explanation for his vote, complaining that the slave labor resolution wasn’t a “balanced depiction of history”:

KING: I would just add that there were about 645,000 slaves that were brought to the United States. And I’m with Martin Luther King, Jr. on this. His documents, his speeches – I’ve read most of them. And I agree with almost every word that came out of him. Slavery was abhorrent, but it was also a fact of life in those centuries where it existed. And of the 645,000 Africans that were brought here to be forcibly put into slavery in the United States, there were over 600,000 people that gave their lives in the Civil War to put an end to slavery. And I don’t see the monument to that in the Congressional Visitor Center, and I think it’s important that we have a balanced depiction of history...

The Capitol Visitor Center is simply trying to recognize the work of those who built the Capitol. But King is apparently concerned that slaves are being unduly recognized while Union soldiers who fought for their emancipation are not getting any credit.... If he steps right outside the Capitol, he’ll see the Ulysses S. Grant memorial, a monument that commemorates the former general of the Union Army.... Grant’s statue is flanked on either side by monuments of fighting Union Artillery and Cavalry groups. The Grant statue faces west toward the Lincoln Memorial, which of course honors the President who led the effort to free the slaves. In addition, at the Congressional Cemetery lies the Arsenal Monument, a memorial in honor of women who died while performing services for the Union Army. And there’s also an African American Civil War Memorial that honors the contributions that African-American troops made to the war effort...

We will not mention King's mind-blowing claim that Stonewall Jackson made his flank march at Chancellorsville and George Pickett made his charge at Gettysburg "to put an end to slavery"...

Republicans: The Party for People Who Don't Like Black People

David Kurtz of TPM:

Glad He Cleared That Up: We've gotten an explanation from Rep. Steve King (R-IA) for why he was the lone vote against acknowledging the role of slaves in building the U.S. Capitol. He did it to protest "a several year effort by liberals in Congress to scrub references to America's Christian heritage from our nation's Capitol":

Our Judeo-Christian heritage is an essential foundation stone of our great nation and should not be held hostage to yet another effort to place guilt on future Americans for the sins of some of their ancestors.

So there you have it.

The Wall Street Journal News Pages Lose Their Mojo II

Not surprising, with Jonathan Weisman on the beat:

A Dig at Berlusconi?: Jonathan Weisman reports from L’Aquila, Italy: President Barack Obama had only been in Italy for a few hours before tongues began wagging over a perceived snub from the U.S. president to Italy’s colorful and embattled prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

In Rome just after noon, Obama stood next to the serious, elderly president of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, a former Italian Communist Party leader, and praised him highly as a man “who has the admiration of the Italian people.” That admiration stems not just from the 84-year-old’s lifetime of service, the U.S. president continued, but because of “his integrity.”

“I had heard of the wonderful reputation of President Napolitano as somebody who has the admiration of the Italian people not only for his longstanding service but also his integrity, and his graciousness,” Obama said. “And I just want to confirm everything I have heard about him is true.”

With Berlusconi enmeshed in scandal over a teenager and alleged call girls caught on tape partying with the prime minister, Obama may not make mention of integrity when he meets the host of the summit of the Group of Eight leading economies here this afternoon.

But then again, the gregarious Berlusconi, always a showman for the cameras, isn’t likely to hold it against Obama.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

The William Kristol Harmonic Convergence

Whiskey Fire, Attaturk:

Rising Hegemon: Let's hear it for unintentional humor!: Thers found this first, but this Bill Kristol protest of Todd Purham's Vanity Fair piece on Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol's need to take part in a daisy chain with Rich Lowry is a classic example of self-immolation:

Is there any real chance that "several" Alaskans independently told Purdum that they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders? I don’t believe it for a moment. I’ve (for better or worse) moved in pretty well-educated circles in my life, and I’ve gone decades without “several” people telling me they had consulted the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Bill, if your circle was in the habit of consulting the DSM-IV, you'd never be able to leave the house because of the restraining orders. In fact, you might want to clue Krauthammer, the psychiatrist, to its existence because I'm pretty sure the guy hasn't read anything on the topic since Carl Jung (or was it Carl Hungus?) died.

The Economit:

The curse of Bill Kristol | Democracy in America | Economist.com: WHAT'S the killer insult in Jonathan Martin's piece about the continuing battle over Sarah Palin's role in the 2008 election? The article is full of them, but this one from Steve Schmidt, John McCain's campaign manager, really stings:

I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign. After all, his management of Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away.

How vindictive is this? Bill Kristol, as the editor of the Weekly Standard, did more than almost any magazine editor in 1999 and 2000 to build up John McCain as a serious politician, not just a military hero (those guys often falter in presidential bids), but an innovative foreign-policy thinker who could shape the future of the Republican Party. He carried water for the 2008 campaign like a sherpa, even defending Mr McCain's disastrous decision to "suspend his campaign" during the financial crisis: "If the race is between an energetic executive and an indecisive talker, the energetic executive should win."

So Mr Kristol was the perfect press ally for Mr McCain. He's also somewhat dangerous for Republicans. The vanquished 2008 candidate had a fly-by-night attitude that led to all kinds of bad decisions—the campaign suspension, the pick of Mrs Palin, the idiotic month of campaigning with Joe the Plumber. He's irrelevent to the next Republican renaissance, but Mr Kristol is very relevant, and everything he says about Republicans—on strategy, foreign policy, health care, and probably the best way to pick a cantelope—is taken seriously. If Mr Schmidt is trying to warn Republicans, good luck with that: Mr Kristol has the stage. 

Glenn Greenwald, October 12, 2008:

Bill Kristol in a nutshell: On October 5, [2008] Bill Kristol used his New York Times column to describe his telephone interview with Sarah Palin, during which they both agreed that the McCain/Palin campaign must attack Obama harder on his "associations," particularly with Bill Ayers. He ended his column this way:

I asked at the end of our conversation whether Palin, fresh off her own debate, had any advice for McCain. . . . "Have fun. Be yourself, and have fun. And Senator McCain can do the same.” She paused, and I was about to thank her for the interview, but she had one more thing to say. “Only maybe I’d add just a couple more words, and that would be: ‘Take the gloves off.’ ”

And maybe I’d add, Hockey Mom knows best.

On October 7, Kristol went on Fox News and urged McCain to use Bill Ayers to attack Obama in the debate:

I disagree with all of the advice that McCain is getting. . . . You have to talk endlessly about the economy. These attacks on Obama on Bill Ayers and possibly Reverend Wright don't matter. I don't agree with that. . . . McCain has got to tie the economic crisis to Obama's character and judgment and say:  "who do you want in charge for four difficult years, who is up to the job -- is this inexperienced, liberal Democrat who has hung out with some pretty unsavory characters, is he the guy who you want him to run the country?" I think that's got to be the core of McCain's message tonight.

Though McCain didn't bring it up in the debate, since then, the campaign has followed Kristol's advice, talking about Ayers more than any other single topic.  But now that it is conclusively clear that these attacks are failing -- that they are actually backfiring and making Obama more popular and McCain and Palin more unpopular -- Kristol went on Fox News this morning and attacked the McCain campaign for running what he called a "stupid campaign" and "a pathetic campaign" because the attacks "haven't worked" and they're "doing things that don't work and they keep doing them" -- without ever bothering to mention that he, Kristol, just last week, was one of the loudest and most vocal advocates for relying on these character attacks against Obama:

That's typical Bill Kristol -- not only chronically wrong about everything, but far worse, completely incapable of acknowledging mistakes.  He just suppresses them, pretends they don't exist, and in that regard is the perfect face for the right-wing movement that is dying a painful, harsh and profoundly well-deserved death in front of everyone's eyes.  

What we're seeing in this video is just the start of the angry recriminations in this movement as they seek to blame each other for what has happened.  As John Cole puts it:  "The coming circular firing squad is going to be fun."  It's also likely to be protracted, bitter and brutal.  Looking around at the utter destruction they've sown -- to our Constitution, to our economy, to our standing in the world, and to multiple other countries -- that is the only just outcome.

Who the "Friends of the People" Are and Why We Bash the Neoconservatives

Matthew Yglesias explains:

Matthew Yglesias: In Defense of Neo-Con Bashing: Greg Djerejian offers up something of a mea culpa and something of a defense against Jeff Weintraub’s charge of “rather tiresome ritual ‘neocon’-bashing which is becoming too much of a reflex in some quarters.”

It’s actually true that neocon bashing is a bit on the tiresome side. That said, I think it really has to be understood as a vital social necessity. Adherents of a deranged and sociopoathic “neocon” conception of America’s role in the world continue to be tremendously influential in our society. They have columns at The Washington Post and dominate the foreign policy coverage on Fox News. They have The Weekly Standard and Commentary and a healthy slice of The New Republic. And most important, as best as anyone can tell their ideas remain utterly dominant in the Republican Party. Their intra-party critics like Colin Powell, rather than winning intra-party arguments seem to be simply drifting out of the GOP coalition.

This is a dangerous situation. In the United States, the opposition party is always one ill-timed recession or political scandal from taking power. So a set of ideas that dominates one such party is something you need to keep a watchful eye on, no matter how marginalized that party may seem at any particular moment.

In other words, if we don't bash them at every opportunity they will be back--more stupid and more destructive than ever. (If we do bash them they will probably be back too, but at least we have a chance...)

Josh Marshall on Sarah Palin: She's Done

The astonishing thing about Sarah Palin is her claim that Sean Parnell will be a better governor of Alaska than she would be.

But in that case, why run for office in the first place? Why did she not simply support Parnell in 2006? My head spins.

Josh Marshall:

She's Done | TPM: TPM Reader MC checks in ...

Am I living in Bizarro world? Does anyone really think that there is any realistic way Palin could be a candidate for President after resigning as governor? Yet pundit after pundit is saying this is a "risky" move that "may pay off". This is absolutely preposterous, and any professional putting such ideas into print should be relegated to writing copy for infomercials. All one needs to do is imagine the campaign ads (Can we Trust S.P. to Finish What She Starts?; Palin Quits When She's Tired, Winners Quit When They're Done; or just string together a few clips from the Mistake by the Lake) to realize there is no recovering from this. This is no wily strategic move; it's running from a scandal.

As I said earlier, I think there's a small chance there's no specific scandal and that Palin is just very mentally unstable. But MC is 100% correct that any pundit who thinks this is some risky but potentially brilliant strategic move is absolutely smoking crack. Hitting the crack pipe, or, just as likely, being witlessly contrarian to set themselves apart from the common herd of sane people. The kinds of ads MC mentions are right on the mark. But they're really only the beginning.

To a degree it goes without saying. But it's worth reviewing just how deeply preposterous Palin's argument yesterday really was when she claimed that she refused to exploit the people of Alaska by serving out her full term.

When you run for governor, as for president, you run for a four year term. You commit, at least implicitly, to serving four years, though many people end up not doing that for various reasons. There's nothing in the implied contract about running for reelection. Indeed it's arguable that the public would be better served by a governor focusing for four years on running the state rather than laying the groundwork for their reelection.

In any case, Gov. Palin, who's served only a little more than half her first term (remember, she was elected in 2006), announces she won't run for reelection. And having decided that she won't run for a second term, she concludes that it would be exploiting the people of Alaska to agree to serve out the remainder of the term they elected her to serve back in 2006. This is apparently because she'll be a lame duck. And, she claims, lame ducks never get anything done and just spend a lot of money going on taxpayer funded junkets. So better to walk away from her job and pass it off to the Lt. Governor who no one hired to do the job at all.

You could keep plumbing the depths of this ridiculousness for some time. But as MC rightly notes it's simply poisonous, toxic, fatal for anyone running for president. Setting side political and policy stances, the one thing really key about a president is that they be steady under pressure, not rash, and not prone to spur of the moment freak outs where they just walk away from the job to go to Disneyland. A lot of nonsense gets knocked around about 'character' in presidential elections. But this is the foundational question of character that really is critical. Assuming this isn't about some soon-to-pop scandal and it's really that Palin just decided on a moment's notice (look at how much preparation went into the press conference to know how long this was in the works) to up and walk away from her responsibilities, that's simply fatal for anyone's presidential chances.

She may resurface as a latter-day Hannity or she may found some Palin-specific Anti-Defamation League dedicated to calling out obscure bloggers who've written mean things about her. But what very little shot she had as a future presidential candidate (and it was a much longer shot than I think many realized) is over. She's done. She's back to what she was -- a small person looking for someone to be angry at.

Donald Rumsfeld Uses the Passive Voice

Justin Eliot:

Justin Eliot: Rumsfeld On Abandoning Geneva: 'All Of A Sudden, It Was Just All Happening': "All of a sudden, it was just all happening, and the general counsel's office in the Pentagon had the lead," Rumsfeld told former Washington Post journalist Bradley Graham, as quoted in By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. "It never registered in my mind in this particular instance--it did in almost every other case--that these issues ought to be in a policy development or management posture. Looking back at it now, I have a feeling that was a mistake. In retrospect, it would have been better to take all of those issues and put them in the hands of policy or management."

[Rumsfeld is talking about] the Bush Administration's decision -- in which Rumsfeld played a key role -- to not grant prisoner-of-war designation to detainees from Afghanistan. In the Department of Defense, which had authority for Gitmo, the policy initially took the form of a since-declassified January 2002 memo, written by Rumsfeld, that said Al Qaida and Taliban detainees "are not entitled to prisoner of war status" under the Geneva Convention. This memo, as Graham puts it, "effectively nullified half a century of U.S. military adherence to the [Geneva] conventions"...

Preschool-age children will resort to the passive voice like this: "the chair got broken." Grownups do so more rarely.

Media Criticism: Scott Eric Kaufman Tears Brent Bozell into Shreds and Gobbets, and then Eats the Gobbets...

Scott Eric Kaufman, last seen in the Washington Post "claiming" to have a Ph.D. in English, tears Brent Bozell into shreds and gobbets, and then eats the gobbets.

SEK:

Sorry. SEK:

And the Award for Missing the Point goes to...: ...Brent Bozell, of the ironically named “Media Research Center,” who refuted Oliver Stone’s comment that “Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch” by quoting a number of prominent figures in Reagan’s administration who thought Reagan was really smart...

Bozell to Stone:

“Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch,” you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, “You know, I think that he was,” and the audience now cheered and hooted and applauded...

SEK:

There are two claims being made here: one, that Nixon thought Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch; two, that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch. Unfortunately for Bozell, Nixon illegally taped every conversation he ever had, and when we consult his conversations with Henry Kissenger on the morning of November 17, 1971 [620a.mp3], we learn that while Nixon didn’t use those exact words—about Reagan, at least, since we know he used that particular phrase about everyone from the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, to the Director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to one of his own White House aides, Tom Charles Huston—he didn’t think too highly of the Gipper’s wits:

(beginning at 1:33:02): President Nixon: "What’s your evaluation or Reagan after meeting him several times now." Kissinger: "Well, I think he’s a—actually I think he’s a pretty decent guy." President Nixon: "Oh, decent, no question, but his brains?" Kissinger: "Well, his brains are negligible. I—" President Nixon: "He’s really pretty shallow, Henry." Kissinger: "He’s shallow. He’s got no . . . he’s an actor. He—When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” That’s really an actor’s approach to foreign policy . . ."

(beginning at 1:46:19): President Nixon: "Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He’s got to know that on defense—doesn’t he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we’ve been at—"...

In other words, the person who misremembered what Stone said in an article somewhere, but doesn’t remember where, who then re-read the article from he-doesn’t-remember-where and promptly forgot where it was again—this person thinks Stone is a lousy historian because he correctly cited Nixon’s sentiments about Reagan and correctly stated that he agreed with Nixon’s assessment. If I were Bozell—and could remember that I was Bozell long enough to cite myself—I wouldn’t be knocking people who don’t claim to be historians for being lousy historians when those same tables could so easily be turned on, say, a “lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher and activist” who fancies himself qualified to judge who is and isn’t “a real [historian].”

Origins of the Current Financial Crisis

In which Barry Ritholtz encounters the unreliable Stan Liebowitz saying very strange and very false things about the mortgage market:

Zero Down Is a Foreclosure Factor: There is a kind of weird OpEd in today’s WSJ by Stan Liebowitz. The professor makes the incredible discovery that zero down payments, 100% LTV financings tend to slide in great numbers into foreclosure.... This is analysis by gross over-simplification. Not quite reductio ad absurdum, but close. Unfortunately, it leads to conclusions that are at best only partially correct. And that conclusion? The problem has been Prime, not sub-prime loans....

Here is where things get weird: I can’t verify many of [Liebowitz's] data points. They don’t square with the data I review via RealtyTrac or Mortgage Bankers Association or Bloomberg. (I assume the professor meant we had 4.3m foreclosures since Q3 2006, not during). As to prime versus sub-prime, it appears the Mortgage Bankers Association, data dispute the professor’s. Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the MBA, noted in May 2009 that in 2008, prime, fixed-rate loans were only 19% of foreclosure starts nationwide, while Subprime adjustable-rate mortgages were 39%. More recently, the two levels have come together: prime loans are up to 29% of foreclosure starts while subprime adjustables came down to 27%.

But reporting only in percentages can be misleading. As Floyd Norris noted in August of 2008, “There are far more prime mortgages than subprime, of course, and subprime loans are much more likely to get into trouble. But this does show how the foreclosure problem is spreading.” Agreed. But the claim that during this crisis it has been Prime and not Subprime is simply unsubstantiated by the timeline or data. Subprime went bad first, then Alt-A, and then prime followed it later. Sub-prime and Alt-A went bad due to poor lending standards; Prime went bad in part due to job losses and as the economy got worse...

Does John McCain Have a Legitimate Place in American Politics? I Say No

This is why:

Michelle Goldberg on Sarah Palin:

Is She a Narcissist?: On Thursday, CBS News had a small scoop.... After McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, rejected a request by Palin to reply to a report that her husband, Todd, had been a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, Palin came forward with a preposterous excuse.... Secession, she insisted—despite all available evidence—is not part of the party’s platform, and besides, Todd “was only a 'member' bc independent alaskans too often check that 'Alaska Independent' box on voter registrations thinking it just means non partisan. He caught his error when changing our address and checked the right box. I still want it fixed." A clearly exasperated Schmidt wrote back that secession is the AIP’s “entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the Web site shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the Web site. Our records indicate that Todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be inaccurate.”

Despite such rebukes, and her punchline status in much of the country, Palin’s self-conception appears undiminished.... Her seemingly irrational faith in herself might not be totally misplaced, especially if other Republicans keep self-destructing at their current rate. That’s because while Palin is unhinged, so is much of her competition. Politics has always attracted the deeply screwed up, but our current political system seems to do so more than most. Perhaps that’s because healthy people looking to make their mark on the world don’t want to subject themselves to the inquisitorial media attention or crushing vapidity of modern campaigning.... Success in our politics often requires a voracious, antinomian egotism, a sense that rules are for others.

The Alaska governor shares the personality flaws of many of her male peers, but by all accounts she doesn’t express them via the preferred method of politicians like John Edwards or Mark Sanford—by being sexually reckless. The United States has grown more blasé about sex scandals post Bill Clinton, but they remain more damaging than, say, dishonesty, greed, or naked incompetence.

Palin may have gone rogue on John McCain, had public feuds with her grandson’s teenage father, turned on loyal aides, flubbed interviews, spent tens of thousands of dollars of other people’s money on clothes, and told countless lies, but as far as we know she hasn’t cheated on her husband. If congenital narcissists dominate our politics, Palin may be just the narcissist the GOP needs.

Jonathan Martin of the Politico Raises the Bar on "Opinons on Shape of Earth Differ" Journamalism

I can envision seeing a more complete, more craven, and even funnier abdication of the journalist's responsibility to inform his or her audience--for some reason "Josef Stalin: lover of puppies or genocidal dictator?" springs to mind--but I never have.

Jonathan Martin raises the bar:

Jonathan Martin - POLITICO.com: The vitriol also suggests the degree to which Palin remains a Rorschach test not simply to Republicans nationally but within a tight circle of elite operatives and commentators, many of whom seem ready to carry their arguments in 2012. Was Palin a fresh talent whose debut was mishandled by self-serving campaign insiders, or an eccentric “diva” who had no business on the national stage? Going forward, does she offer a conservative and charismatic face for a demoralized and star-less party? Or is she a loose cannon who should be consigned to the tabloids where she can reside in perpetuity with other flash-in-the-pan sensations?

The Importance of Editors--and Friends

Jeebus save us! Does National Review have no editors? Does Thomas Sowell have no friends?

In National Review, Thomas Sowell writes:

Why Republican Infighting Matters: A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year... [is] not [a thing] from which any country is guaranteed to recover...

Ummm...

The national debt is estimated to be likely to increase by 17% in nominal terms over fiscal 2010. It is not estimated to quadruple. Is there nobody at National Review who will tell Sowell that +17% is not equal to +300%? Does nobody at National Review care to keep the magazine from embarrassing itself? Does nobody like him enough to care enough to keep him from embarrassing himself?

It gets worse after that:

Thomas Sowell: A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism such as Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover. Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago. Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

The glib pieties in Barack Obama’s televised sermonettes will not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear terrorist nation. Time is running out fast and we will be lucky if it doesn’t happen during the first term of this president. If he gets elected to a second term  — which is quite possible, despite whatever economic disasters he leads us into — our fate as a nation may be sealed...

Tyler Cowen snarks:

Marginal Revolution: Knowledge and Decisions: Today I wanted to cover lots of different topics, so here is a thought from Thomas Sowell:

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

And to think that I was worried about high marginal rates of taxation.  The full article is here. Not so long ago, Yana asked me: "What does Thomas Sowell think of Barack Obama?"  I believe I now have an answer for her.

Matthew Yglesias is too dumbstruck to even snark:

Matthew Yglesias: Sowell: Obama Will Lead to Sharia: Via Tyler Cowen, Thomas Sowell argues that “Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.” And, yes, that was in National Review the flagship publication of the American right...

I hope I always have editors--and friends. It would be very sad to be without them.

Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned Watch (Ceci Connolly/Health Care Coverage Department)

Why would the Washington Post have a health-care story written by a reporter who knows neither legislative process nor health-care policy substance?

Outsourced to Robert Waldmann (Robert! Paul and Nadine Mende say hello!):

Decimate or Alienate: A good sign of a totally bogus argument is reliance on contradictory presumptions of fact. When one is simply wrong, one can often make a convincing argument by inventing facts. When one is being absurd, one can fall into the temptation to invent inconsistent facts.

In this article in the Washington Post Ceci Connolly is being absurd. She argues that progressives (such as movon) who attack Democratic Senators who don't support a public option are endangering health care reform. For brevity only I will call the first group "leftists" and the second "centrists." "Centrists" is not as accurate as "people who care more about the value of insurance company shares than equity or efficiency and who are willing to sell their votes for campaign contributions" would be more accurate but too long.

She presents two arguments: one stated in her own name (in what is supposed to be a news article), and one ascribed to an anonymous source whom she does not criticize.

The first is that the centrists have the power and might destroy health care reform if their feelings are hurt. Hence her personally stated opinion that leftist pressure is a bad idea because "the intraparty rift runs the risk of alienating centrist Democrats who will be needed to pass a bill." Now I know it was rude of me to suggest that said centrists are more or less corrupt, but at least I didn't assert--as Connolly did--that they are willing to leave people without health insurance out of pique.

The second is that centrist Democrats are better than Republicans and terribly weak so that criticizing them will cause them to lose office -- just look what a close call Ben Nelson had last time. Hence the anonymous source:

The strategist, who asked for anonymity because he was criticizing colleagues, said: "These are friends of ours. I would much rather see a quiet call placed by [Obama chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel saying this isn't helpful. Instead, we try to decimate them?"

So which are they? People so powerful that they must not be offended or they will damage the country, or people so weak that one tenth of them will die horrible deaths if they are criticized?... Oh and did the strategist also ask that it not be mentioned whether or not he or she is paid by big business for helping them with public relations?

Just reading the headline, I knew I'd be hearing about this at eschaton, who linked to Adam Green.

Boy am I late on this. I'm not even the first Waldman[n] to denounce Connolly...

---

And, of course, from the past: Eric Boehlert on why the world would be a better place if Ceci Connolly had never written a word:

The Press vs. Al Gore : Rolling Stone: Lots of well-known embellishment stories were not legitimate, such as the infamous Love Canal incident. When Gore spoke at Concord High School in New Hampshire on November 30th, 1999, and urged students to take an active role in politics, he recalled that it was a letter years before from a student in Toone, Tennessee, that got then-Rep. Gore interested in the topic of toxic waste. "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that issue - and Toone, Tennessee, that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

The next day, both the Washington Post and the New York Time botched the quote, erroneously reporting Gore had bragged, "I was the one that started it all."

The Post's Ceci Connolly, who covered Gore campaign for eighteen months and made the error, today insists that her miscue "did not change the context" of Gore's original statement. She contends that the key quote, the one that catches Gore embellishing, was the quote "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal." Yet clearly from his response, Gore used the term "found" in reference to "looking around the country for other sites like" Toone, and in no way suggested he uncovered the Love Canal toxic-waste disaster.

Thanks to the high-profile misquote, though, the media's echo chamber erupted, with MSNBC's Chris Matthews mocking Gore for being delusional, while ABC's George Stephanopoulos lamented that the vice president had "revealed his Pinocchio problem." (In a press release, the ever-helpful Republican National Committee cleaned up the mangled quote, changing "that" to "who" in order to make the misquote grammatically correct: "I was the one who started it all.") This time Gore responded quickly but was again too humble, calling a reporter the morning after the Concord visit to say he was sorry if his Love Canal comments had not been clear enough.

It was actually local students, enrolled in a media-literacy course, who had to set the record straight by taking the unusual step of issuing their own press release under the headline TOP TEN REASONS WHY MANY CONCORD HIGH STUDENTS FEEL BETRAYED BY SOME OF THE MEDIA COVERAGE OF AL GORE'S VISIT TO THE THEIR SCHOOL.

It took the Post and the Times a week to run Love Canal corrections. Yet one month before Election Day, the usually reliable Associated Press reported confidently, "Gore's exaggerations have placed him more centrally than warranted at the creation of . . . the Love Canal toxic-waste investigation." The episode fit a distinct pattern: Journalists just refused to drop unflattering Gore stories, no matter what the facts revealed...

Orbital Mind-Control Time-Traveling Lasers!

The answer is: "Barack Hussein Obama has a spaceborne flotilla of orbital mind-control time traveling lasers at his command."

"What is the question?" you ask. It's Steve Benen's:

The Washington Monthly: TYING IT ALL TOGETHER.... We learned yesterday, by way of Rush Limbaugh, that Mark Sanford's sex scandal was President Obama's fault. If it weren't for the administration's economic policies, the argument goes, Sanford would have been more optimistic about the future, wouldn't have cheated on his wife, and wouldn't have secretly left the country to see his mistress.

Who can argue with air-tight logic like this?

Today, Limbaugh's right-wing colleague, Michael Savage, takes this one step further. Obama didn't just inspire Sanford to betray his family; the White House conspired to make this scandal happen in the first place.

"The fact is, Obama's team is taking out potential [2012] rivals, one after another," Savage argued:

Just last week, the media jumped on the story of Sen. John Ensign (R) of Nevada and his infidelity. He was considered to be a possible Republican presidential candidate in '12. Now Sanford, who had similar ambitions, caught in a similar situation. This is politics at its worst, brought to us by the worst administration, the meanest administration, the most closed administration, the most incompetent administration in American history."

Now, listening to the clip, it's a little unclear to me whether Savage thinks Obama made Sanford and Ensign have sex with these other women, or whether Obama was spying on Sanford and Ensign, learned of their adultery, and brought it to public attention.

Sure, either way, this is all painfully stupid, and not to be taken seriously. But even from the perspective of a twisted right-wing worldview, I'm curious about one thing: how does an incompetent administration pull off a feat like this? Wouldn't it take an enormous amount of competence to secretly hatch such an elaborate conspiracy?

Silly Steve. He just doesn't understand the Republican Party: Obama is incompetent and he controls a flotilla of orbiting mind-control lasers that he can send back in time eight years to persuade Sanford to ask Maria for her phone number.

Hoisted from the Archives; Yet Another Gregg Easterbrook Train Wreck (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

This morning's observation from Zachary Roth that the mainline press corps has no way--in fact, regards it as a breach of ethics--to tell its readers that important political figures are likely to be lying reminded me of the other major grave deficiency of the press corps: its inability to exercise any quality control over its own members. And that reminded me of thus just-ain't-so story from four years ago:

---

Brad DeLong's Website: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New York Times Book Review Edition): Everyone who has read Jared Diamond's excellent Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies knows that its principal theme is that Eurasian civilizations have dominated world history because Eurasia (including the southern shore of the Mediterranean) was the best environment to nurture the growth of preindustrial human cultures, technologies, and civilizations. The large size of and easy east-west communications across Eurasia meant that Eurasia had more people in communication thinking about solving cultural, technological, and civilizational problems--and two heads are always better than one. The east-west axis of Eurasia meant similar climates across ten thousand miles--so whatever good ideas your neighbors had were probably relevant to you as well. The rich biological resources of Eurasia gave its civilizations an advantage in terms of the crops and animals they could selectively breed and domesticate. And, at a slightly finer scale, Europe's mountain ranges and narrow seas provided barriers to control that were not impediments to communication: thus the Ming Dynasty could suppress shipbuilding, but the Pope could not suppress astronomy.

Thus I was astonished to open the New York Times Book Review and find:

Gregg Easterbrook: "Guns" asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern.... [E]nvironmental coincidences are the principal factor in human history. Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about.

But this is completely false. Diamond does say it was culture, it was brainpower--brainpower that could be successfully amplified, harnessed, and applied to building cultures because of the tremendous long-run advantages provided by the Eurasian incubator. It's not either/or. Diamond's view is not postmodern: it is materialist--the antithesis of postmodernism. Diamond's story gives "Western civilization" a great deal to boast about (and also gives it, as any attempt to tell history straight does, a great deal to be bitterly ashamed of).

Some quality control, people. Somebody's job should be to catch book reviewers who don't understand or don't accurately present the books they are reviewing, and pull their reviews before they hit the press.

Thought of the Day...

maureendowdsfriendwhodoesntwantanycredit@gmail.com writes:

Would anyone but a Republican politician quote 1 Corinthians in an email to his Argentinian mistress?

More Lies from the Heritage Foundation...

Can they speak a word of truth ever, about anything? Or is every word coming out of the mouth of Heritage a lie, even "and" and "the"?

Matthew Yglesias sends us to Benjamin Friedman, who is on the case:

Matthew Yglesias » Heritage Slams Mythical Defense Cuts: The Heritage Foundation has a blog post complete with chart claiming to demonstrate that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels”. As Benjamin Friedman lays out this is nonsense:

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

Matthew piles on, detailing how Heritage is doing Al Qaeda's bidding here:

Since economic growth causes real wages to rise over time, there is some reason for thinking that a military sized appropriately to the strategic environment would need real increases in spending to maintain its level of capabilities. But one way or another, the crucial issue is that the appropriate level of defense spending is determined by the nature of the strategic environment, not by the pace of economic growth. The US economy grew rapidly during the 1990s but the level of military threats facing the country didn’t—thus, a decline in defense expenditures relative to GDP was appropriate.

One interesting trope both in the substance and rhetoric of this argument from Heritage is the idea that 9/11 ought to have touched off a large and sustained increase in defense spending. On the merits, this is a little hard to figure out. It’s difficult to make the case that the 9/11 plot succeeded because the gap in financial expenditures between the U.S. government and Osama bin Laden was not big enough. Would an extra aircraft carrier have helped? A more advanced fighter plane? A larger Marine Corps? Additional nuclear weapons? One of the most realistic ways an organization like al-Qaeda can damage the United States is to provoke us into wasting resources on a far larger scale than they could ever destroy. The mentality Heritage is expressing here is right in line with that path.

And, of course, we all remember that the Washington Post's David Broder likes the tripe that Heritage produces for its "intellectual honesty": another reason that every day the Washington Post publishes is a crime against rationality.

More Republican Waste, Fraud, and Abuse: Defense Misspending Issue

Paul Krugman Sends Us to Ali Frick Who Reportrs on Barney Frank:

Think Progress: Barney Frank: GOP Thinks $2 Billion F-22 Project Is Funded By Monopoly Money: On a press call hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund this afternoon, Frank pointed out Republicans’ hypocrisy in railing against the deficit while simultaneously funding a $2 billion air force jet that has never once flown a mission in Afghanistan or Iraq. Frank said so-called deficit hawks act as though the Pentagon is funded with “Monopoly money”:

I am of course struck that so many of my colleagues who are so worried about the deficit apparently think the Pentagon is funded with Monopoly money that somehow doesn’t count...

Frank also dismissed concerns that eliminating the F-22 will cost jobs:

These arguments will come from the very people who denied that the economic recovery plan created any jobs. We have a very odd economic philosophy in Washington: It’s called weaponized Keynesianism. It is the view that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation...

Indeed, conservatives declare that canceling the F-22 would result in thousands of lost jobs. However, as Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Lawrence Korb pointed out on the call, the administration has also ramped up production of the F-35, which is produced at many of the same facilities — and by the same workers — as the F-22.

Frank called the F-22 fight an important “test” for the Obama administration’s efforts to cut wasteful military spending. “If we cannot hold the line on this, then it’s very bad news for trying to hold down any kind of excesses in military spending,” he said.

Republicans Lie, and the Press Echoes Their Lies

Shame on ABC News and Fortune. This isn't even "opinions on shape of earth differ" journamalism. This is "the earth is f;at" journamalism.

Shame on John Boehner and Lindsey Graham.

We could have fruitful and productive normal politics right now--if we had a better class of Republicans, and a better class of journalists.

Igor Volsky:

Wonk Room » The Public Insurance Plan Is Not Responsible For High CBO Scores: Since the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued very preliminary cost estimates of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee’s health bill and the Senate Finance Committee’s draft legislation, Republicans and some in the media have argued that the somewhat higher-than expected price tags undermine the President’s contention that a new public heath insurance plan would lower health care spending:

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH): The Congressional Budget Office came out with a score on Senator Kennedy’s bill, just part of the score — of the — of his bill, that says that the public option would cost over $1 trillion, and would cause 23 million Americans to lose their private health care coverage, and only 16 million of which would — would be covered under the — the government plan. [CNN, 6/16/2009]

ABC News: The President’s chances for an optional health care plan that would be run by the government may be fading after a Congressional Budget Office report found a Democratic plan in the Senate would cost at least a trillion dollars over the ten years and cover just 1/3 of the uninsured. [ABC News, 6/16/2009]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): The CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan. The finance committee has abandoned that. [This Week, 6/21/2009]

Fortune Magazine’s Nina Easton: And I think the, the big speed bump this week, of course, was that CBO, Congressional Budget Office study that said that the costs of a public plan are going to be well beyond what they expected. [MTP, 6/21/2009]

But both estimates never scored the public option. The HELP Committee’s bill omitted any language about the public plan and, according to reporting by the Health Beat’s Maggie Mahar, the CBO couldn’t “mark up the Senate Finance Committee plan because the Senate Finance Committee plan doesn’t yet exist.” “Yesterday, I spoke to Peter Orszag’s Office of Management and Budget and they confirmed that there are many blank lines in the draft CBO is looking at. What was missing included a public-sector insurance option,” Mahar wrote.

In fact, rather than add to the costs of reform, a robust public option could produce savings that could actually be scored and identified by the CBO as a money-saver. As the New York Times editorialized on Sunday, “A public plan would have lower administrative expenses than private plans, no need to generate big profits, and stronger bargaining power to obtain discounts from providers. That should enable it to charge lower premiums than many private plans.” “It would also shave hundreds of billions of dollars from the amount needed to cover the uninsured — a crucial advantage as Congress scrambles to finance the reform effort,” the NYT concluded.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New Republic Contributing Editors Edition)

Chris Orr of the New Republic on Charles Krauthammer. The wind-up:

It's All in How You Say It - The Plank:

"[A]fter treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of 'some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election.' Where to begin? 'Supreme Leader'? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator."  -- Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, June 19

"And the president has said 'I have seen in Iran's initial reaction from the supreme leader.' He is using an honorific to apply to a man whose minions out there are breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, arresting students, shutting the press down, and basically trying to suppress a popular democratic revolution." -- Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 16

The punch line:

"Look, these were sham elections from the beginning. In a real democracy, you can have a change of power as a result. That was not going to happen in Iran. The mullahs are in charge. Khamenei, the supreme leader, remains in charge." -- Charles Krauthammer, Fox News All Stars, June 12 [my italics]

Where to begin?

--Christopher Orr

But then comes the superpunchline, of course, which is the New Republic's own masthead:

THE NEW REPUBLIC | Masthead: Contributing Editors: Peter Beinart, David A. Bell, Paul Berman, Gregg Easterbrook, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Nathan Glazer, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Yossi Klein Halevi, Robert Kagan, Lawrence F. Kaplan, Michael Kinsley, Charles Krauthammer, Ryan Lizza, Jeremy McCarter, John McWhorter, Sherwin B. Nuland, Michael B. Oren, Steven Pinker, David Rieff, Maggie Scarf, Ronald Steel, Andrew Sullivan, Alan Taylor, E.V. Thaw, Helen Vendler, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, Alan Wolfe, Robert Wright

Morning Daniel Froomkin News Roundup

Hamilton Nolan:

Gawker - Washington Post Fires Token Liberal - Dan Froomkin: The Washington Post, which pays money to opinion writers such as Bill Kristol (smarmy) and Richard Cohen (smarmier), has fired blogger Dan Froomkin, one of the only WaPo opinion writers who pointed out that the Bush White House was crooked. Froomkin wrote the "White House Watch" blog and he was extremely "Liberal" because he generally pointed out the Bush administration lied all the time. (While the rest of the paper's opinion page supported the Iraq War, etc, they really do suck). Here's the paper's s----- explanation:

I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we're giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources. Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com

Translation: the Washington Post has to be even more conservative now with Obama as president or else they won't be taken "Seriously"...

John Harris of The Politico:

John Harris: This is a quick note on your recent items on Dan Froomkin's ouster from the Post.

I blundered four years ago in allowing myself to have an overwrought public disagreement with Dan over what now seems (and if I was thinking clearly at the time would have seemed then) an insanely narow [sic] issue--i.e., whether his column was appropriately labeled. I don't want any current references to that now ancient episode to obscure my actual view of Dan and his work. I think he is a distinctive and valuable voice on the presidency and on journalism. I particularly admire the entpreneurialism [sic] he has shown in his career--using the power of the Web to build a community of followers and create his own franchise. This was actually my view at the time, though it got lost in the smoke when I got indignant over a couple points that seem distant now. But my view has strengthened in the years since, with more appreciation of how the Web is changing journalism and how enterprising writers thrive in this new environment.

It's been nearly three years since I have had anything to do with decision-making at the Post, and I have no insight into what prompted he and the Post to part ways. But he had some impressive achievements there, and I hope he'll find the right home for his voice soon.

Best,

John Harris

Actually, I don't think that last is true. I think John Harris has considerable insight into what prompted the Post to fire him--how could it possibly be otherwise? I would be interested to learn what his insights are.

Glenn Greenwald:

Glenn Greenwald: [T]his Froomkin firing is so revealing.  The fact that one of the very few people to practice real adversarial journalism in the Bush era was decreed not to be a real "journalist" -- and has now been fired by the Post -- is one of the most illustrative episodes of the past several years regarding what the real function of the establishment media is.  Along those lines, Harris might want to consider also acknowledging that Froomkin was absolutely right when insisting (and Harris wrong when doubting) that Froomkin was not acting as "liberal opinionist" when criticizing Bush, but rather, was as an "accountability journalist" because he was merely pointing out facts, and would subject the actions and claims of a Democratic president to the same journalistic scrutiny.  Froomkin's tenacious criticisms of Obama leave no doubt about that... 

Jane Hamsher:

Campaign Silo » Froomkin v. Washington Post — The Battle Continues: Glenn Greenwald says most of what needs to be said about the Washington Post's firing of Dan Froomkin.  But having been involved in the early rounds of this battle and watched it ferment over the years, I thought I'd add a few notes of context. When Debbie Howell wrote that Dan Froomkin was "highly opinionated and liberal," she didn't just think that up by her little old "yippie ki yeah motherf-----" self.   It was the consensus of the newsroom, where it was believed -- correctly -- that Froomkin's writing about the war and US foreign policy were an inherent criticism of the WaPo's own coverage and editorial position.  And so they wanted to make it clear that he was Not One Of Them, nor did he rise to their high standards.   Here was Len Downie at the time:

"We want to make sure people in the [Bush] administration know that our news coverage by White House reporters is separate from what appears in Froomkin's column because it contains opinion," Downie told E&P. "And that readers of the Web site understand that, too."

And here's John Harris (now chief of Politico):

They have never complained in a formal way to me, but I have heard from Republicans in informal ways making clear they think his work is tendentious and unfair. I do not have to agree with them in every instance that it is tendentious and unfair for me to be concerned about making clear who Dan is and who he is not regarding his relationship with the newsroom.

But aside from the desire to play access footsie with the White House, Downie and Harris were bristling at Froomkin's critique of -- well, them.  While they were fawning over Bush, his war and his codpiece, Froomkin was writing about Bob Woodward's "unique relationship" with the White House.   When Froomkin was transferred into Fred Hiatt's fiefdom a couple of months ago, it didn't bode well for his consistently popular column.

There was always a sympathetic ear in the halls of the Washington Post for anyone who wanted to complain about Dan Froomkin.  The arrogant presumption that they were carrying on some sort of noble journalistic tradition that Froomkin violated is just baked into the concrete over there.  In the end, the bitter petty people who discredited the entire profession with their coverage of the war and its fallout just did not like the mirror he held up to them. 

And an organization that has long felt it could change reality simply by refusing to acknowledge its existence runs true to form once again.

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander:

Ombudsman Blog: Post Axes Froomkin's "White House Watch": After five and a half years as a regular feature on the Web site, Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch column is being axed. Froomkin was quietly passing the word today that he was told by The Post that his contract will be terminated in early July....

"I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t 'working' anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well," Froomkin said. "I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online. I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day," he continued. "I’m not sure at this point what I’m going to do next. I may take White House Watch elsewhere, or may try something different."

Froomkin bills his often-irreverent online column as a “pugnacious daily anthology of White House-related items from news Web sites, blogs and other sources.” He does not operate as a White House reporter. Rather, he compiles material about the White House and offers his own commentary, often with a liberal bent.

That slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president.

Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, whose stable of contributors includes Froomkin, said late Thursday: "With the end of the Bush administration, interest in the blog also diminished. His political orientation was not a factor in our decision."

When it began, the column was called “White house Briefing.” But the name was changed after concerns by some at The Post newspaper that readers might believe Froomkin was a White House reporter, working alongside those offering objective news reporters.

Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank's comment on this is that it would have been much more popular with readers for the Post to have kept Froomkin and fired Alexander.

Jay Rosen:

The Washington Post, Dan Froomkin and the establishment media: Froomkin came along, in the wreckage of that, and from a position way on the wing, as a columnist for washingtonpost.com, this new entity which to the guys downtown at The Washington Post didn't even matter at first, came along and he basically picked up the signals from that event, and started to write it up, and started to bring that story, that whole narrative of the radicalism of the Bush years, into The Washington Post. And the truth is, that the Washington press corps, and the people at the White House themselves, helped to normalize Bush; they normalized a radical move. They didn't know what to do in the case of an outlier. All the things they would have had to do to respond, they failed to do. And Froomkin was reminding them of that. And that is ultimately why he was let go...

Duncan Black:

Eschaton: I think one mistake people, including me, have been making in discussing Froomkin was to assert that he's a liberal and, as Glenn Greenwald said, is almost alone in the mainstream media in criticizing Obama from the Left. This is true, in some sense, but only because our political discourse has become so weird. I mean, a decade ago, whatever I thought of conservatism, I wouldn't have considered "following the law" and "constitutional limits on executive power" and "skepticism about government secrecy" and "acknowledgment of the 4th amendment" and "accountability for government misdeeds other than blowjobs" and "lying our way into war is maybe wrong" and, perhaps, most of all, "torture is bad" to be just "liberal" positions. But since we just came off the age of Bush, where only liberals actually got upset about these things, and conservatives haven't yet (for some reason) become all that concerned that Rahm Emanuel might be bugging their phones, these are now apparently "liberal" positions. So in our discourse Froomkin became an extreme leftist, even though I don't remember him actually expressing opinions on the vast range of issues which, in non-crazy times, we associate with liberalism.

James Fallows:

James Fallows: egative journalistic development of the week: the Washington Post's insane decision to fire its media-political blogger Dan Froomkin. (I know Froomkin only through his work, not personally.) We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut. More later.

A Reader of Glenn Greenwald:

From a reader, via email: As of this moment the post on the WaPo Ombudsman's blog about Froomkin has 395 comments (most in support of Froomkin). His previous post, on Howard Kurtz, has 9. The post before that has 25. The one before that 0, as in none [and the 3 posts prior to that have 3 each, and the one prior also has zero]. Genius of the WaPo to get rid of the writer who readers are most passionate about.

And Glenn comments:

Number of comments isn't a perfect barometer of interest, but when the disparities are that large, it is certainly probative. The bottom line is that I'd be willing to bet anyone that Froomkin generates more outside traffic to The Post than the overwhelming majority of Post blogs that remain.

Steve Clemons:

Dan Froomkin and White House Watch - The Washington Note: Politico's Patrick Gavin (who is editing Michael Calderone's column this week) reports and I have confirmed that Dan Froomkin's invaluable White House Watch blog has been discontinued at the Washington Post. Froomkin was the new media hybrid of Woodward and Bernstein during the George W. Bush administration and provided one of the best informed portals into America's palace politics. I want all TWN's readers to know that Froomkin was one of those who greatly furthered serious public discourse about torture, domestic spying, the Iraq War, and many other stressful and important subjects -- and his platform at the Post will be missed.

Steve Benen:

The Washington Monthly: if Froomkin is leaving the Post, it's a real loss. Froomkin has been a great writer with keen instincts, often picking up on a burgeoning story before it's gained traction elsewhere. The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions...

Megan McArdle:

Froomkin Fired - Megan McArdle: Dan Froomkin is out at the Post, for reasons that aren't clear to me.  Was there really room for only one liberal political blogger?

And Dan Froomkin:

Froomkin, Lord Carlile, and US Political Journalism: Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central.  The threat comes from inside.  It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do…

Calling bulls---, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

It also resonates with readers and viewers a lotm ore than passionless stenography I’m not sure why calling bulls--- has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access fo  insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bulls----calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bulls--- more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bulls----calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat.  We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship — or whatever it is — out of the way.

Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander Really Is as Stupid as He Is Ugly...

Washington Post "ombudsman" Andrew Alexander this morning:

[Dan Froomkin's] slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president...

"Seemed," "may." Shouldn't he try to find out? But that would require work for Andrew Alexander, and would require him to represent reader concerns.

Here is what Alexander has been writing about for the past two weeks:

Ombudsman Blog - Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander represents reader concerns:

Posted at 4:03 PM ET, 06/18/2009 Post Axes Froomkin's "White House Watch"... Comments (595)

Posted at 4:09 PM ET, 06/17/2009 What Howard Kurtz Didn't Disclose... Comments (12)

Posted at 4:14 PM ET, 06/16/2009 Post Plays Catch-Up on AmeriCorps Story... Comments (28)

Posted at 4:46 PM ET, 06/15/2009 Sunday's 'Set for Life' Installment: Long, and Not Local... Comments (0)

Posted at 12:34 PM ET, 06/12/2009 New Competition for The Post: Niche Players... Comments (3)

Posted at 1:04 PM ET, 06/11/2009 Closing the Gender Gap Among Post Columnists... Comments (3)

Posted at 4:49 PM ET, 06/ 9/2009 How "Swann Street" Could Have Been Handled Online... Comments (3)

Posted at 4:37 PM ET, 06/ 8/2009 One Paper Tries a Print-Only Experiment... Comments (0)

Posted at 11:28 AM ET, 06/ 5/2009 Where's the Line on Those Suggestive Ads?... Comments (4)

Posted at 2:27 PM ET, 06/ 3/2009 Newspaper 'Sleeves' Are Safe From D.C. Plastic Tax... Comments (2)

And here's an archived post from Hilzoy about why it is disgraceful that Alexander has a job:

Obsidian Wings: The Washington Post's "Multi-Layer Editing Process": February 20: I haven't written about George Will's factually challenged column from last Sunday, but I have been following the various refutations of mistakes he made. I have also been following the various requests for comment from the Washington Post, and wondering when the Post might respond. Now they have:

Thank you for your e-mail. The Post’s ombudsman typically deals with issues involving the news pages. But I understand the point you and many e-mailers are making, and for that reason I sought clarification from the editorial page editors. Basically, I was told that the Post has a multi-layer editing process and checks facts to the fullest extent possible. In this instance, George Will’s column was checked by people he personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors. The University of Illinois center that Will cited has now said it doesn’t agree with his conclusion, but earlier this year it put out a statement that was among several sources for this column and that notes in part that "Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979,"

Best wishes,
Andy Alexander
Washington Post Ombudsman"

Until I read this, I had been under the impression that newspapers didn't do as much fact-checking as magazines, because of deadline pressure; and I had imagined that the inaccuracies in George Will's column might result from applying standards designed for reported stories to columns. But on reading that Will's column had been subjected to a "multi-layer editing process", and that this "process" had checked the facts "to the fullest extent possible", I realized that I had been wrong. Naturally, I clicked the link Mr. Alexander provided, and read it. Did he? I don't know what would be worse: that he did, and takes it to support Will, or that he didn't take his job seriously enough to bother. 

Here's how George Will cited the Arctic Climate Research Center:

"As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979."

Here's the statement Mr. Alexander cites as "one of" Will's sources, including the sentence he specifically references. It's a response to an article in the Daily Tech called "Sea Ice Ends Year at Same Level as 1979": 

"One important detail about the article in the Daily Tech is that the author is comparing the GLOBAL sea ice area from December 31, 2008 to same variable for December 31, 1979. In the context of climate change, GLOBAL sea ice area may not be the most relevant indicator. Almost all global climate models project a decrease in the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area over the next several decades under increasing greenhouse gas scenarios. But, the same model responses of the Southern Hemisphere sea ice are less certain. In fact, there have been some recent studies suggesting the amount of sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere may initially increase as a response to atmospheric warming through increased evaporation and subsequent snowfall onto the sea ice. (Details: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050630064726.htm ) Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N.Hemisphere reduction." 

Where I come from, when someone writes something of the form: "P is not evidence for Q, and here's why", it is dishonest to quote that person saying P and use that quote as evidence for Q. If one of my students did this, I would grade her down considerably, and would drag her into my office for an unpleasant talk about basic scholarly standards. If she misused quotes in this way repeatedly, I might flunk her. Will does this more than once. Since it's Will's only citation of a peer-reviewed journal I recognize, I checked the quote from Science in this passage:

"Although some disputed that the "cooling trend" could result in "a return to another ice age" (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively)."

It's from this paper (pdf, subscription wall.) Here is the bit Will cited in context:

"Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth's orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends -- and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.  One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in an exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar's astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate." 

So that "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" is (a) supposed to happen "over the next 20,000 years", not imminently, and (b), more importantly: it's a prediction that does not take into account anthropogenic changes in climate, like, um, those "due to the burning of fossil fuels". Which is to say, the kind of global warming we're now talking about.

The fact that this prediction specifically excludes anthropogenic climate change means that you cannot use it to say: those silly scientists; they used to believe that the earth was cooling, and now they think it's warming. When scientists say "if we don't take man-made changes to climate into account, the earth will get cooler over the next 20,000 years", this is completely consistent with saying: "however, when you factor in those man-made changes, the earth will get warmer", or "when you factor in those changes, we don't know", or any number of things.

If Will actually read these two articles, it's hard to see how he's not being deliberately deceptive by citing them as he did. If, as I suspect, he just got them from some set of climate change denialist talking points and didn't bother to actually check them out for himself, he's being irresponsible. All those people who supposedly fact-checked Will's article as part of the Post's "multi-layer editing process" -- "people [George Will] personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors" -- should be fired, either for not doing their job or for doing it utterly incompetently. These are hard times for newspapers; I wouldn't have thought they could afford more than one layer of an editing process that produces no discernible improvement in quality.

And Andy Alexander? He should read the cites George Will gives him before he sends them out, under his own name, in support of his paper's decision to publish Will's piece, if he doesn't want to be embarrassed like this again.

Is There a Reason to Have a Washington Post?

John Byrne:

Raw Story: On Thursday, the Washington Post confirmed it had fired liberal online columnist Dan Froomkin. On Friday, they gave a guest column to Bush war architect Paul Wolfowitz...

The Return of "Liquidationism"

Paul Krugman sends us to Ezra Klein. Ezra won't, but I will, say that John Tamny and Forbes have now written the worst thing I have yet seen on the recession.

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein: A Prescription for a Crippling Recession: I'm not quite prepared to say that John Tamny's column on "the Flip Side of Failure" is the worst piece I've read since the onset of the recession, but it's arguably the most overblown.

Tamny's thesis is pretty simple. Another way of looking at a devastating recession is that it represents "assets falling into the hands of those who can either afford them, or who possess a stated objective to use them more wisely. In short, the flipside of failure is opportunity." And Tamny, to his credit, gives examples. Buffalo Wild Wings, for instance, which has taken over eight restaurants formerly owned by the Don Pablo's chain. And Panera Bread Co., which is moving into some of the buildings previously inhabited by the now-shuttered Bennigan's. This seems, to me, like a fundamentally sad macroeconomic story: A lot of jobs were lost and a couple of jobs were gained. This is like taking consolation because you won $50 at slots even as you lost several thousand in Vegas. But Tamny is more enthused. "The failure of certain chains and restaurants has created opportunities for other eating establishments to expand," he writes.

He also quotes a Los Angeles Times article tracking a couple of different experiences in the housing market. In one, an older man lost his job due to a heart problem, and that, plus legal costs incurred by a wayward son, led him to lose his house. But wait! On the flip side of that guy's heart-trouble-related "failure" are Hilary and Mark, newlyweds who never thought they'd be able to afford a house in Los Angeles. Squeal!

Elsewhere, a Chinese company purchased the Hummer brand. "It would be impossible to calculate," writes Tamny, "but it's likely that the creation of the Hummer brand (and the factories necessary to build it) from scratch would have cost many multiples of the $500 million that Sichuan paid GM for Hummer."

For all that, the article would be an innocuous enough tour through the recession's thin silver lining if not for its conclusion:

[T]hese stories do remind us that just as the human body frequently heals itself during times of illness, the economy is ultimately comprised of self-interested individuals who, if left alone, will work in order to improve their individual financial situations.

In that sense, the answer to our sagging economy today is not more government intervention, but instead a humble federal government that will sit back and let the economy heal itself. The flipside of economic failure is economic opportunity, and it's time for Washington to get out of the way so that individuals can turn misfortune into opportunity.

That's quite a conclusion based off five anecdotal examples. Indeed, as a macroeconomic prediction, it's not even clear what it means. What would a "humble federal government" do, exactly? Shut down the stimulus projects so a couple million more people end up unemployed and a couple million other people can buy their possessions at fire sale prices? Shut down the system of financial supports which are currently sustaining a weakened lending market? Should they have held back from Detroit's collapse so that the assets of the various companies were simply liquidated, along with what was left of the Rust Belt's economy? Should they cut off economic aid to the states so infrastructure literally crumbles? I want specifics!

The idea that government should get out of the way because Panera has taken over eight of Bennigan's former locations beggars belief. At the end of the day, it will be a resuscitation of household spending and business expansion that restarts our economic growth. But for now, both have fallen through the floor, with terrible consequences for both individuals and businesses. What little demand exists is being substantially kept afloat by the massive intervention of the federal government. At this moment, federal spending does not exist in competition with household spending. It's one of the last forces sustaining it. Indeed, the idea that the economy will heal itself if the government only steps out of the way is exactly the thinking that led to the deep recession of 1937. What a pity those lessons haven't been better learned.

Demagoguery and the Responsibility of a Bureaucrat

Todd Gitlin asks a question of Council on Foreign Relations head Richard Haass:

Demagoguery of Choice | TPMCafe: I was present at a conference in Maryland sponsored by the NewsHour in November 2002 when Mr. Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, issued a ringing defense of the impending war, which evidently he now maintains that he already opposed as a war of choice, not necessity. At the time, he stirred together, in Cheneyesque fashion, claims about Saddam and al-Qaeda, about Iraqi WMD, and the rest. I arose to argue with him and called his presentation "demagogic," but my protest did not attract his interest or sympathy. I'm curious to know if Mr. Haass believed what he was saying to this audience of foreign policy influentials at the time; if his presentation was a presentation of necessity or of choice; if he agrees that he was demagogic; and if he has any regrets.

There are hard questions as to how one should act when one works for an administration that is making a mistake on matters of policy. One could resign--and see one's place taken by somebody who will make the mistakes even better. One can be a good soldier and argue publicly for the mistaken policies while arguing privately for the right thing, in the belief that:

But it has always seemed to me that the minimal requirement imposed on the "good soldiers" is this: you don't tell lies in public.

From what Todd Gitlin reports, it looks as though Richard Haass--a man whom I have never heard praised in his role at the head at CFR--told things that he knew to be lies or that he could easily have determined to be lies in public.

Can Anybody Tell Me Why Ross Douthat Rather than Megan of Jezebel Writes an Op-Ed Column for the New York Times?

Megan:

Jezebel - Op-Ed Writer: Pro-Choicers Have George Tiller's Blood On Their Hands - Ross douthat late term abortion: I'm starting to suspect that the New York Times is giving increasingly ill-considered and poorly written conservatives column space in an effort to undermine the idea that Republican ideology has any intellectual validity. Otherwise, I don't really see what the papers' editors are thinking, between hiring neocon idiot Bill Kristol and then replacing him with slut-shaming, supposedly new-idea-having former Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat. Having already definitively determined that feminism makes women unhappy by reading one study abstract, today, Douthat turns his attention to late-term abortion.

You see, Douthat totally understands why late term abortions might be necessary, and the courage it took for Dr. George Tiller to continue performing this vital health service for women... he just thinks the late doctor was an amoral baby-killer who didn't understand God. As for all the women who have written testimonials about their experiences with late-term abortions, Mr. Douthat read them, and he thinks they're all assholes.

They help explain why Tiller thought he was doing the Lord's work, even though that work involved destroying something that we wouldn't hesitate to call a baby if we saw it struggling for life in a hospital bed.

And let's not forget the amoral part: Douthat's been listening to the very people who advocated violence against Tiller, his patients, his staff and the clinic, and so he knows that Tiller was just willy-nilly performing late term abortions on perfectly healthy fetuses and mothers all the time. How does he know? Because the anti-abortion movement told him and the state government, over and over again, to try to get Tiller jailed.

But his critics were convinced that he performed them not only in truly desperate situations, but in many other cases as well. Over the years, they cobbled together a considerable amount of evidence - drawn from the state's abortion statistics, from Tiller's own comments, and from a 2006 investigation - suggesting that Tiller abused the state's mental-health exemption to justify late-term abortions in almost any situation. This evidence is persuasive, but not dispositive. We may never know how many of George Tiller's abortions were performed on healthy mothers and healthy fetuses.

Well, I mean, the courts found it "dispositive," which is why on what few charges the anti-abortion movement managed to gin up against him, Tiller was acquitted. But, by all means, lets continue to smear Tiller as an amoral baby-killer. It'll help strengthen Douthat's argument! Douthat also understands why, having read the real stories of women who endured the sorts of pregnancies that needfully ended in late term terminations, why pro-choice types think abortions should remain legal. He just thinks we're wrong, i.e. causing needless social strife and even violence. I mean, most abortions are elective, Douthat says! (And even most late-term ones, he additionally asserts without evidence!)

The same is true of the more than 100,000 abortions that are performed after the first trimester: Very few involve medical complications of any kind. Even the now-outlawed "partial-birth" procedure, which abortion-rights supporters initially argued was only employed in the direst of dire situations, turned out to be used primarily for purely elective abortions.

Now that last bit is a careful bit of language on Douthat's part. Because, in reality, there's no evidence even in the Slate article that Douthat links to that the abortions were elective; the best that the article's author Franklin Foer can muster is that the procedure known as "intact dilation and extraction" was "safer and more convenient" than alternative methods (because, really, why would you want to use the method least likely to cause the death of the mother?) and that two newspapers concluded, after speaking to a couple doctors, that second-trimester intact dilation and extractions were "mostly" performed on poor women who were unable to get into a practitioner in time for a first trimester abortion — which doesn't necessarily make them "elective."

Douthat then sets up his pro-choice strawman to knock down: as far as he's concerned, pro-choicers people deny that a fetus has a "claim to life" — i.e., is already a human being — and that's why we don't care whether a fetus is healthy or the mother was simply too lazy to use birth control. And in our zeal to protect the right of every woman to make the best choices for her (and, yes, in some cases, the fetus she is carrying), it's our fault that we've made abortion politics so controversial.

If anything, by enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be. One reason there's so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions - Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? - is that Americans aren't permitted to debate anything else. Under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you're allowed to even regulate.

In other words, since Roe v. Wade protects women's right to any abortion pre-viability, the "debate" over late term abortions — as epitomized in Douthat's own column by one George Tiller — is so "fierce" because poor anti-abortion activists have nothing else to fight about. Apparently, Douthat has missed the efforts by South Dakota to make abortion illegal, the efforts by Colorado to pass a personhood amendment, the efforts activists in states like Mississippi to drive all clinics out of business (thus, eliminating abortion in the state) through over-regulation and all the other various things anti-abortion activists are actively doing to overturn Roe v. Wade in addition to fueling hate-filled and violent rhetoric against all abortion providers, including late-term providers like George Tiller.

Douthat's final argument is — I swear — that pro-choice people who want to prevent violence against abortion providers should simply accept the end of Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion illegal. I wish I was kidding.

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester - as many advanced democracies already do – would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions. The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases - and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller's murder.

To sum up: if we just roll over, accept the end of abortion access, and let them teach us about respect for human life, they won't kill any more abortion providers. Good to know whose hands Douthat thinks Tiller's blood is really on.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Can Anybody Tell Me Why Ross Douthat Rather than Hilzoy Writes an Op-Ed Column for the New York Times?

Hilzoy:

Obsidian Wings: Ross Douthat Makes No Sense: Ross Douthat has a very peculiar column on abortion in the New York Times. In it, he asserts, falsely, that "under current law, if you want to restrict abortion, post-viability procedures are the only kind you’re allowed to even regulate": in fact, it is possible to regulate abortions before viability, and the Supreme Court in Casey upheld precisely such restrictions. He claims, also falsely, that "Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything" besides post-viability abortions (which would surely come as a surprise to the First Amendment), and that abortion needs to be "returned to the democratic process." As Freddie at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen notes:

Setting aside the banal fact that the judicial system is a part of our democratic process, there is a clear, straightforward and well-known way to overturn Roe v. Wade– pass a constitutional amendment criminalizing abortion. That’s how you override Supreme Court decisions; that’s how Dred Scott was effectively overturned. That’s how the federal income tax was passed. There’s a method for overturning Supreme Court law you don’t like, it’s well known, it’s time tested, and it’s as open to abortion foes as it is to anyone else.

But what's really odd is his reasoning. Try, if you dare, to make sense of this:

The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there are exceptions, there cannot be a rule. Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever. As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense. Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation. But the law is a not a philosophy seminar. It's the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense. And it can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons.

First of all, the claim that "where there is an exception, there cannot be a rule" does not make sense as a matter or moral philosophy. If it's possible to distinguish clearly between the exceptions and the other cases, there's no problem at all with having a rule. This is why we can have such rules as: No parking in a handicapped spot, unless you have a handicapped badge. When it's not easy to tell the exceptions from the rest, whether or not it's OK to have a rule depends on how bad it is to miss those exceptions, and how bad it is not to have a rule. There are surely circumstances in which it would be fine to drive on the left, but we do not normally think that these should prevent us from having a rule about which side of the street to drive on. On the other hand, the existence of people who have been falsely convicted of capital crimes is a much more compelling argument against capital punishment: even one mistake is a horrendous injustice.

More importantly, consider this sentence:

Because rape and incest can lead to pregnancy, because abortion can save women's lives, because babies can be born into suffering and certain death, there should be no restrictions on abortion whatsoever.

How on earth is that supposed to be evidence for this?

Either a fetus has a claim to life or it doesn't. The circumstances of its conception and the state of its health shouldn't enter into the equation.

The whole point of bringing up cases of rape and incest is to argue that the circumstances of a fetus' conception are relevant to the question whether abortion should be legal. If we were convinced that a fetus was a full person, they wouldn't be: we do not think it's OK for a mother to kill her five year old child on the grounds that it is the product of rape or incest. Likewise, the point of bringing up the fact that "babies can be born into suffering and certain death" is to say that the state of the fetus' health is relevant, not that it isn't. What Douthat wrote makes about as much sense as saying: "The argument for not hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it would cause you a whole lot of pain. As a matter of moral philosophy, this makes a certain sense: hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is either right or wrong regardless of how it makes you feel." To which the only possible response is: Huh???

Douthat's column begins with a rather lovely meditation on the hard cases that George Tiller had to deal with: abortions on "women facing life-threatening complications, on women whose children would be born dead or dying, on women who had been raped, on "women" who were really girls of 10." He doesn't actually say much about how we should deal with these cases, other than the part I already quoted: the law "can take account of tragic situations without universalizing their lessons." How it should take these cases into account, and why it shouldn't universalize their lessons, are left shrouded in mystery.

And yet, somehow, he ends up here:

If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically. Arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester -- as many advanced democracies already do -- would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions. The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases -- and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

Because, as we all know, giving terrorists what they want is the surest way to prevent more terrorism.

There are arguments for making abortion illegal. I don't accept them, but they exist. Douthat should try making them sometime.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

In Which Conor Friedersdorf Succumbs to Stockholmm Syndrome...

He writes:

The Man with the Golden Microphone | Politics | The American Scene: Americans regard Rush Limbaugh as the face of the Republican Party, he is able to drive the agenda of the conservative movement, and a lot of people on the right don’t find that problematic. Okay, it is what it is. Mr. Limbaugh isn’t going away anytime soon, and I wouldn’t want him to stop doing his radio program even if I could choose it. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to quietly stand by while Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck or Mark Levin jockey to be his successor. Should this be the last time that a talk radio host breaks the 10 percent barrier in a poll like this, the GOP and the conservative movement will be a lot better off, and so will our country, which suffers when its public discourse is largely driven by a medium that rewards bombast, oversimplification, the vilification of political opponents, and engaging paranoid straw men rather than the strongest arguments offered by the other side...

But if Rush Limbaugh were to stop doing his radio show today, move to the Upper Amazon, and take up a life of anonymous service to others--well, then, the country and the Republican Party would be much better off: there would be less "bombast, oversimplification, the vilification of political opponents, and engaging paranoid straw men..."

So why doesn't Conor wish that Limbaugh stop? I can understand "I wouldn't want to shut him down even if I could..."--free country, free speech, et cetera. But I cannot understand "I wouldn't want him to stop..."

It looks to me like Conor Friedersdorf has succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome...

The National Review: Taking the Class Out of Class Warfare: Ed Whalen Edition (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?)

Eugene Voiokh seriously dislikes the arguments of National Review "legal correspondent" Ed Whalen:

The Volokh Conspiracy - Supreme Court Justices and "Policy Implications": [T]alk [like Ed Whalen's] about how judges shouldn't "make policy" has been commonplace now, especially on the Right.... [C]riticisms of... decisionmaking based on what seems to the judge to be likelier to produce good results are often correct.... But it's a mistake... to turn that important insight into a categorical assertion that judges shouldn't "make policy."... [J]udicial development of legal rules, with an eye towards their consequences, is a longstanding feature of American law, recognized and accepted from the Framers onwards...

And Volokh explains:

Ed Whelan.... "Sotomayor thinks an unobjectionable and apt description of the role of Supreme Court justices in making decisions involves 'ponder[ing] about ... policy implications'."...

The trouble with this criticism [of Sotomayor]... is that of course Supreme Court Justices routinely, and entirely properly, consider "policy implications."... [T]he Supreme Court acts as a common-law-making court.... [It must consider policy implications where] statutes are either deliberately vague or specifically delegate authority.... Antitrust law... evidentiary privileges... copyright fair use.... [T]he job of the federal courts, and in particular the Supreme Court, is to develop legal rules that they see as sensible "in the light of reason and experience"... looking at consequences ("the policy implications") is an important part of that.... American law... was developed by the common-law courts. It has been in considerable measure codified by legislatures, but common-law courts continue to develop it.... [A]ll the Justices... routinely consider practical implications.... The cases that come before the Supreme Court are generally not ones in which the text provides one absolutely clear result... such cases... tend to be resolved early precisely because the result is clear.... [Y]ou often have several plausible readings... [so] judges... ask whether one or another reading would have results that are ridiculous, or inconsistent with what was understood as the purpose of the provision, or unduly administratively burdensome....

Ed Whalen responds:

Exposing an Irresponsible Anonymous Blogger - Ed Whelan - Bench Memos on National Review Online: One bane of the Internet is the anonymous blogger who abuses his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks...

To which my first reaction is: What!? Eugene Volokh isn't anonymous. He is very Nonymous indeed!

But it turns out that Whalen doesn't dare pick even the smallest argument with Volokh. Whalen's obsequious groveling is truly something to behold:

Ed Whelan: I initially wrote a sloppy sentence.... Volokh used [it] as the occasion for a broader discussion.... I credited Volokh for a “characteristically thoughtful critique.”... [I] tweaked my sloppy sentence so that it read as it should have in the first place...

And then Whalen tries to create daylight that doesn't exist between Volokh and Sotomayor's expression of what is the same idea:

Volokh:

Supreme Court justices are even more likely than other federal judges to legitimately consider the consequences of their decisions...

Sotomayor, draft text of 2006 Hofstra graduation speech:

[M]y thoughts sound like a three-part test. Unfortunately, I have now been a circuit judge too long. There is a joke that aptly describes the difference between supreme court, circuit court, and district court judging. It involves three judges who go duck hunting:

A duck flies overhead and the supreme court justice, before he picks up his shotgun, ponders about the policy implications of shooting the duck—how will the environment be affected, how will the duck hunting business be affected if he doesn’t shoot the duck, well by the time he finishes, the duck got away.

Another duck flies overhead, and the circuit judge goes through his five part test before pulling the trigger—1) he lifts the shotgun to his shoulder, 2) he sights the duck, 3) he measures the velocity of the duck’s flight, 4) he aims, and 5) he shoots—and, he misses.

Finally, another duck flies by, the district judge picks up the shotgun and shoots. The duck lands and the district judge picks it up, swings it over his shoulder and decides that he will let the other two judges explain what he did over dinner.

So whence the "bane of the Internet... the anonymous blogger who abuses his anonymity to engage in irresponsible attacks..."?

The "anonyous blogger' is Publius of Obsidian Wings. The "irresponsible attack" is Publius's giving a wider distribution to Volokh than Volokh would have otherwise had.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Hey! National Review! Puerto Rico Is Not in Asia!

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

At least this made me laugh and brightened my day:

National Review:

Brian Buetler snarks:

National Review's Wise Latina Caricature Inexplicably Asian: [T]he folks over at the conservative National Review--apparently flummoxed by the very idea of a "wise Latina"--have caricaturized the Puerto Rican-descended Sonia Sotomayor as an Asian Buddhist. Good times.

And maureendowdsanonymousfriendwhodoesntwanttobecredited@gmail.com emails some additional snark:

Sheesh. In the old days[1] National Review would have at least been able to get the racism thing right...

---

[1] For example: William F. Buckley:

From National Review's Archives: 8/24/1957: [L]et us speak frankly. The South... want[s] to deprive the Negro of a vote... [because] the White community merely intends to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White.... The central question... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail... in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes.... National Review believes that the South's premises are correct.... The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote.... That, of course, is demagogy...

In Which Julian Sanchez Joins the Special Action Executive of La Raza

Another not very Hispanic-American radicalized by the Republican garbage dumped on Sonia Sotomayor:

A Sotomayor core dump: I’ll cop to sharing some of Yglesias’ irritation at the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor, and if Republicans are managing to get a rise out of my pallid ass, I can only imagine the kind of damage they’re doing to their brand among, you know, real Latinos.  For one, it is basically impossible for me to believe that anyone with two functioning brain cells could read the “wise Latina” speech in full and find the notion that it’s “racist” anything but laughable. It’s been done to death in a thousand other venues, but one more time for those who are just joining us now: Sotomayor is talking about different views of how identity affects judging, and in particular she’s focusing on cases the high courts have decided involving race or gender discrimination. She mentions a quotation attributed to Sandra Day O’Connor to the effect that a “wise old man” and a “wise old woman” will come to the same conclusion. And she wonder’s whether that’s true, because historically some very wise jurists handed down decisions that we now mostly recognize as bad ones. She’s suggesting that someone with the experience of living as a disfavored minority might not have fallen prey to some of their errors.... This isn’t racist, or even particularly controversial.  It’s just obvious.  Consider Justice Henry Brown’s opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Let me posit that basically any black man living in Louisiana in 1896 would have understood perfectly well why this is grotesque and misguided, and why “separate but equal” is a cruel fiction. He might not be a better judge on the whole, but he’d surely make a “better” decision in this kind of case. At this point in history, of course, we all understand this—though not in quite the same visceral way—and so a judge of any ethnicity or gender would make a better decision. But there are still cases that might involve somewhat more subtle dynamics—questions, for instance, about when a government policy exerts a “chilling effect” on speech—where a certain kind of experience might make it easier to see what’s going on....

On a related note, I find the “what if a white man said that?” move incredibly grating about 99 percent of the time it’s used, because it’s almost always a way of blotting out all the reasons that it would, in fact, be different. In the instance, it would be weird for a white man to say it because it’s probably not true that the experience of growing up as a white male in the United States specifically enhances one’s understanding of what it means to be a disfavored minority. In other words, it just wouldn’t be true or reasonable in this case—though it might be for a white male who grew up as a religious or ethnic minority somewhere else in the world. So yes, sometimes formally gramatically equivalent statements will have different connotations depending on whether it’s a white person speaking about whites or a Latino speaking about Latinos, because history happened. I realize this is, like, the worst racial injustice ever, but Republicans should realize how insanely tone-deaf they come across when they assert that Sotomayor’s is a “story of privilege” because she was “blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment”—as opposed to poor schmucks saddled with surnames like Bush, I suppose, who had to claw their way into the Ivies on their own merits. Or how it sounds when Fred Barnes engages in bouts of Socratic reasoning like the following:

BARNES: I think you can make the case that she’s one of those who has benefited from affirmative action over the years tremendously.

BENNETT: Yeah, well, maybe so. Did she get into Princeton on affirmative action, one wonders.

BARNES: One wonders.

BENNETT: Summa Cum Laude, I don’t think you get on affirmative action. I don’t know what her major was, but Summa Cum Laude’s a pretty big deal.

BARNES: I guess it is, but you know, there’s some schools and maybe Princeton’s not one of them, where if you don’t get Summa Cum Laude then or some kind of Cum Laude, you then, you’re a D+ student.

I feel pretty confident that Fred Barnes has met a few people who attended Princeton, and does not, in fact, believe that they hand out Summas like party favors. So when he goes hunting for some way to cling to the belief that this woman must be a dunce who got some kind of special treatment, it’s hard not to wonder what his priors are. Or here’s Michael Goldfarb on reports that  “Princeton allowed Sotomayor and two other students to initiate a seminar, for full credit and with the university’s blessings, on the Puerto Rican experience and its relation to contemporary America”:

I went to Princeton but somehow I never got to teach my own class, or grade my own work. One wonders how Sotomayor judged her work in that class, and whether the grade helped or hindered her efforts to graduate with honors.

Now, Goldfarb can’t even have clicked through his own link to read the press release from the 70s about the course. He would have discovered that when the course was launched, all students had for six years been allowed to propose a seminar on material not covered by the curriculum, and that 132 such seminars had been created under those rules.... [A]s you watch these gross distortions pile up, you start coming away with the clear impression that they’re not just the result of simple sloppiness, but a deep background conviction that the achievements of Hispanics are always presumptively attributable to special preferences—and that there’s no need to double-check and see whether that’s supported by the facts in this case.  They just know she can’t have really earned it.

Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is.  This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don’t think I’m  especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I’m angry. I don’t think Republican pundits really appreciate the kind of damage they’re probably doing, for no reason I can discern given the slim odds of actually blocking the nomination. Which, perhaps, goes to Sotomayor’s point: They really have no idea how they sound to anyone else.

The Republican Base on Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Via Ali Frick of ThinkProgress. The Republican Base's culture hero G. Gordon Liddy on Judge Sotomayor:

G. Gordon Liddy On Sotomayor: Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, “the race”...

Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then...

And everybody is cheering because Hispanics and females have been, quote, "underrepresented," unquote. And as you pointed out, which I thought was quite insightful, the Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body...

Clean up your party, guys. I understand that you have a base that is heavily into identity politics of the worst kind--that thinks that the Supreme Court ought to be made up of eight old white men plus Clarence Thomas, that thinks that there is something wrong with people who menstruate, and that thinks it is funny to call Spanish "illegal ailen"--and that you think you must pander to it. But enough is enough.

The Radical Education of Matthew Yglesias: Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation

The attacks on Sonia Sotomayor lead Matthew Yglesias--the original model for the New Yorker's Eustace Tilly--to discover his Hispanic-American roots and sign up as head of La Raza's Special Action Executive:

Matthew Yglesias: Sonia Sotomayor and Identity Formation: As anyone who knows me can attest, I don’t have what you’d call a strong “Hispanic” identity. Three of my four grandparents are Jews from Eastern Europe. My paternal grandfather, José Yglesias, was a Cuban-American born in Florida. But that puts the family’s actual Hispanic ancestry pretty far back in the past. He grew up in a Spanish-dominant immigrant community, but spoke English fluently. My dad grew up in an English-speaking household and knows some Spanish. I took a semester of Spanish at NYU one summer. And Cuban-American political identity in the United States is heavily oriented around a highly ideological far-right approach to Latin America policy that neither I nor anyone else in my family shares. The Yglesiases emigrated from Cuba before the Revolution, José was initially a Castro supporter, and though he gave that up he and my dad and I all share what you might call anti-anti-Castro views.

But for all that, I have to say that I am really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor. The idea that any time a person with a Spanish last name is tapped for a job, his or her entire lifetime of accomplishments is going to be wiped out in a riptide of bitching and moaning about “identity politics” is not a fun concept for me to contemplated. Qualifications like time at Princeton, Yale Law, and on the Circuit Court that work well for guys with Italian names suddenly don’t work if you have a Spanish name. Heaven forbid someone were to decide that there ought to be at least one Hispanic columnist at a major American newspaper.

Somehow, when George W. Bush affects a Texas accent, that’s not identity politics. When John Edwards gets a VP nomination, that’s not identity politics. But Sonia Sotomayor! Oh my heavens!

At any rate, Ann Friedman wrote a great piece on the hypocrisy of this back during the Democratic primary. And I think this item from Neil Sinhababu on constructing political identities is insightful. I think conservatives are playing with fire here, and underestimating the number of, say, Mexican-Americans in Texas who didn’t think of themselves as having a great deal in common with Puerto Ricans from New York who are waking up today to find that in the eyes of the conservative movement normal qualifications for office don’t count unless you’re a white Anglo.

"Most Unfair Attack on Sonia Sotomayor" Contest Entry: Greg Mankiw

The amount of s--- that has been thrown at Sonia Sotomayor is truly amazing.

Now we have another entry in the "most unfair attack on Sonia Sotomayor" sweepstakes...

Greg Mankiw writes:

Greg Mankiw's Blog: SCOTUS nominee is a spender: [T]here are two types of people: Some save and intertemporally optimize their consumption plans, while others live paycheck to paycheck.... Some people with low incomes manage to scrimp and save (I always think of my grandmother), and some people with high incomes spend most everything they earn. Apparently, the new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an example of the latter. The Washington Post reports that the 54-year-old Sotomayer has a $179,500 yearly salary but on her financial disclosure report for 2007, she said her only financial holdings were a Citibank checking and savings account, worth $50,000 to $115,000 combined. During the previous four years, the money in the accounts at some points was listed as low as $30,000. My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little...

Sonia Sotomayor has a large defined benefit pension with a current market value of roughly $2.5 million.

Sonia Sotomayor has roughly $1 million in equity in her Greeenwich Village condo.

Sonia Sotomayor has no descendents to bequeath wealth too.

I bet Greg Mankiw's grandmother would indeed be shocked and appalled--but not at the fact that Sonia Sotomayor is a millionaire three times over with a 20:1 wealth-to-income ratio.

Hoisted from the Archives (July 15, 2007): Caccianli i Ciel per Non Esser Men Belli,/ Né lo Profondo Inferno Li Riceve...

A correspondent directs me to the following bizarre comment by the Economist, starring Megan McArdle, on the latest atrocity from the Wall Street Journal.

If you recall, the atrocity was this "Laffer curve":

which we talked about here.

Here's Megan:

Outlandish | Free exchange | Economist.com: The Wall Street Journal is wrong; their line is not the only, or even the obvious, one to draw through noisy data, even without omitting Norway...

Megan is trying to take a middle position between Mark Thoma's sensible criticism and Donald Luskin's idiotic defense of the clown show that is the Journal editorial page.

I see three misrepresentations by the Economist here:

1. The WSJ line is not "draw[n] through noisy data." It is drawn above noisy data.
2. To say that the WSJ line is "not... the obvious" one to draw implies that there might be some non-obvious reason to draw it. There isn't.
3. The claim that the WSJ line is "not the only... one to draw" is a statement that it is one of the lines that one might draw with some justification. It isn't.

All I can say is:

Questo misero modo/ tegnon l'anime triste di coloro/ che visser sanza 'nfamia e sanza lodo./ Mischiate sono a quel cattivo coro/ de li angeli che non furon ribelli/ né fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sé fuoro./ Caccianli i ciel per non esser men belli,/ né lo profondo inferno li riceve...

This is indeed the behavior of the banner-chasers of Dante's Inferno: those who did not have the morals to be worthy of heaven but also lacked the guts to sin enough to be worthy of hell, and who were thus rejected by both.

One more point, with respect to "omitting Norway": Personally I see no need to omit Norway. I do see a need to plot the Norway point on the graph correctly. The revenues plotted on the vertical scale include oil excise taxes levied on corporations. The tax rates plotted on the horizontal scale do not--hence the Norway "tax rate" of 28% rather than the correct 52%. Move Norway out to its proper position--with the same tax concept on both axes--and everything is fine.

Mendacious and Unfair Attacks on Sonia Sotomayor: Stuart Taylor, Jr. 's Meshugannah Entry

As I have said before, nobody who wants to please The One Who Is has any business paying even a single red cent cent to the National Journal for any purpose as long as Stuart Taylor, Jr., writes for it. For we all remember that, to its eternal shame and disgrace, National Journal did not fire Stuart Taylor after he denounced our NATO allies for being "already in an overwrought tizzy about the supposed mistreatment of the 158 detainees at Guantanamo Bay...".

Not to mention things like:

The perception that the Bush administration has systematically denied due process to the more than 650 alleged "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay has both shocked Americans who care about the rule of law, me included, and done America enormous damage in world opinion. But... the administration has made a plausible case that its process for deciding whether to send prisoners to Guantanamo... has far more rigorous safeguards than had previously been disclosed...

And:

I am rooting for Bush to go down in history as a great president.... How can we not root for Bush to win this campaign for Arab democracy?... [S]houldn't we sometime Bush-bashers -- and even the full-time Bush-haters -- be prepared to give great credit to him and his neocons, if and when it becomes clear that they have engineered a historic breakthrough?... [N]o matter how shallow, slippery, and smug Bush sometimes seems, if he ends up changing the world for the better, he will be entitled to a presumption of wisdom, even brilliance...

Now Stuart Taylor, Jr., is back!

Sonia Sotomayor said:

[O]ur gender and our national origins may and will make a difference in our judgingh. Justice O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the sme conclusion.... I am not so sure that i agree with that statement.... I hope that a wise Latina woman the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life. Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo... upheld both sex and race discrimination.... [W]e should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values nad needs of people from a different group.... [N]ine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions....

However, a difference there will be by the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further.... I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some....

Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I... owe [people] constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions, and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences...

And here is what Stuart Taylor does with that speech:

Identity Politics And Sotomayor: [This] remarkable speech... deserves more scrutiny... Democratic Party's powerful identity-politics wing... seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.... [H]er basic proposition... white males... inferior to all other groups.... [A]ny prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.... [T]he president's emphasis on selective "empathy" for preferred racial and other groups as "the criteria by which I'll be selecting my judges" is not encouraging.... Do we want a new justice who comes close to stereotyping white males as (on average) inferior beings? And who seems to speak with more passion about her ethnicity and gender than about the ideal of impartiality? Compare Sotomayor's celebration of "how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul" and reflections "on being a Latina voice on the bench" with Judge Learned Hand's eulogy for Justice Benjamin Cardozo in 1938.... Some see such talk as tiresome dead-white-male stuff, from a time when almost all judges were white males.... I see it as the essence of what judges should strive to be.... [E]ven if a devotee of identity politics fills retiring Justice David Souter's seat, she will not have enough votes to encourage greater use of such racial preferences. Not yet.

It is an interesting question whether Taylor's holding up Cardozo as the just judge and thus hinting in the context of Sotomayor's speech that Cardozo's judgments upholding of race and sex discrimination were rightly decided is unintentional--due to his rhetorical incompetence--or is intentional. I am undecided on this question.

New York Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (David Brooks Edition)

David Brooks:

And the Angels Rejoice: I’ve been incredibly moved over the past few weeks to watch squads of corporate executives come to the White House.... These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II...

Abu Muqawama invokes Dave Barry:

abu muqawama: "You certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler": Dave Barry understood this way back in 1982:

Compare your opponent to Adolf Hitler. This is your heavy artillery, for when your opponent is obviously right and you are spectacularly wrong. Bring Hitler up subtly. Say: "That sounds suspiciously like something Adolf Hitler might say" or "You certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler."

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Dumb and Obnoxious Ivy League Summa Graduates for Sonia Sotomayor

http://www.cafepress.com/aisforobama.389106695

Amanda Terkel:

Think Progress: Conservatives Blast Obama’s Hispanic SCOTUS Nominee As ‘Not The Smartest’ And An ‘Intellectual Lightweight’: When the media began floating Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a possible Supreme Court nominee... Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic... [used] unnamed sources [as sockpuppets] to attack Sotomayor as “not that smart” and lacking “penetrating” questions on the bench.... [C]onservatives are now making this argument one of their principle lines of attack.... Curt Levey, executive director of the right-wing Committee for Justice... at the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru calls Sotomayor “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”... Karl Rove questioned whether she was smart enough to be on the Supreme Court.... Citing Rosen, Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes said that Sotomayor was “not the smartest.”... These attacks started even before Sotomayor was named. The National Review’s Mark Hemingway earlier said that Sotomayor was “dumb and obnoxious.”

But as even Fox News’s Megyn Kelly admitted this morning, Sotomayor’s credentials are “impressive by almost any standard.”... Coming from a housing project in the Bronx, Sotomayor ended up graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton. She also was a co-recipient of the M. Taylor Pyne Prize, the highest honor Princeton awards to an undergraduate. Sotomayor then went to Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Studies in World Public Order...

Can we just shut down the New Republic until they develop an ability to do some quality control?

Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic Says: "Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eurasia!"

Jeffrey Rosen, May 26, 2009:

The Sotomayor Nomination: Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court--not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success...

Jeffrey Rosen, May 4, 2009:

The Case Against Sotomayor: [T]here are also many reservations about Sotomayor.... They expressed questions about her temperament.... The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor... was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench."... Second Circuit judge Jose Cabranes, who would later become her colleague, put this point more charitably in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: "She is not intimidated or overwhelmed by the eminence or power or prestige of any party, or indeed of the media."... Her opinions... are... not especially clean or tight... sometimes miss the forest for the trees... concerns about her command of technical legal details...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

New York Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Edition (Ross Douthat Edition)

A friend who calls herself chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike writes:

Ross Douthat:

1. believes that abortion is murder.
2. thinks that women who use birth control should be stigmatized as (or perhaps are) unattractive sluts.
3. thinks that single parents should be stigmatized too.

Don't you only get to pick two of those three? Unless you're a real p---- who thinks women should be locked up by their fathers until title to them is passed to their husbands, that is.

I agree. If you think birth control and single parenthood should both be stigmatized then you must be for abortion on demand. If you both forbid abortion and stigmatize birth control then single parents are valuable parts of society performing important work raising the next generation. If you forbid abortion and disapprove of single parenthood then women on the pill are Visible Saints.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Sunday Morning Blogging: Someone Has Said Something Foolish on the Internet!

Thomas Riggins http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/8466/1/364/ Political Affairs Magazine - Misunderstanding Marx: Brad Delong and the Collapse of Neoliberalism:

[DeLong's] series of ill informed assertions and claims, without any supporting arguments in most cases, personal opinions and prejudices put forth in a pontifical manner, and value judgments dished out as if they were factual statements. I haven't the inclination to deal with all the nonsense in this garbled attack on Marx, but I will highlight a few examples.... Delong says that Marx was "part prophet."... "Large-scale prophecy of a glorious utopian future is bound to be false when applied to this world." He follows this up with a lot of idiotic comments about the New Jerusalem and Marx's not having visited the island of Patmos (the old stomping grounds of St. John the Divine)...

Ummm...

Karl Marx:

Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated...

John of Patmos, after having gotten into the 'shrooms:

And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife. And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there. And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it. And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life. And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever...

A certain family resemblance, no?

Now, you can walk the Paul Sweezy walk, and claim that the Gospel of the Holy Karl of Trier is "not so much a prediction as a vivid description of a tendency"http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000396.html. But the only proper response to that is to laugh.

Henry Farrell Reads Clive Crook, and Pounds His Head Against the Wall...

Clive Crook assumes a sensible middle position between the crazies who think we ought to torture people to induce them to make false confessions and the crazies who think we ought to obey our laws.

Henry Farrell comments:

That’s Some High-Quality Wank There — Crooked Timber: Clive Crook positions himself as a reasonable moderate between the extremes of Republican torture-and-detention-porn crazies, and people who, you know, who take civil rights seriously.

The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.

Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.

The signature intellectual defect of the non-compromisers on each side of this debate is an inability to recognise conflicting ends. The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. There can be no trade-off between freedom and security, because the freedoms they prioritise trump everything. To many on the other side, no trampling on the liberty of ordinary citizens, no degree of cruelty to detainees, no outright illegality is too much to contemplate in the effort to stop terrorists. On this view, security trumps everything.

The “seem to believe” is a weasel-phrase, which would (to use his own dubious phrasing) “seem” to be nicely calculated so as to allow him to make very nasty insinuations and accusations without having to prove them, and the “several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects” bit is a common-or-garden shameful and disgusting slur. If Crook has any substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ have been put at risk, or are likely to be put at risk, because of civil libertarians’ tiresome insistence on trials and such, I invite him to produce it. And no, hypothetical ticking bomb scenarios don’t do it, thank you very much.

The underlying claim of this shoddy exercise, such as it is, is three-fold. First, that the people who are insisting on civil liberties in the GWOT are wild-eyed and extremist zealots, fundamentally similar in kind to the members of the lock-em-up-and-torture-em-to-death crowd on the other side. Second, that a difficult balance has to be struck between civil liberties for terrorists on the one hand and the need to avoid the destruction of medium-sized American cities on the other. Third, that the only people capable of making these complex choices are sceptical moderates like Clive Crook who realise, as others don’t, that differing ends are incompatible, there are unavoidable trade-offs in life &c&c. In its fully fledged form, this might be described, after the example of Isaiah Berlin, as High Table Liberalism – that anguished and serious engagement with the difficulties of political choice in a world of irreconcilable and competing values which occurs somewhere between the end of the main course and the serving of the port and Stilton. But it reminds me even more of a radio comedy sketch I remember from my youth in Ireland, where a punter representing the Plain People of Ireland and a nun are discussing how best to deal with football hooligans. The punter says that they’re a pack of bastards, and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. The nun says no, we need to think too of the principles of charity and forgiveness, of Christian love etc – and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. Clive Crook is taking the part of the nun here.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (Robert Samuelson Edition)

Jesus weeps every day that the Washington Post prints another edition.

Publius:

Obsidian Wings: Robert Samuelson's Dishonest Jihad Against Social Security: If the country ever gets around to ending life tenure for Supreme Court Justices, I hope we add a provision ending it for Washington Post columnists too.  Or at least ending it for Robert Samuelson.  Today, again, we see another extremely misleading op-ed from him on the fiscal health of Social Security. Here’s a good rule of thumb – anytime you see an op-ed whining about entitlements that uses the phrase “Medicare and Social Security,” it’s safe to stop reading.... To lump Social Security together with the more problematic Medicare shortfall (which should be addressed through national health care reform) is blatantly misleading.  It’s like saying the combination of a Big Mac and a jelly bean is an extremely high-calorie meal. But that’s exactly what Samuelson is doing.  In fact, Michael Lind had a Salon column a while back outlining all the rhetorical tricks that dishonest Social Security skeptics make.  It’s as if Samuelson read that column, and decided to use them all.

For instance, here’s Lind:

In order to frighten gullible Americans, anti-Social Security crusaders conflate Social Security with Medicare and talk about the "entitlement crisis" in general. This masks the fact that Social Security's projected shortfalls are minor, compared to those of Medicare.

And Samuelson:

It's increasingly obvious that Congress and the president (regardless of the party in power) will deal with the political stink bomb of an aging society only if forced. And the most plausible means of compulsion would be for Social Security and Medicare to go bankrupt.

And Lind:

About a decade ago, conservative and libertarian economists who oppose Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements came up with a clever rhetorical strategy. They would calculate the gap between the payroll taxes that pay for these programs and estimated costs over time. But there was one problem: The gap isn't all that scary, at least in the near future. So in order to frighten the American people and their elected leaders, deficit hawks cite the sum total of Social Security's "unfunded liabilities" over 75 years. But even this -- a paltry $4.3 trillion over three-quarters of a century, according to the 2008 report -- isn't sufficiently terrifying.  [So they combine Medicare and SS].  [This] produces a suitably spooky 75-year shortfall of $42.9 trillion. And if this is not alarming enough, deficit hawks can cite the truly apocalyptic figure of $101.7 trillion in combined "entitlement" spending over an infinite time horizon. The anti-Social Security lobby always presents the "unfunded liabilities" of "entitlements" in scary dollar terms, rather than as percentage points of GDP. Here's why: Over the next 75 years, the Social Security shortfall at most hovers around 1 percent of total U.S. GDP over that same period.

And Samuelson:

That the programs will ultimately go bankrupt is clear from the trustees' reports. On Pages 201 and 202 of the Medicare report, you will find the conclusive arithmetic: Over the next 75 years, Social Security and Medicare will cost an estimated $103.2 trillion, while dedicated taxes and premiums will total only $57.4 trillion. The gap is $45.8 trillion. (All figures are converted to "today's dollars.")

New YorK Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (Helene Cooper Edition)

Publius:

Obsidian Wings: Helene Cooper Needs To Discover Google, Lexis: So let's say I'm Helene Cooper of the NYT.  And let's say I have a great idea for an article -- the premise is that Obama knocks down pretend strawmen in his speeches just like Bush used to do (e.g., "Some have said..."). It would be a good idea for an article -- if it were true.  But it's not, as about 15 minutes of Google and Lexis would show.  But Cooper went ahead and wrote it anyway.

The difference between Bush and Obama's arguments is fairly simple -- Bush just made stuff up, while Obama's critics are actually making the critiques that Obama attributes to them.  Somewhat hilariously, Cooper herself concedes this....  She notes, for instance, that the criticisms Obama cites were made by real, living, breathing, non-straw-filled people like John Kyl, Anne Applebaum, Bill Kristol, and Jeffrey Kuhner....

Exhibit A of Cooper's article is that Obama is supposedly pretending that critics are saying he's bitten off more than he can chew.  This is most prominent "strawman" that Cooper presents:

“There are those who say these plans are too ambitious, that we should be trying to do less, not more,” Mr. Obama told a town-hall-style meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., on March 18. “Well, I say our challenges are too large to ignore.” Mr. Obama did not specify who, exactly, was saying America should ignore its challenges.

A couple of problems here.  First, Obama didn't claim his critics were saying "ignore challenges."  He claimed they criticized the way he approached challenges by trying to do too much. But more to the point, Obama has been routinely criticized for trying to do too much.  It's a common refrain, and it was particularly common around mid-March when he was making the comments Cooper cites.  Here's a short sample: David Broder, 3/15/09.... David Brooks, 2/23/09.... Matt Lauer, 3/11/09.... Martin Bashir, 3/11/09.... John King, 3/15/09.... I could probably have come up with another two dozen examples, but you get the point.  The main strawman in her article turns out to be one of the most common and fundamental critiques of Obama in mid-March. Moving on -- Cooper also claims that Obama cited strawman critiques of his March appearance on Leno:

Mr. Obama continued on the offensive against straw men that day in Los Angeles, pointing out that critics told him not to go on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" on NBC because “I can’t handle that and the economy at the same time.”

Hilariously, Cooper then points out that John Kyl (in the Senate Republican leadership) made this precise critique.  She tries to spin her way out of that....

Google and Lexis are valuable tools -- they should be used...

Ombudsing the Ombudsman of the New York Times II

Mark Thoma sends me to Felix Salmon:

Felix Salmon » Blog Archive » The NYT ombudsman’s blogophobia | Blogs |: The good news: the NYT’s ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, has weighed in with uncommon speed on l’affaire Andrews. But he’s done so in a most peculiar way: he spends 11 paragraphs on whether or not Andrews should be covering his own personal housing crisis at all, given his job, and then moves on to Megan McArdle’s bombshell with one final tacked-on graf, in which he can’t even bring himself to mention McArdle by name. (She’s first “a blogger for The Atlantic”, and then just “the blogger”. You’ll excuse me for reading that language pejoratively: if a newspaper columnist had written the same thing, I doubt they would have just been “a columnist” and “the columnist”.)

Here’s Hoyt’s conclusion in full:

Andrews is an excellent reporter who explains complex issues clearly. There are plenty of them to cover without assigning him to those that could directly affect whether he keeps his own house. He is too close to that story.

He can’t be too cautious. On Thursday, he came under attack from a blogger for The Atlantic for not mentioning in his book that his wife had twice filed for bankruptcy — the second time while they were married, though Andrews said it involved an old loan from a family member. He said he had wanted to spare his wife any more embarrassment. The blogger said the omission undercut Andrews’s story, but I think it was clear that he and his wife could not manage their finances, bankruptcies or no. Still, he should have revealed the second one, if only to head off the criticism.

“He can’t be too cautious” carries with it the clear implication that the next bit of criticism is largely unwarranted — an implication which is reinforced by Hoyt’s inability to name McArdle. And the way he talks about Andrews being “under attack” from this anonymous blogger also naturally puts the reader on Andrews’s side. Eventually, Hoyt decides that Andrews’s wife’s bankruptcies really aren’t germane after all, on the rather peculiar grounds that since Andrews is open about his inability to manage his finances in any event, the news of the bankruptcies doesn’t really add anything. Huh? There’s a world of difference between a couple who can’t manage their finances and who are sucked into the subprime bubble, on the one hand, and a couple with two bankruptcy filings in the space of 8 years and 4 months, on the other. (You’re not allowed to file for bankruptcy within 8 years of your last filing.) The reason why Andrews should have revealed both bankruptcy filings (not only the second one) is that they’re highly relevant to his family’s finances, and he’s written an entire book about his family’s finances. The reason is not just “to head off the criticism” he might end up receiving from the blogosphere....

[I]f you want to make an impression on the public editor, it’s best to avoid any hint that you might be a blogger. It seems that McArdle should have mailed Hoyt an official complaint, on Atlantic letterhead, signing herself the Business and Economics Editor of The Atlantic: Hoyt would probably have taken that more seriously...

Republicans: The Stupid *and* Immoral Party

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

OK, I'm No Longer Surprised: It's just who they are:

[Andie Collier:] She's the 69-year-old speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of succession and the most powerful woman in U.S. history. But when you see Nancy Pelosi, the Republican National Committee wants you to think "Pussy Galore." At least that's the takeaway from a video released by the committee this week - a video that puts Pelosi side-by-side with the aforementioned villainess from the 1964 James Bond film "Goldfinger...."

"It's an attempt to demean your opponent, rather than debate them. If they're serious that this is an issue of national security, then you'd think that one would want to debate it on the merits," [Ann Lewis] says. "It's almost as if they can't help themselves." 

That's because they can't.

For some time now I have been responding to Daniel Klein's whimpers about the low numbers of Republicans in academia as evidence of some sort of bias by pointing out that the existence of any academics who are Republicans is evidence of an opposite kind of bias--that nobody dedicated to education and truth-telling could stomach being a Republican today, and nobody who isn't dedicated to education and truth-telling had any business being a Republican.

Now I think it is time to expand that list of professions in which having professional ethics is simply inconsistent with being a Republican...

Two Strikingly Different Columns from Jay Newton-Small of TIme

Column 1: The Republicans lied, and the press got it wrong:

Pelosi's Probably Right: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has had a tough week.... But... it increasingly looks like she was right. Porter Goss was careful to parse his words in the conditional future tense when talking about what, exactly, he and Pelosi were briefed on in September 2002:

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned...

And Senator Richard Shelby also carefully avoided saying he'd been briefed on EITs that had already been used, saying only that he'd been told about the techniques. And “purported” isn't exactly a strong word – it's a synonym of suggested or claimed. From his statement: 

As Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2002, Senator Shelby was briefed by the CIA on the Agency's interrogation program and the existence of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs). To his recollection, not only did the CIA briefers provide what was purported to be a full account of the techniques, they also described the need for these techniques and the value of the information being obtained from terrorists during questioning...

Bob Graham, who was theoretically in the room with Shelby, says he has no recollection of the meeting at all – this from a man who famously details his every waking minute. Perhaps the most astonishing response has been from the CIA Director Leon Panetta, who basically said: Don't trust our records. Which begs the question: what other issues have they kept questionable records on?

But all of this has been lost in the GOP sturm und drang, led, by – of all people – Pete Hoekstra and Newt Gingrich.... [I]t increasing looks like there's nothing wrong with her memory.

Column 2: It's Pelosi's fault that the press got it wrong:

Nancy Pelosi['s]... tough week... [is] of it her own making.... Pelosi needs a serious lesson in public relations...

And, of course, the two columns are interwoven.

Classic blaming-the-victim. Absolutely classic. It's Pelosi's fault that the press could not be bothered to fact-check Republican lies.

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”

From Attaturk:

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”: Well, here's something everyone could have anticipated, but as usual, other than bloggers it seems only Warren Strobel and John Landay of McClatchy reported:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

Well, this column is apparently going to be as long as a Leon Uris novel, but here is a selection.... Oh, you damn dirty hippies -- being all right and not serious like Dick Cheney. Because David Broder and his ilk know serious, and only serious can be appreciated. Especially in the form of needlessly dead soldiers and civilians in a third-world country (no pictures though).

Cheney vs. the Asteroid

Bruce Reed of "Sadly, No!" has the story:

Sadly, No! » Dick vs. the Asteroid: Peter “The Mustache of Enhanced Interrogation” Kirsanow tells us all how super cool Dick Cheney’s torture defense was yesterday:

Cheney: Adult Peter Kirsanow: A serious, important speech. Politicians and the media seem unduly impressed by favorability polls, often drawing unwarranted conclusions from them. Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it’s assumed that the public dismisses his statements. It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, “When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?” I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top....

Here at Sadly, No! Research Laboratories, we recently detonated a hydrogen bomb near a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy, thus creating a parallel timeline.... Read on, if you dare, to see how this counterfactual history played itself out...

[A] small asteroid crashed into a rural area of Wyoming, killing 2,000 people in a small town and leaving a massive crater 60 miles wide in the ground. President Richard Cheney, who was just awakening from a nap in his underground White House lair, was informed of the crash by Chief of Staff Alberto Gonzales, who the day before had handed him a memo from NASA with the headline “Asteroid hurtling toward the United States.” “That damned space rock has just assaulted my home state!” Cheney snarled. “Nobody could have predicted this would happen!” Cheney called a press conference later in the day and urged Americans to show strength and resolve in the face of this unprecedented assault on the Heartland. “Asteroids are evil rocks,” said the president. “We do not negotiate with evil rocks; we defeat them.”...

An enraged Cheney was determined to never let another asteroid crash into the United States again and had decided to use any means necessary in order to achieve that end. Cheney reasoned that it was not enough to merely respond to asteroids after they crashed. For America to be truly secure, the government needed to attack asteroids long before they reached orbit. To this end, he decided that the United States needed to set an example to other asteroids in the galaxy by launching a preemptive strike on the large asteroid that was menacingly hovering over the Earth: namely, the moon. In order to build his case for war against the moon, Cheney worked to strong-arm NASA into proclaiming that the moon could come unhinged from its orbit to the Earth at any moment and that the military needed to destroy the sinister heavenly body in order to safeguard the homeland. When NASA officials balked at his request, Cheney hired George C. Deutsch, a disgraced former NASA press aide, to go through the agency and make lists of all scientists who displayed signs of disloyalty. Once the list had been completed, the scientists were then rendered to Cheney’s underground White House lair for interrogation. The following transcript was taken from a video of an interrogation session under the White House...

[An unknown NASA scientist is tied down to a waterboard in President Cheney's underground lair. Cheney and NASA Grand Inquisitor George C. Deutsch enter the chamber to start the interrogation.]

DEUTSCH: My liege! I have brought forth the Unbeliever to receive your judgment!

CHENEY: Fine work, my young apprentice. And what are his crimes?

DEUTSCH: My liege! He refused to sign a loyalty oath proclaiming that our solar system has been scientifically proven to have been created by an Intelligent Designer!

CHENEY: Bah! The heretic will rue the day he defied my will! Tell me, heretic, do you not regret your lack of faith?

[Cheney pours water over the scientist's head, causing him to gasp and writhe in pain.]

SCIENTIST: GLAAAAAAAAARBB!!! ACK! Please, yes! I repent! Just stop it with the water!

CHENEY: You are wise to confess, heretic! You may achieve penance for your actions by doing one simple task: signing your name to this official policy document that proclaims the moon to be a mortal danger to the security of the United States that must be eliminated!

SCIENTIST: Buh, buh, but sir? You’re talking about destroying the moon? Thu, thu, that would be extremely unwise because…

[Cheney pours more water on the scientist.]

SCIENTIST: GLARRRRRRB!!! OK, OK, I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it!

CHENEY: That’s good. Now here’s the pen. Let’s…

[A knock at the door interrupts Cheney. Deutsch opens the door and a hunched-over Alberto Gonzales shuffles in carry a basket of dead rabbits.]

GONZALES: Master, I have brought you your daily basket of fresh uncooked bunny rabbits to devour!

CHENEY: That is excellent, Alberto! Bring them to me!...

After obtaining all the necessary intelligence from NASA officials, Cheney went on the Sunday morning talk shows and began to build his case for war. In addition to the signed statements of top NASA officials attesting to the moon’s nefarious intentions, Cheney produced an alleged picture of terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta walking on the moon just days before the asteroid struck Wyoming. Cheney called this the smoking gun that proved that the moon posed a threat too grave to ignore.

Although McClatchy later reported that the supposed picture of Atta that Cheney showed on Meet the Press was actually a photograph of Neil Armstrong, the media in general did not question the premises of the president’s claims. The British tabloids in particular ran wild with the claim that the moon could crash into Earth a mere 45 minutes after being knocked out of its orbit. On May 21, 2010, Cheney went on national television and said that he was giving the moon 48 hours to surrender before he would launch a nuclear strike to destroy it. Senate Democrats, alarmed that the president would declare war on the moon without their consultation, tried to draft a nonbinding resolution telling the president that they might be displeased if he were to launch his preemptive lunar assault. The measure was scuttled, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t have the 95 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

Two days after his ultimatum to the moon was met with eerie silence, Cheney ordered to sinister rock destroyed...

All the TV You Ever Need to Watch

Watch TPMTV:

The Day in 100 Seconds: Dueling Speeches

and you can reclaim the rest of your life from TV news. Here is today's, on Obama and Cheney: