Justice John Paul Stevens will retire this summer. Cue the filibuster.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
The Lose-Lose
Speaking of Larison, he asks a good question:
One wonders where Republican hawks can possibly go from here. They have almost three more years of an Obama Presidency to endure, and already they have gone mad with alarmism, hysterics and overreaction to fairly ho-hum policy decisions. Obama needs a credible, sane opposition to keep him in check and challenge him when he is actually wrong. Right now, he doesn’t have that, and all of us will suffer for it. His own party will not hold him accountable, because a President’s party never does, but in any contest between an erring Obama and a mad GOP the latter will keep losing.
My answer: Republicans (not just hawks) are going nowhere until November 6, 2012. They will continue the same noisemaking and hysteria until Obama wins a second term. They’ve convinced themselves that every minor loss on his part is their gain, despite any evidence to the contrary. As long as Democrats lose a seat or two in the 2010 election, nothing’s going to change.
Until the 2012 election, every time one of their their anti-Obama talking points is featured in the “on the other hand” portion of the nightly news, they’ll congratulate themselves on winning the day. Every downward blip of Obama’s approval rating will be celebrated, and any upward movement will be explained away.
So, batten down the hatches and get ready for a thousand more days of Newtonian bullshit:
So let’s go back to Gingrich’s original sentence. “One of the things in the health bill is 16,000 additional IRS agents,” he said. First, that’s not a “thing in the health bill.” It’s an extrapolation from a CBO report. Second, the word “is” is wrong, as even the original GOP spin only used the word “may.” Third, the number 16,000 is wrong. Fourth, the word “agents” is wrong. But if the statement gets no credit for truth, it’s at least efficient: Not just anyone could pack four falsehoods into 13 words. But Gingrich, now, he’s a professional.
The Overton Window on a Slippery Slope
Glen Whitman at Cato just published a serious (and long) discussion of paternalism. His argument is that our society is moving from the question of whether we should be paternalistic, to how much. One example he uses is state-mandated savings plans. Here’s another:
Sound paranoid? Anti-smoking regulations followed a similar path. Once upon a time, banning smoking on airplanes seemed like the reasonable middle ground. Now that’s the (relatively) laissez-faire position, smoking bans in bars and restaurants are the middle, and full-blown smoking bans have come to pass in some cities.
This is what libertarians always seem to get wrong — it isn’t paternalism (or, at least, it isn’t the “bad” kind of paternalism) when the state is protecting me from direct harm caused by someone else’s actions. I can claim a direct harm from inhaling second-hand smoke: emphysema and lung cancer. I can’t make a similar claim about somebody else’s lack of a savings plan.
I’d expect better from a guy at Cato, because I’m counting on them to help get pot, gambling and prostitution legalized everywhere.
(via Sully)
Not Worthy
Under the headline A Masters win would be too much too soon for Tiger Woods, some Kaplan sports columnist writes:
We know that bad things happen to good people. We cope with it. But when great things happen to people who have acted badly, especially if the bonanza comes fast and arrives ringed with robes of glory, don’t we have to draw the line? I’m forgiving, but my brain hasn’t turned into pimento cheese. If Woods has a tap-in to win the Masters, I hope his conscience helps him yip it and lip it. Win any other week. But not here. Not now.
Are all sports columnists this fucking stupid, or did I just happen to glance at the sports part of the webpage on a bad day?
If this guy wins a Pulitzer (which I’ll grant is pretty unlikely), I hope he’ll have the common decency to give it back if he cheated on his wife or girlfriend. Because I can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of someone’s hard work and talent being rewarded if they’ve done anything wrong in their personal life.
The Party Left Me
This tale of a Republican who left his party was posted at David Frum’s site the other day.
I am an old Republican. I am religious, yet not a fanatic. I am a free-marketer; yet, I believe in the role of the government as a fair evenhanded referee. I am socially conservative; yet, I believe that my lesbian niece and my gay grandchild should have the full protection of the law and live as free Americans enjoying every aspect of our society with no prejudices and/or restrictions. Nowadays, my political and socio-economic profile would make me a Marxist, not a Republican.
The whole thing is worth a read, in part to contrast this traditional conservative’s view of Democratic policies with what we hear from the current crop of conservatives.
In the 80’s, the term “Reagan Democrat” was thrown around constantly to describe voters who left the Democratic party because of a mixture of ideology and admiration for Reagan. This guy is an “Obama Democrat Republican”, but we don’t hear a peep about a phenomenon that’s just as real as Reagan Democrats ever were.
A Failure of Tragic Imagination
James Fallows’ examines the Wikileaks footage and makes an important point:
We could not know that this episode would occur. But we could be sure that something like it would. It’s not even a matter of “To will the end is to will the means.” Rather the point is: You enter these circumstances, sooner or later you get these results.
A failure of tragic imagination is what I most criticized in war supporters in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and it was much of the reason I opposed the war. We can’t do anything about that decision now. But this new footage is worth bearing in mind as we face the next decision — about bombing Iran, let’s say; or extending the anti-Taliban fight into Pakistan; or how long to remain in Afghanistan.
The one thing I never understood about Iraq War supporters was how anyone who’s read an honest account of modern war could generate any enthusiasm for the project. Yet there was an air of almost giddy anticipation among a fair number of the pro-war punditry around the time of the invasion.
Real Anti-Semites
I’ve been working on my totebagger cred by listening to Fresh Air podcasts, and a recent one on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s study of hate groups was pretty interesting:
Potok points to race as one of the reasons “anti-immigrant vigilante groups [have] soared by nearly 80 percent” in the past year. He also notes a “dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing” in the past year — jumping 244 percent in 2009. Potok says that these groups’ messages are increasingly moving into the mainstream.
“I think it’s very clear that you see ideas coming out of all kinds of sectors of the radical right, from the immigrant radical right, from the so-called Patriot groups, the militias and so on — and you see it spreading right across the landscape at some of these Tea Party events,” he says. “I think it’s worth saying that much of this is aided and abetted by ostensibly mainstream politicians and media members.”
A lot of the “patriot group” rhetoric is anti-semitic and neo-nazi. So, we have one group of Republican thinkers, the neo-cons, labeling anyone who doesn’t agree with Bibi Netanyahu “anti-semitic”, while another group, the teabaggers, is inspired by a militia movement that denies the Holocaust. Who says the Republican party isn’t a big tent?
(Photo by flickr user Pargon, used under CC license)