Weekend Open Thread
* A quick note: I’m in the middle of moving to Washington, D.C., so I’m signing off a bit early. I’ll be mostly off the grid for the weekend, so anything you all can do to keep the site alive will be much appreciated. Hopefully the move will make the site better, more vivid, more deeply informed, more fun…
* Paul Krugman asks whether Obama has a hint of a “Bush infallibility complex” on the economy, which are some serious fighting words.
* Marc Ambinder has a juicy bit of campaign history: Turns out the McCain campaign carefully scripted Sarah Palin’s attack on Obama for “palling around with terrorists,” which would seem to give the lie to McCain’s supposed unwillingness to take the low road.
* Jonathan Cohn has some very encouraging news for all of you ardent backers of a public health care plan.
* This House Republican doesn’t appear to be an ardent backer of a public health care plan. In fact, he seems to think it will kill people.
* Matthew Yglesias is grateful to Roy Blunt.
* More than half of the House GOP caucus voted against a foreign aid package containing funding for Israel that was hailed by AIPAC.
* Republicans really seem to be putting their entire pile of chips on the eventual failure of the stimulus.
* Yep, there’s little doubt that race and affirmative action will be front and center at next week’s Sotomayor hearings.
* And Michael Goldfarb theorizes that Bibi privately calls Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod much worse things than “self hating Jews.”
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Congrats on the move. I hope this means that you’ll be able to get some more timely responses on your stories. Being a legit journalist and all, it would be nice to have someone in that town that knows what their doing.
Just don’t let the DC bubble consume you, man. Good luck!
Holy Frick! If the GOP bucks AIPAC who do they have left other than the religious right?
And Congrats on the move Greg!
If you have a housewarming party I will bring the sweet potato pie.
Moving sucks. Hope it goes smoothly for ya, Greg.
Probably not Obama himself, but Larry Summers certainly does.
test
From Peggy Noonan at the WSJ:
“She [Sarah Palin] went on the trail a sensation but demonstrated in the ensuing months that she was not ready to go national and in fact never would be.
…In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn’t say what she read because she didn’t read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn’t thoughtful enough to know she wasn’t thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. “I’m not wired that way,” “I’m not a quitter,” “I’m standing up for our values.” I’m, I’m, I’m.
…”The elites hate her.” The elites made her. It was the elites of the party, the McCain campaign and the conservative media that picked her and pushed her. The base barely knew who she was. It was the elites, from party operatives to public intellectuals, who advanced her and attacked those who said she lacked heft. She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon.
“She makes the Republican Party look inclusive.” She makes the party look stupid, a party of the easily manipulated.
…”Now she can prepare herself for higher office by studying up, reading in, boning up on the issues.” Mrs. Palin’s supporters have been ordering her to spend the next two years reflecting and pondering. But she is a ponder-free zone.
…”The media did her in.” Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in.
…It’s not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won’t be that way.
We are going to need the best.”
I have only a single quibble here with Noonan’s honesty (or clarity of perception, perhaps). She says above, “She [Palin] makes the party look stupid.” If by “look” she means “appears as something other than what it is”, then Noonan herself is merely, if somewhat valuably, noting that the boat has sailed but she hasn’t yet figured out that she’s not on it either.
It is not that the party “appears” stupid. The party, now, is stupid. And it has been for a long while. And that happened on purpose.
The consequence of misinformation, promoted over long periods of time, promoted aggressively, broadly and ceaselessly, will inevitably be a misinformed (stupid) audience. Disregard for facts and the denigration of careful or educated analyses (eg; global warming, evolution) will – there is no other possible consequence – lead to carelessness/laziness in thought, to steadfast resistance against learning, and to ideas that are fixed on the worst underpinnings (inappropriate ‘authorities’ like Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh or propagandist front groups like ‘Petroleum Producers for Accuracy in Climate Science’) and thus to ideas which are unavailable for reconsideration.
The consequence of a decades-long project to denigrate and invalidate objective news reporting or analysis is to remove those means whereby the conservative movement audience/membership might encounter and truly engage conflicting or alternate ideas. In this project, we have seen the ad hominem mechanism arrayed against not merely an individual or a single institutional or opinion source but against everything and everyone that stands as ideologically impure (such as Noonan herself will be for many as a consequence of this column).
If one wishes to gain perspective on those agencies who/which are truly destructive to American society, then one needs to look to those which have quite purposefully worked to engender and foster a misinformed, lazy-thinking, ideologically divisive and exclusionary Republican Party membership. And Noonan is not an innocent.
Greg, congratulations on the move, unless of course you have to move because of someone stalking you. If that’s the case, I’d recommend that you not publicize where you’re moving. Just a thought.
I’ll simply add that it’s so nice to see a federal employee whose entire personal history is full of socialized employment and health care, admit government should never have gotten into the health care business. Does Blunt not understand his very own health care plan is government getting into the business of health care???
Republicans really seem to be putting their entire pile of chips on the eventual failure of the stimulus.
No surprise there. They haven’t had an original thought on economic policy in, what, thirty-five years? We tried their ideas and they were a spectacular failure. They’re the only ones not willing to acknowledge that.
Welcome to D.C. It’s a great place to be.
Re Krugman’s idea for another stimulus:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124724552795524331.html#mod=rss_Today’s_Most_Popular
Where did all the Cheney’s go?
Lest we forget…
“Palin the Polarizer”
“Using numbers from a post-election poll, Jones and Cox conclude that Palin damaged McCain’s brand because her style evoked the kind of polarizing politics that Americans had grown sick of–and to which, not coincidentally, Barack Obama offered himself as an antidote.” http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/07/palin-polarizer.html
Ok, all this talk about the stimulus and whether its working after a whole entire 8 months – well Roubini thinks it is and he never thinks anything is going well:
“Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who accurately forecast the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting economic contraction, has become famous for his pessimism—he has been the gloomiest of the doomsayers. Which is what makes his current outlook surprising: Roubini believes that the Obama administration’s policy makers—and especially the much-maligned Tim Geithner—have gotten a lot right. Pitfalls may still abound, but he is now projecting an end to the recession, and he sees growth ahead.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/roubini
Someone want to ask Krugman HOW Obama can persuade Congress to pass yet another stimulus? I don’t think Congress will do it so what’s the point of constantly saying that’s what we need? What good will this harping on something that ain’t going to happen helpful?
Can y’all imagine the howling if more money is poured into things right now, when there hasn’t been time for the first bunch of money to really work yet? Jeeeeeeeeeeez!!!!!
While some may argue that it was Ed Land and his Krazy Kameras, I believe this whole Instant Gratification idiocy can be directly linked to the early 1970s, when Raytheon introduced the microwave oven.
Nothing’s been the same since.
Washing machine
Movable type
The plow
The wheel
***
Feh. Damn censorware. . It says “ѕex”.
I had a different formulation in mind, but same difference.
The apple
A Creator with narcissism of biblical proportions.
Given the Times piece yesterday on Cheney’s orders to keep Congress (and all citizens) properly uninformed, blind and stupid I expect we’ll see a significant push from him and his daughter now to further misinform, blind and stupidify the nation.
John McCain on Palin:
“I don’t think she quit. I think she changed her priorities.”
That’s an interesting construction, don’t you think? Very multi-purpose and handy for that. Some other possibilities:
I don’t think the Vietnamese tortured me. I think they loved their nation.
I don’t think Sanford and Ensign and screwed those other women while their Christian wives were home doing dishes. I think they expanded the parameters of family values.