• Some early results from a forthcoming Washington Post-ABC News poll show that at some level, a majority of the public understands that efforts towards bipartisanship in Washington have largely been at the behest of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and that Republicans have done "too little" to reach across the aisle. The poll also shows that a majority of the public wants Congress to keep working on "comprehensive health-care reform," a sentiment most Republicans disagree with. Meanwhile, Nate Silver looks at 25 policies being pushed by the Democrats and concludes that public opinion is on their side with at least 14 of them, contrary to the conservative canard that the public is rejecting radical liberalism.
  
• Eventually, the voting public will come to forget how terrible the presidency of George W. Bush was and accept some fabricated mythologization of it designed to rescue "conservatism" from his legacy. Until that day comes, the powers that be in conservative politics will continue testing the whitewash waters with efforts like a billboard in Minnesota that asks drivers whether they "miss" W's reign. This is a corollary to the Conservative Belief in the Eternal Silent Majority Thesis, whereby the most enthusiastic Bush boosters, rather than accept that the public's memory is short, believe the 43rd president was misunderstood in his time, and whose decisions will age well with the public, like fine wine in a cool cellar.
• This is hardly unique to Republicans, but the continuing presence of embarrassing scandals at the state party level is just one more element working against GOP gains in November. Consider the case study of Florida, where moderate Republican Charlie Crist is looking less and less likely to survive a primary challenge from Marco Rubio, and the state GOP is reeling -- in the midst of overall low party donations -- with a money scandal involving its outgoing party chair. If Rubio gets to and wins in the general election, he will do so less with party support and more with being the better candidate. This is simply not replicable across the entire 2010 landscape.
  
• House liberals see the upcoming health-care summit as their last chance to inject liberal principles into the final reform bill, hoping the added media attention will convince the Democratic leadership to start taking progressives as seriously as they do Blue Dogs and preening Senate centrists. I do not think they will be successful, given the track record, but it did give me a reason to link to this Kevin Drum post from a few days ago in which he both sympathizes with and offers stern words for progressives who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and the president. In short, progress is frustratingly slow, but taking the first step is incredibly important and might be easier to swallow knowing your fellow liberals are in your corner.
  
• It's an annoying habit of the press to ask every Republican who suddenly becomes newsworthy whether he or she is considering a run for president in 2012. In the case of Paul Ryan, he wrote an alternative Republican budget that his own party can't walk away from fast enough, and suddenly he's considered a viable presidential candidate. This tendency seems to be born from a belief that political problems can be solved via the will of a great leader, which ignores how little control presidents have over the details of domestic policy and economic conditions. It goes without saying that this is the story of the Barack Obama presidency thus far, noting that candidate Obama tried, rhetorically, to tamp down expectations he could neither fulfill nor ignore to win the election.
  
• Remainders: Obama "considers" recess appointments unless Republicans start acting like responsible legislators; Copenhagen may not be a total bust after all; Alan Grayson takes on the "liberal" media; and weekend legislative sessions are good, but telling people that Republicans are blocking a job-creation bill would be better.
  

--Mori Dinauer

Wondering just how human society might collapse into chaos and cannibalism this year? Want to know what the chances are of, say, a cyclone, and how it might relate to an asset price collapse and food price volatility? The World Economic Forum, the masters of the universe who put together those glamorous conferences in Davos, have provided a snappy infographic to tell you the odds, and economic impact, of various economic, social, environmental, geopolitical, and technological catastrophes (via datavisualization.ch).

It's actually a pretty well-constructed infographic. You may not understand the world much better after seeing it, but it's nicely interactive – you can play around with all the different potential causes of global upheaval, see how they relate to each other, and see the (essentially arbitrary) probabilities the WEF has assigned to each.

Just something to brighten your Tuesday.

-- Paul Waldman

President Obama created a task force today that will be part of First Lady Michelle Obama's effort to address childhood obesity:

Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may designate.

Arguments over whether to do things like tax soda or ban junk food in schools usually break down when someone tries to argue that it means the government is telling you what to do. But it seems absurd to expand that argument to what children eat and whether they exercise, since children spend much of their time at schools and many do the bulk of their eating there. What they're given to eat and whether they're taught to be active can have a big influence over how they grow.

Which is why I wish the task force could have included the anonymous teacher who has committed to eating school lunch every day in 2010. She pointed out a few days ago that, for many kids, school lunch might be the best meal they have all day. For others, it's the only meal. So demanding that children, whose biggest education on nutrition comes from a school that frequently feeds them pizza, grow into adults who know how bad too much fatty food is for you is a bit unrealistic.

-- Monica Potts

Danny Goldberg, a music-industry veteran and prominent progressive donor who spent what he describes as "one unhappy year midway through Air America's life as its CEO" has an interesting piece on Alternet about the radio network's demise. While it's true that there was terrible mismanagement over the course of Air America's existence, Goldberg argues that the whole idea of an ideologically driven radio network that could generate profits was probably misguided:

The fatal flaw in Air America's genetic code was the pretense that liberal talk radio was a great business opportunity, that progressives could have their cake and eat it too, could do well by doing good, make big salaries and get a great return on investment while also pursuing an ideological agenda. Sure, every once in a while political media like Michael Moore's movies or Rush Limbaugh's radio show will make money, but for those interested in influencing public opinion, media in all venues is vital whether it makes money or not.

Air America's lesser-known competitor, Democracy Radio, had a more coherent rationale. Set up as a non-profit it spawned the Ed Schultz Show and the Stephanie Miller show, both of which survive but would never have been launched were it not for Democracy Radio's initial funding. (Democracy Radio folded in 2006 as a result of a lack of financial support from progressive donors.)

Fox News is just about the only profitable ideological media outlet in existence -- and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, has sunk millions into money-losing ventures like the New York Post and the Weekly Standard (which he recently sold to Philip Anschutz, another conservative mogul willing to support it). It's true that people like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage generate large profits, but they are individual hosts who worked their way up through the existing radio infrastructure. They got hired or added to a station only when they could be profitable. They weren't part of a conservative radio network created by conservative businesspeople hoping to turn a profit while furthering their ideology.

Likewise, there are no profitable political magazines.  Some, like the Weekly Standard or the New Republic, have a wealthy benefactor who doesn't mind losing millions of dollars to support what he thinks is a worthy endeavor. Others, like TAP, are nonprofit organizations that receive donations. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but it's just the reality of magazine publishing (all the more reason why you should donate).

This all applies to "old" media, but not new. On the Internet, where costs are minimal, lots of ideologically driven sites make money. But in retrospect, it appears that for all its avoidable missteps, Air America may have been doomed from the start.

Though it was unsustainable as a profit-making venture, during its tenure Air America did spread a progressive message to millions of Americans. It also gave Al Franken the platform that ended up lifting him to the Senate, and perhaps most visibly, gave the world Rachel Maddow.

If profits aren't the point, where should progressive media go now? I'm glad you asked, because Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke have an article right here on TAP today, in which they lay out some of the strategic advice in their new book, Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media. Check it out.

-- Paul Waldman

The National Organization of Marriage thinks so. In response to a San Francisco Chronicle article "outing" District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, who is presiding over the Prop. 8 federal challenge in California, the organization released a statement cataloging instances of the judge's bias, which include:

• Subpoenaing the "Yes on 8" campaign for documents, but not the "No on 8" campaign.
• Allowing a non-California gay man forced into ex-gay therapy to testify.
• Allowing the public trial to be broadcast (the Supreme Court put a stop to this until it can consider the matter more thoroughly).

These are all pretty feeble indications of "bias." "Yes on 8" docs were handed over to address the key question of whether the amendment was motivated by "animus" against gays and lesbians -- it wasn't clear why the defenders of Prop. 8 wanted to get their hands on "No on 8" materials. The defense has been allowed to present non-expert testimony that would not have been allowed in a jury trial. And broadcasting the proceedings, despite NOM's claim, is not "illegal." A number of bloggers have also pointed out that Walker once helped sue the San Francisco Gay Olympics for using the "Olympics" trademark -- and that he's a Republican appointee.

But it shouldn't be surprising that the revelation has sent the NOM camp into a frenzy. This is a group that believes firmly that biology is destiny -- that our desires, thoughts, and feelings break down neatly along the gender line. Men can only want women, women can only want men, and they only want each other in order to procreate. It is inconceivable to NOM that a gay judge would put fidelity to the law before his "inherently disordered" sexual orientation.

I can't argue, as some have, that Walker's life experiences as a gay man won't color his views at all. But so what if they do? Being a first-hand witness to the discrimination gays and lesbians face allows him to make a more informed decision. In any event, in order to stand Walker's ruling has to survive scrutiny by higher courts (and straight judges), so it must be based on sound legal reasoning. Note that most of NOM's complaints don't criticize Walker's understanding or application of the law. Instead, they seem to be upset that he has given the issues the broad and open airing they deserve.

-- Gabriel Arana

Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke offer three strategies for keeping progressive media makers flourishing:

The progressive media sector has suffered a few sharp blows in recent weeks. On Jan. 21, Air America Media unceremoniously folded, citing a "perfect storm" in the media industry. Just a few days later, a survey from Public Policy Polling revealed Fox News to be the most trusted television news source -- echoing Fox's continued ratings domination over CNN and MSNBC. Even old "crash the gates" Markos challenged progressive media's power to influence Democrats or inspire newly disillusioned voters in a recent blog post. "Our media machine is tiny," he wrote. "We don't have the power to move our base around."

None of this negates the tremendous impact that progressive media makers and outlets -- from straight journalism organizations, to blogs, to citizen activists swarming social networks -- have made. Growing in force, visibility, and organization over the past decade, networked progressive media efforts have steadily been winning victories against the right's behemoth noise machine. Together, progressive blogs, sites, magazines, radio and TV programs, documentary films, and Web 2.0 projects reach millions of engaged, active users. Progressive media has led the way in using a combination of traditional and social media platforms and campaigns to drive stories into the mainstream discussion and affect local and national policy.

KEEP READING ...

The Indian government has put a hold, pending further study, on approving genetically modified eggplants. Government scientists approved the new crop last year, but this new move from Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh comes in response to public concerns, according to the BBC:

The minister said "independent scientific studies" were needed to establish "the safety of the product from the point of view of its long-term impact on human health and environment".

Mr Ramesh said it was "a difficult decision to make" since he had to "balance science and society".

"The decision is responsible to science and responsive to society," he said.

This is the kind of thing that makes Denialism author and New Yorker writer Michael Specter crazy, but I never understood why he was so on the GM foods bandwagon. The problem of world hunger isn't necessarily going to be solved by growing more foods more efficiently than we already do, because those foods still aren't going to find their way to the world's poorest.

There are also plenty of products we thought of as safe raising concerns. While I understand the frustration over fears -- like those over vaccines -- that continue to be held long after they're proven irrational, holding a new crop up for further study seems like the kind of caution that could only help.

-- Monica Potts

Republicans have been arguing that failed underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab should have been put in military detention rather than being charged through the criminal justice system. Yesterday, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, responded to John Brennan's revelation that Republicans had been informed failed Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody and hadn't objected until after the fact by saying that ... he didn't know what that meant.

Hoekstra didn't dispute Brennan's account that he was one of four Republicans who was briefed by Brennan shortly after Abdulmutallab's arrest. But Hoekstra maintained that they were only told that Abdulmutallab was in FBI custody.

"We weren't told that he was going to be read his Miranda rights," Hoekstra said.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman argues that we're only doing al-Qaeda recruiters a favor by casting its young men as invincible warriors:

When you notice that the typical terrorist is a man in his 20s, it's tempting to put it down to the fact that young men are the source of much of the world's problems, responsible for most of society's crime and mayhem wherever you go. But there's something else at work there, a force we would do well to recognize. But the age of new adulthood is also when you begin to understand that the dreams and expectations of your youth existed in a different reality. Nobody says to a kid, "Someday, if you play your cards right, you can have a reasonably remunerative job and a mortgage with a good interest rate, then steadily build your 401(k) until you settle into a not-unpleasant retirement." Kids watch sports stars and musicians, read about presidents and kings, and hope that one day their lives will be world-changing.

But then they grow up, and the future doesn't seem so grand for most. The week before last, The New York Times Magazine ran a story about a young man named Omar Hammami, the son of a Syrian immigrant father and a white Christian mother, who grew up in a small Alabama town and wanted a dramatic existence. Smart and charismatic, Hammami could have led a successful American life, but a variety of twists and turns over the course of his adolescence culminated with him winding up in Somalia, where he is now a key figure in an al-Qaeda-backed insurgent group. What was remarkable isn't that this promising young American wound up devoting his life to terrorism -- what's remarkable is that it doesn't happen more often.

KEEP READING ...

Conservatives like Andy McCarthy have been challenging Justice Department numbers indicating that more than 300 convicted terrorists reside in American prisons, convicted by the criminal justice system. The numbers undermine the conservative case against using courts instead of military commissions to handle terrorism cases: 

Quite clearly, the 300 figure is a gross exaggeration if our focus is the number of international terrorists convicted since 9/11. As I show in my column, the Human Rights First report had to include all sorts of non-terrorism crimes just to get to 195. DOJ can't conceivably get anywhere close to 300.

Mark Hosenball reports that the numbers come from ... the 2009 Justice Department budget summary prepared by the Bush administration. Oops.

Human rights groups have been giving a smaller number, closer to 200, which McCarthy touts as inflated by the term "terrorism related" or because the suspects weren't necessarily convicted of "terrorism" charges even if the government suspected that they were convicted of being connected to terrorist groups. As I've written before, this is like complaining that the criminal justice system doesn't work because Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion. McCarthy's problem with the criminal justice system is that it's incapable of ensuring a conviction if the government is unable to prove its case. Which is to say, he has a problem with due process, period.

But let's accept for a moment that the number of terrorism cases is inflated. During the same period, the military commissions prosecuted three. McCarthy complains that Ali Saleh al-Marri got a "sweetheart deal" from the government when he received another five years in addition to the seven he already served without trial. Out of the three defendants tried by military commission, only one is still in custody, Ali al-Bahlul. The other two are free, having received five- and nine-month sentences, respectively.

McCarthy can play the numbers game all he wants; the facts still don't go his way. 

-- A. Serwer

The New York Times has a story on what the Republicans hope to offer as a new health-care bill, if the Democrats and President Obama scrap the current legislation, which they are unlikely to do. In their plans, Republicans emphasize a free market -- their bill would provide tax credits to individuals and small businesses, expand high-risk pools, reform medical malpractice law, and allow insurance companies to sell plans across state lines.

That these ideas alone are unlikely to bring down health-care costs considerably doesn't seem to concern Republicans. They also don't seem too troubled that their bill would not come close to covering 30 million uninsured Americans, as the bills that passed the House and Senate would. And they don't seem to care that many of their ideas are already in the bills. No, what they're really focused on is making sure that health reform happens in small steps:

But Republicans say they can make incremental progress without the economic costs they contend the Democratic plans pose to the nation.

What costs are those? Not those posed by the Democratic bills. As Tim pointed out yesterday, the nonpartisan CBO has the bills reducing the deficit in the long term. It would be nice if the Times would point that out the next time it quotes Republicans about controlling "costs."

Moreover, what's the point of a bill with such small goals? Even if those reforms help, they would only delay the need for the kinds of reforms the Democrats are looking to make now. The next time I see a story like this, I'd like to know that the reporter asked more about why.

-- Monica Potts

To follow up on yesterday's discussion between Paul and me on the president's new health-care summit, it seems Republicans in Congress have responded to the invitation with a barrage of questions and criticism.

Scrapping the House and Senate health care bills would help end the uncertainty they are creating for workers and businesses and thus strengthen our shared commitment to focusing on creating jobs. ... Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over so that we can develop a bill that is truly worthy of the support and confidence of the American people?

... Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan way, does that mean he has taken off the table the idea of relying solely on Democratic votes and jamming through health care reform by way of reconciliation? ... Eliminating the possibility of reconciliation would represent an important show of good faith to Republicans and the American people.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' response was anemic, repeating the president's willingness to listen to Republican ideas and his dedication to reform. It's exactly what I worried about: Republicans are going to keep pushing their narrative (if they want bipartisanship, why won't they start over?) and Democrats will do, well, nothing. Republicans are never going to admit that they've had their say, and the president's public relations event -- which no one thinks will result in substantive policy changes -- won't convince the press otherwise. The only way to change this narrative is, to borrow a phrase, by changing the facts on the ground. And the only way to do that is by passing the bill.

To conclude: Reconciliation is a commonly used congressional procedure, and Senate Democrats have already all voted for this health-care bill and will be criticized for it. Why not actually get what you're paying for?

-- TIm Fernholz

White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan appears to have become the point man for the administration's pushback against GOP criticism on national security.  Following his criticism of Republicans on the Sunday shows this weekend, Brennan writes an op-ed for USA Today in which the former CIA official launches a number of critiques that almost sound like they come from civil libertarians and human-rights activists.

Brennan reiterates several key facts: Failed underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab was mirandized after he stopped talking; mirandizing does not interfere with intelligence collection; Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate while they were held in military custody; suspects in military custody are still provided with lawyers; and shoe bomber Richard Reid was mirandized moments after being apprehended. The handling of the failed underwear bombing was in accordance with standard practice going back to the prior administration.

Brennan also hits the GOP for acting as an unofficial branch of al-Qaeda's PR operation, minimizing their failures and inflating their successes:

Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda. Terrorists are not 100-feet tall. Nor do they deserve the abject fear they seek to instill. They will, however, be dismantled and destroyed, by our military, our intelligence services and our law enforcement community. And the notion that America's counterterrorism professionals and America's system of justice are unable to handle these murderous miscreants is absurd.

The point of trying terrorists in civilian courts instead of military commissions is that civilian courts diminish the political symbolism of their actions -- treating them as criminals highlights the hypocrisy of murderers posing as the devout. Treating terrorists not captured on the battlefield like "enemy combatants" elevates them to the level of soldiers. It implies a parity with American servicemembers, and a right to the use of force against innocent people where there is none. Treating terrorists like warriors gives them power, while treating them like criminals takes it away. The reasons for trying terrorism cases in civilian court should be obvious.

Which is what makes this point from Brennan so remarkable:

Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation. There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui.

The public discourse on terrorism has been so distorted though, that the White House can rely on the mainstream press to avoid even questioning the underlying premise of trying suspected terrorists in military courts. It's just taken as a given, even though it's a radical departure from precedent that even former Bush lawyers have warned may be unconstitutional. How is it not "serving the goals of al-Qaeda" to abandon the Constitution and the rule of law in the name of national security?

So maybe Brennan should ask his boss, "Why are we using these again?"

-- A. Serwer

Gawker tells us that in addition to being far ahead of their Democratic counterparts in the donning of tri-corner hats, GOP members of Congress are leading the way on Twitter:

According to a newly released survey, Republican politicians dominate the congressional Twitter-verse. Meanwhile, Barack Obama just sent his first "Tweet" last month. Twitter Gap!

A Congressional Research Service report released last week (and published by Secrecy News) found that 60% of the members of Congress with Twitter accounts are Republicans, and that fully half of all congressional Twitterers are House GOP members. The study, which was conducted in August of last year is limited to U.S. senators and House members, shows GOP pols out-Twittering Democrats in virtually every category: A whopping 67% of all congressional "Tweets" are written by Republicans.

To this, I offer a resounding, "Meh."

Is there anything less valuable than the tweets of a member of Congress? Just how meaningless is your time if you are willing to pass even an instant of it getting up-to-the-minute updates from the likes of John Boehner and Eric Cantor? But wait, you say -- they might be offering fascinating missives! Really? If you're lucky enough to get Cantor's feed, you'll receive pearls of wisdom like, "I don't think the President's plan to raise taxes will get our economy back on track. What do you think?" and "We are doing everything we can to defeat the Democrats' flawed healthcare takeover bill. It isn't over yet." Boehner chimes in, "Sen. Brown’s seating today confirms: Even in the bluest states, Americans are tired of the Democrats’ job-killing agenda."

Wow! I didn't just need to hear that -- I needed to hear it right now.

And lest you think I'm just picking on Republicans, let's hear what some Democrats are tweeting. How about Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill: "Just arrived back in DC. Huge trucks hauling away snow around the Capitol. No place to push it all." There's been some snow in Washington? You don't say. My favorite may be New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, whose 2,374 followers have been treated to exactly one tweet, posted back in November. "Just joined Twitter!" it reads. So true.

Whatever you think of Twitter, I'm guessing you've never heard anyone say, "Man, I am so psyched to read Congressman Knucklehead's Twitter feed!" Many of them consist of little apart from links to their speeches and press releases. And if there's anything more boring than reading Ben Nelson's wisdom in 140-character chunks, it's reading Ben Nelson's wisdom in 1000-word chunks.

You can tell by my tone that I'm something of a Twitter skeptic (I have a running joke with one of the TAP editors that someday I'll write a piece titled "Hell Is Other People, and Their Stupid F***ing Tweets"). There are valuable Twitter feeds out there (like those of TAP and its personnel, of course), and many, many more that no sane person would waste their time on. Every new social medium that comes along isn't necessarily something every politician should thrust themselves into.

It's possible that the experience of being behind in most kinds of Internet organizing for the last few years made Republicans particularly eager to jump on board the latest Web 2.0 thing. So when that young staffer says, "Hey, we should totally get the Congressman on Twitter!", the Congressman himself says, "Yes, I should be on this Twooter you speak of. Make it so!"

So I don't think Democrats should get too concerned about trailing the Republicans on Twitter. If politicians can use it as an organizing tool for their campaigns, that's great. But while they're trying to do the people's business, it's probably more important that they spend their time doing things like passing the health-care bill.

-- Paul Waldman

• It strikes me that rather than being an educational moment to teach the public about obstructionism, continued "outreach" to Republicans on policy issues they are constitutionally opposed to is playing a game only Republicans can win. Democrats and the president will say they extended an olive branch, only to have it swatted away, and Republicans will claim that their ideas were never taken seriously by the opposition. The public sees partisan bickering and legislative gridlock, and Republicans double down on anti-incumbency sentiment and bad economic conditions to sweep them back into office. I agree that Republicans are overconfident if they think their chances of taking back Congress are strong, but what have they got to lose?
  
• "House Democrats," The Hill reports, "say leadership has their work cut out in convincing the public to support a tax increase on those making more than $250,000." The reason for this, we're told, is that concerns about the deficit makes raising taxes risky. Short of the fact that raising taxes on people earning over $250,000 is one -- but by no means the only -- way of reducing the deficit, what are these Democrats afraid of? A fraction of the population going Galt? Other no-brainer policy proposals meeting serious resistance include reforming federal student loans and the president encouraging healthy eating.
• Steve Clemons has become the latest leftish political commentator to diagnose the path to failure for the Barack Obama presidency, relying on the reporting of Edward Luce noted here by Mark Schmitt on Friday. What stands out for Clemons is that the theory of management embraced by this president -- relying on a tight inner circle of trusted advisers -- has corrupted the promise of the administration. This has the luxury of being both impossible to prove or disprove, which is to say it's more useful at this point to look at what has and has not been accomplished, and focus on the more tangible institutional barriers that affect the shape of the president's agenda.
  
• Pollster Scott Rasmussen has a theory about the American public: "Americans don't want to be governed from the left, the right or the center. They want to govern themselves." I don't know what this means in practice (direct democracy?) but I assume Mr. Rasmussen has data to bolster this claim, data that probably reaches a different conclusion than this Rasmussen poll, subtitled "Republicans Still Trusted More on Most Key Issues." Emphasis mine, as in "the Republican position is still the default for our center-right nation."
• Howard Kurtz would like to inform you that the White House press corps is feeling neglected by the president, who has been spending all his time in the unaccountability zone of YouTube, instead of taking questions from professional reporters. Meanwhile, we learn that the editors at Kurtz's newspaper went out of their way to solicit a piece on why liberals are condescending. Perhaps someone in the White House press corps could ask Mr. Obama this very question next time there's a press conference and get some answers for the American people.
• Weekend Remainders: Harold Ford Jr. wants to shake up the liberal establishment and we should not stand in his way; a debate between Ford and Michael Steele predictably results in astute observations about being in touch with the bulk of the American people; Annie Lowrey take you on an adventure in alternative Senate seat disbursement; Zbigniew Brzezinski appreciates that even though the president has primacy in foreign policy, he is still very much constrained by domestic politics; Republicans discuss the superiority of last year's GOP budget proposal, ignore their current proposal; and opposition to climate change legislation becomes easier to understand when viewed in its most unhinged form.
  

--Mori Dinauer

The alliance of Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, perhaps the last archetypal old-style pol in the House, who died this afternoon of complications from gall-bladder surgery, always struck some observers as more than a bit bewildering. Pelosi, after all, hailed from the most post-industrial metropolis in the nation, while Murtha represented an old steel-and-mining district near Pittsburgh. Pelosi was ever proper; Murtha was a gruff old bull who would have fit right into a hard-drinking, spittoon-spraying meeting of the Tammany chiefs. Pelosi came from anti-war, culturally vanguardish San Francico; Murtha was a hawkish Viet vet who reveled in doling out defense dollars from his post on the House Appropriations Committee.

But when the Democrats retook the House in 2006, Pelosi backed Murtha in his challenge to Steny Hoyer for the post of majority leader, just as Murtha had provided key support to Pelosi all throughout her rise to the party’s top leadership position in the House. He was one of several no-nonsense senior members -- Appropriations Chair David Obey was another -- who’d been impressed by the speaker-to-be’s performance while a member of the Appropriations Committee -- more specifically, by her ability to deal with the boys and to understand who needed what to get a bill passed. Beyond that, she clearly had an affinity for the old pols in the House, which likely stemmed from her childhood as the daughter of Baltimore Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, who, like The Last Hurrah’s Frank Skeffington, met with constituents at his home, as Nancy and her brothers scurried around.

Not all of Pelosi’s fellow liberals took a shine to Murtha, and a number of her closest allies -- Henry Waxman, for one – stuck with Hoyer during Murtha’s challenge. But it’s a mark of Pelosi’s skills that she could almost always count on having both Waxman and Murtha in her column. No intra-party relationship better symbolized the link between old and new politics than that between Murtha and Pelosi, in which the party of Harry Truman met the party of Gavin Newsom. And just now, as Pelosi surely realizes, the party could use an in to the Truman Democrats who still inhabit districts such as that represented by John Murtha.

--Harold Meyerson

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

It's not surprising that the response to the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad was a collective, "All that fuss for that?" The spot mostly features his mom, Pam Tebow gushing about her miracle baby, only to be tackled by the son who grew up to be a Heisman Trophy winner. Both had big smiles for the camera.

Of course, the spot directed you to the Web site for Focus on the Family, the conservative, anti-abortion group that funded the spot. There you can watch an interview with Pam Tebow and her husband, Bob, who elaborate a little on the back story. The Tebows were in the Philippines as missionaries when she became pregnant with Tim, their fifth child, and the pregnancy was complicated from the start. We know from other sources how likely it was that Pam Tebow's condition could have killed her, and why her doctors would have recommended an abortion to save her life.

At the end, Bob Tebow makes a tearful plea to the camera: "Don't kill your baby." Drats! Feminists' nefarious baby-killing plans foiled again! This, right after Pam Tebow encourages women to seek help and recognize they have options. Again, it seems like the Tebows think women only have one real choice, and it's hard to respect their message when that one choice could kill a lot of women.

The ad could have seemed so innocuous just so anti-abortion groups could decry unwarranted feminist hysteria, which they were already doing. But as Amanda Marcotte points out on Double X, it's really not so innocuous when you know the back story. Tim plowing into his mother carries double symbolic weight when you think he nearly killed her in utero and that the image of a man plowing over a woman is exactly the kind of misogynistic symbol you would expect from an anti-abortion group.

-- Monica Potts

Greg Anrig says that in some states, progressive leadership and grass-roots activism have turned crisis into opportunity for long-deferred tax reform:

In October 2007, two months before the onset of the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression, Maryland's Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley, convened a special session of his state's Democrat-controlled General Assembly in a high-stakes effort to close an unexpectedly large $1.7 billion budgetary shortfall. A central component of O'Malley's proposal was converting the state's flat income tax of 4.75 percent to a progressive system with higher brackets of 6 percent and 6.5 percent for upper-income households. At the same time, he advocated a combination of tax hikes on corporate income, sales, tobacco, and vehicle titles, along with reductions in taxes on property and the incomes of lower earners.

The progressivity of O'Malley's plan was somewhat weakened as the negotiating process unfolded, largely through the interventions of legislators representing Montgomery County and its influential minority of multimillionaires. Nonetheless, the final budget reduced income taxes for lower- and middle-income taxpayers while adding three new rates ranging from 5 percent to 5.5 percent on incomes from $150,000 to $1 million for single individuals and $200,000 to $1 million for married couples.

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Rep. John Murtha, Pennsylvania's longest-serving member of Congress, has died at age 77. As chair of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, he was critical of the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism and argued for withdrawal from Iraq. Recently, he had signed on to the "Share the Sacrifice" Act, which would impose a surtax to help pay for the war in Afghanistan.

--The Editors

(Flickr/Center for American Progress Action Fund)

Contrary to Tim, I'm not totally skeptical of the news that Obama has invited Republicans to have a half-day conference -- at which they'd tell him why his health-care bill is awful, and he'd tell them why they're wrong. This is, of course, a media event in the strictest sense -- it has no legislative purpose but is something created so that it can be viewed. It's something to get us from the limbo we're in now to some actual voting.

Here, Obama has put Republicans in a bit of a bind: If they refuse his invitation, they confirm that they're just "the party of no." If they accept, on the other hand, they'll probably end up being taken to school by the president the way they were when he came to the House Republicans' meeting a couple of weeks ago. As many of us have been explaining at absurd lengths over the past year, nearly all of their objections to health-care reform are bogus. And this meeting promises a kind of exchange we don't actually get that often at a high level: one in which ridiculous claims can be refuted directly and immediately.

Despite all the cable chatter, this back-and-forth doesn't actually happen that much in places most people notice. When people watch the news, they tend to get a claim by one side followed by a claim from the other side wherein no claim is ever definitively shot down. Contrast that with, say, the exchange at the Baltimore meeting, in which Rep. Jeb Hensarling made the assertion that the yearly deficits under President Bush have become the monthly deficits under President Obama. Obama shot him down by noting that what he was saying was simply false, and Hensarling looked a little ridiculous.

If this next meeting takes place, we're likely to see some repeats of that moment. Republicans are unlikely to score too many points against health-care reform because the most politically effective arguments they have made on the topic have been the most dishonest and simplistic ones. It may have had an impact for Sarah Palin to tweet about "death panels," but that was partly because there was no one right there to call her out for the lie. In a situation where there are people from the other side sitting right there, these kinds of distortions become much more risky, with each potentially producing a humiliating moment that ends up leading the 6:30 news. And of course, the White House will be prepared for every argument Republicans will make (because there aren't that many of them), and will no doubt make sure Obama has compelling, sound-bite-ready answers.

At the end of it, Democrats can say, "All right -- you've had your say, we've listened to your ideas, such as they are, and now it's time to move forward with the bill." Perhaps more important than anything, the meeting could give tremulous congressional Democrats the shove they need to finally pass the damn thing.

-- Paul Waldman

Washington Monthly has a fantastic feature detailing the efforts of ultra-conservatives to rewrite textbooks for Texas schools. Since Texas is such a big market, it will affect what's in textbooks around the country. The effort had been reported on before, but Mariah Blake adds some history, noting that the involvement of conservatives grew after efforts in the 1960s to teach a more inclusive history:

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias.

Among the changes? History books, for example, would emphasize the Christianity of America's founders and the role of conservatives in recent decades, leaving out liberals -- a sad coda to the death of Howard Zinn, the people's historian who showed the course of events from the perspective of the oppressed. Zinn, of course, undeniably had a point of view when he did so. The idea that history is colored by the lens of those who view it is, surely, nothing new. What's so depressing here is the anti-intellectualism and exclusionary tactics of those in charge in Texas. They seem to have mistaken the idea that there might be multiple readings of any historical event to mean almost anything you want to believe is true.

-- Monica Potts

On a news-slow, snowed-in Monday (TAP's Washington-based staff is corresponding from various neighborhood bureaus today) the most interesting topic -- barring The New York Times deciding to bring the thunder -- is the White House's decision to host a big, televised, bipartisan family meeting on health-care reform next week. On the subject, here's Ezra Klein, here's Jon Cohn.

Just about everybody figures that Obama is trying to capitalize on the success of his last televised interaction with the GOP to disarm the argument that Republicans have been left by the wayside on health-care reform, giving cover for Democrats to push ahead with the bill. It's not the worst idea in the world if he can't privately convince Senate leaders to use reconciliation to modify their bill and induce the House to pass it. Indeed, this may be what is needed to get reluctant Dems over the line. But I'm a little concerned because, as Kevin Drum observes, this effort is "largely going to succeed or fail based on how well Democrats and Republicans are able to make their case in the media." We've had these summits before (for health care, above, and for energy, and for the jobs bill as recently as December), and they haven't moved the debate.

Thus far, Republicans have been very effective in making this bill out to be a grand social experiment in Marxist horror, even though it actually incorporates many of their ideas. The legislation's component parts also remain individually popular. Republicans are going to come out of this meeting just as they are going into it -- complaining and demanding that Obama follow their advice. However brilliant the president's performance may be, it won't change the Republican-promoted narrative that the GOP was left out of making this bill, that it is is too complex to understand, and that it represents the end of the world. I mean, the media isn't even willing to challenge Republican claims that the bill "spends money we don't have" when the nonpartisan CBO has scored it as deficit-neutral in the short run and a deficit-reducer over the long term.

What might change that narrative would be if Democrats demonstrated their belief in the quality of their proposals by passing them. Show, don't tell, Dems.

-- Tim Fernholz

Dayo Olopade profiles Attorney General Eric Holder:

Hours before dawn on one of the last days of October 2009, the deadliest month for American troops in Afghanistan since 2001, Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, strode out of a C-17 cargo plane parked at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Barack Obama, having reversed the ban on media coverage of the arrival of war dead at Dover, trailed just behind. During the official military ceremony, the two friends stood in dark suits, silently saluting 18 servicemen, including three Drug Enforcement Agency officials claimed by the Afghan War days prior. The aggrieved expressions on their faces were identical.

Holder's presence was surprising. The attorney general has played only a minor role in the public debate over issues of war and peace. But as the president contemplates the legal and logistical puzzles bequeathed to him by George W. Bush -- chiefly the management of what the administration no longer calls a "war on terror" -- Holder has provided crucial, if understated, counsel and support.

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It was encouraging to see the Domestic Policy Council's Heather Higginbottom say in a White House chat last week that the Obama administration is supportive of a federal law restoring ex-felons' voting rights. The messy patchwork of laws we currently have for the once-incarcerated is one of the least appealing aspects of the modern American practice of democracy. It doesn't have to be this way.

Elections are, of course, largely state affairs in the U.S., by history and by the fact that people would freak if we threatened that. But the way that the ex-felons are treated on Election Day isn't right -- all the more so because it varies so wildly from state to state. Take Maine. There, you can vote from your prison cell. But if you sold the same amount of marijuana in Florida, you'll most likely never vote again. Even after you've formally repaid what society has said is the debt incurred by your crime. According to the Sentencing Project, 35 states prohibit the once-incarcerated from voting while they are on parole. All but five of them also prevent felons from voting while on probation.

We end up with broken places like Providence, Rhode Island, where 1 in 5 black men there can't vote, according to a 2004 report. We incarcerate so many people that in the U.S. as a whole, 13 percent of black men can't vote. That's a problem for everything from representative democracy to the damage it does to how these men and women (and others like them) think about themselves, their communities, and their country.

Now, the political optics of restoring the right to vote to former felons through a federal law are obviously, well, pretty challenging. But I do think that a supremely talented politician could convincingly lay out the case and come away with a historic civil-rights win. Anyone know of one?

-- Nancy Scola

(Photo credit: iandavid)

Many state school systems are facing a "funding cliff" next year when their federal stimulus money runs out, which was the kind of dramatic budget shortfall the stimulus money was meant to prevent in the first place. Most states spent the bulk of the funds last year and this year, and are left with little. But a few states spent everything, leaving nothing for the coming academic year, according to the New York Times.

The leaders of some of these struggling states, like South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, were among the most vocal opponents of the stimulus and feigned reluctance when the federal money was dispersed. And since many states used those federal funds to bolster the program that helps poor and disabled children, it's hard to imagine where those children would be if it weren't for the stimulus money. Now, those kids could be poised to suffer most since the budget pain was merely postponed, not averted. And don't look for Republicans and centrist Democrats in Congress to vote for the second stimulus package their states could use. 

Of course, this disconnect is part of a larger problem. Many of the reddest states, whose citizens espouse the loudest anti-tax rhetoric, benefit the most from federal money, and have for a long time. That was part of the reason the video of Obama schooling the G.O.P. over their hypocrisy on the stimulus was so satisfying. We could use more of that from the Democratic leadership.

-- Monica Potts

Mark Schmitt argues that the real concern after Citizens United should be that small donors will stop giving:

Discussions of money in politics are usually steeped in watery metaphors: The Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision will "open the floodgates" of corporate money, we're told, which will "drown" or "swamp" the voice of ordinary citizens. Skeptics of campaign finance regulation warn that, like damming a river, it will only divert the flow to other channels.

Permit me to extend the soggy simile for just a few lines more: In the case of water, floods and dambreaks make headlines, but far more human suffering and strife is caused by too little water than by an excess of it. And the same is true of political money. While political reformers still sometimes lapse into slogans like, "Get money out of politics," or bemoan the total amount spent, in fact, a scarcity of money for campaigns is a source of far more trouble than an excess is.

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Via David Schorr, former Bill Clinton- and George W. Bush-era counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke accuses the GOP of positioning themselves in order to take advantage of a terrorist attack. Noting that the Obama administration's approach to handling the failed underwear bomber was consistent with that of prior administrations, Clarke writes:

It has been hard to escape the conclusion that the goal of these critics is to discredit the President's handling of terrorism for political advantage, whether or not the administration is actually doing a good job. Indeed, they seem to be posturing themselves simply so that if there is a successful terrorist attack on America, they can say "I told you Obama doesn't know how to fight Al Qaeda."

[...]

There may well be another successful terrorist attack in the U.S. someday soon. No system can stop all of the attempts all of the time; ask Israel. When and if that attack does come, let us hope the American people will reject any attempt to make it a partisan issue. It is not conduct worthy of real patriots.

Naked political interest would certainly explain the irrational discrepancy between the rather sudden Republican opposition to Bush-era policies now that the Obama administration is implementing them.

At any rate, remember when criticizing the president on national security was giving "aid and comfort to the enemy," the definition of treason as described in the U.S. Constitution? Now apparently it's giving aid and comfort to the enemy for the president to respond. Perhaps if the GOP retakes Congress, they can rewrite the statutory definition of treason to mean "disagreeing with Republicans."

-- A. Serwer

All for the best, in my view. The move also doesn't eliminate the possibility of a bipartisan bill; if anything, it makes the chances of a bipartisan bill even stronger. Republicans would be happy to pull a Gang of Six and spend months weakening a regulatory reform bill, publicly dragging it through the mud and then, ultimately, not voting for it. By moving forward on an aggressive bill, Dodd and the Democrats can harness anti-bank sentiment by staking out a clear position and daring Republicans to oppose it. Despite the Frank Luntz memo's newspeak, I just don't think this is a winning issue for Republican opposition if Democrats demonstrate that they are pushing for serious restrictions on the banks. 

The worry, though, is whether the rest of the Democrats on the committee can hold together. While Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer (despite his Wall Street fundraising prowess) are both solid on these issues, others -- like Mark Warner, Evan Bayh, and especially Tim Johnson -- are not known as reformers. The question now is whether they calculate that the political incentives of restricting banks outweigh the financial incentives of cosmetic reform. In that effort, some clear lines in the sand from the president would be helpful.

-- Tim Fernholz

Last night's NFL Championship game provided many instructional moments for politics. For one, President Barack Obama could learn strategy from Saints' Coach Sean Payton, who turned the game around with his bold play-calling, particularly an on-sides kick to start the second half.

Unfortunately, the political ads were not so enlightening. The controversial anti-choice ad from Tim Tebow and his mother didn't seem as pernicious as we all expected due to vague language and the weird decision to have Tebow fake-tackle his mom. But another ad, run by one of Rick Berman's astroturf shops, the Employment Policies Institute, was a classic debt-scare, featuring children reciting an altered pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to America's debt, and to the Chinese government that lends us money. And to the interest, for which we pay, compoundable, with higher taxes and lower pay until the day we die."

Oh noes! Except that this is way over-hyped, especially the pledging allegiance to the Chinese government. Shall we go to the chart?

The chart is from this excellent Brad Setser post which explains why we relied more heavily on China in 2006 and 2007 than we did last summer -- basically, because of the recession's effect on trade and the fact that many U.S. bondholders are private. Even though that data is a bit older, right now, the Chinese only own 22 percent of America's public debt. True, China owns the most of any single country, but that also makes sense given they're the third largest national economy in the world (Japan, for instance, holds comparably high U.S. reserves). And as I've written before, China can't do much to hurt us with that debt unless they are willing to hurt themselves.

The deficits needed to get us out of the this recession are pretty easy to finance thanks to low interest rates and the fact that the vast majority of the current deficit was inherited by the current administration. But you didn't hear Rick Berman and the rest of the debt-scare crew complaining about China taking over the country when we were even more in hock three or four years ago.

-- Tim Fernholz

White House Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said Sunday that Republicans had been briefed that underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab had been placed in FBI custody shortly after the failed attack. At the time, they had raised no objections, and only criticized the administration's approach later. 

This isn't exactly surprising. Even though the policy continuity between the Obama and Bush administrations has been so flush that it's disturbing, Republicans have nevertheless vehemently objected to policies that they found acceptable when their party controlled the White House.

Brennan said that on Christmas night he had briefed four senior House and Senate Republicans about Abdulmutallab, who was "in FBI custody" and at that point "talking" and "cooperating." He said that at no point did any of the four -- Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the Senate Republican minority leader; Sen. Christopher S. Bond (Mo.), ranking GOP member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), the House minority leader; and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), ranking minority member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- raise concerns about Abdulmutallab being placed in military custody or being Mirandized.

Bond and spokespeople for McConnell and Hoekstra have subsequently said that they didn't know Abdulmutallab was being "mirandized," but that's precisely what being in FBI custody would entail -- they are a federal law enforcement agency. That response doesn't excuse the subsequent Republican overreaction. In fact, it makes it worse. It suggests those among the GOP who are now complaining about how Abdulmutallab is being handled are incompetent rather than uninformed.

The GOP seems mostly disappointed that Abdulmutallab is providing useful intelligence without being tortured or otherwise mistreated. Had Obama heeded the GOP's calls for Abdulmutallab to be put in military custody (and it's not clear that's legal; the past two administrations have deliberately dodged SCOTUS cases on the assumption that it likely isn't), it's unlikely the key cooperation of Abdulmutallab's family could have been secured -- or for that matter, that of other Muslims in future terrorism cases. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to have settled on two lines of attack, with the first being to disparage the FBI like McConnell did last week. The second is to argue that while Republicans are allowed to attack the administration for being weak on national security, correcting the faulty assumptions at the heart of those criticisms is unfair.

Brennan, a career CIA man whose controversial record in support of some Bush-era policies got him in trouble with the left early last year, seemed particularly fed up with the GOP criticism of those intelligence and law enforcement professionals whose job it is to protect the country:

I think those counterterrorism professionals deserve the support of our Congress. ... And rather than second-guessing what they are doing on the ground with a 500-mile screwdriver from Washington to Detroit, I think they have to have confidence in the knowledge and the experience of these counterterrorism professionals.

I think this approach, trashing counterterrorism professionals, has substantial political risk for the GOP. Or it would, if the Democratic Party were interested in something other than playing defense. While the Center for American Progress' John Podesta called on McConnell to apologize for trashing the FBI Sunday, you're not likely to see very much aggressive pushback from members of Congress while the administration appears to want Republican cooperation on the health-care bill.

What's that definition of insanity again? Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different response ...

-- A. Serwer

• Barack Obama continues to display a trait guaranteed to annoy his supporters: clearly articulating the nature of a problem, and then refusing to throw his weight behind a solution. The president's remarks last night won't put liberals at ease. To look at the big picture, House Democrats want the Senate to act first on a reconciliation bill before they vote for the final Senate bill and its amendments, Senate Democrats want the House to make the first move and are waiting for leadership from the president, and Obama wants the Senate to move before he gets behind the effort. No wonder people are frustrated.
• Lawrence Lessig on what ails the country: a corrupt "Fundraising Congress" that is trapped in a cycle of dependency on lobbyist and corporate money. It's a familiar argument for anyone who has followed Lessig's political advocacy career, and his diagnosis, I think, is spot-on. Less convincing is his belief that Barack Obama, perhaps uniquely, squandered an opportunity to do something about it. It's impossible to assess whether coming out strongly in favor of changing Congress would have been enough to fix the problem, although some of the specific reform ideas he throws out -- particularly changing campaign finance law -- are sound. Read the whole thing.
• From the better-late-than-never file, Dana Milbank has finally gotten off the tire swing and declared that he misses the old John McCain from a decade ago. The Maverick was always a myth, of course, but compared to the vindictive warmonger that is the John McCain running for re-election in a hostile conservative environment, I'd take the figment-of-the-imagination John McCain any day.
• Freshly inaugurated Sen. Scott Brown, in claiming that the stimulus did not create a single job, has more or less proven the Larison Theory of Tea Party Support -- allegiance aligns with acceptance or rejection of the stimulus. Bonus circumstantial evidence: dead man walking Gov. Mark Sanford flying to Washington, hat in hand, after spending the better part of last year decrying the stimulus and promising to reject it.
  
• The Internet is hardly novel, so I am surprised to read discussions about who has the "edge" on the Internet, politically. In 2003 or thereabouts when all this stuff was new, the question of how technology would affect media and politics was legitimate. But it's clear now that technology is a tool, and who has leveraged Twitter the best is not a particularly interesting question. Look at it this way: if Michael Steele had rolled out an awesome GOP.com Web site instead of the joke du jour of the blogosphere, would we be saying right now that the awesomeness of the new GOP.com Web site is a major factor in the Republican comeback?
  
• Remainders: In light of this whole Shelby brouhaha, I'd like to endorse Steve Benen's "bring on the recess appointments" approach to filling government posts; Gallup discovers that most Americans have opinions on political systems that they define with their own imaginations; Newsweek notices that people earning over a quarter million dollars aren't exactly struggling; Tom Tancredo has the courage of his convictions to let everyone know that he is a bigot; and while this post examining the 2010 Obama legislative strategy is worth reading for the analysis, the LBJ quote alone is worth the price of admission.
  

--Mori Dinauer

The latest breakdown in the operations of the world's most farcical legislative body that Paul mentions below should serve as a reminder that the Senate's crazy anti-democratic rules go well beyond the filibuster. As Mark Tushnet recently noted, getting rid of the filibuster in itself probably wouldn't accomplish very much:

Changing the rule over the objections of a cohesive minority that's big enough -- as the Republican minority is -- would immobilize the Senate because an enormous amount of the Senate's work gets done by unanimous consent to the waiver of otherwise applicable rules. (Remember the contretemps over reading Senator Sanders's substitute amendment for the health care reform bill? The rules require reading such amendments, which almost never happens because the proposer seeks and obtains unanimous consent to waive that rule.) By denying unanimous consent to such waivers, a minority can stall legislation almost as effectively as it can through the modern form of the filibuster.

The problems posed by non-filibuster obstructions can also be seen in Republican threats to derail a Senate reconciliation vote on health care.  But this brings us the other issue Paul discusses, the asymmetry in how the two parties approach minority obstruction.  (As an example of how shameless the GOP has become, take Jim DeMint's assertion that using the majority voting rules that prevail in pretty much every other legislative body in the world would be "tyrannical"; tyranny of minorities of one, apparently, doesn't count.)

I think Paul identifies the critical fact here: Until Senate Democrats realize that the Republican minority is simply no longer willing to adhere to norms that allowed the institution to function despite its stupid rules, basic governance will be enormously difficult.  Dems need to realize that the party in power will be held responsible by the electorate for these failures either way, so they need to do what they can to move the Senate toward majority rule.

--Scott Lemieux

Rosa Parks sits for a booking photo following her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, on Dec. 1, 1955. She would have turned 97 this week.

Previous Little Pictures in honor of Black History Month:
The P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Army Air Force
The Little Rock Nine
Jack Johnson
Jitterbugging in Clarksdale, Mississippi

Robert Kuttner argues for more deficit spending on public investment and jobs:

The economy is still very fragile, yet Washington seems more fixated on deficits than on recovery. Fiscal conservatives in Congress hope to hold recovery spending hostage for long-term caps on social outlay, and they have some company in the White House. Groups like the billion-dollar Peter G. Peterson Foundation are leading the charge.

For a quarter-century, Peterson has been exaggerating long-term costs of Social Security and Medicare. In truth, Social Security is close to balance -- its 75-year projected deficit is just one-half of 1 percent of gross domestic product. Medicare is seriously in deficit, but reform of Medicare consistent with high-quality health care depends on tackling the deeper drivers of medical inflation.

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Adam Serwer reviews Born to Use Mics, a new anthology edited by Michael Eric Dyson:

Illmatic, the first album by hip-hop elder statesman Nas, is a masterpiece. Released in 1994, its tales of scowling corner boys, prowling drug addicts, undercover cops, treacherous lovers, and remorseful gangsters are so vivid that you can almost feel your nostrils being singed as Nas brushes the marijuana ash from his clothes. From out the gate, Nas identifies himself as a writer's writer ("see with the pen I'm extreme") and proceeds to prove himself right, offering lines that are poetic ("with more kicks/than a baby in a mother's stomach"), bleak ("straight-up shit is real/and any day could be your last in the jungle"), and cautiously hopeful ("that buck that bought a bottle/could have struck the lotto").

As the legend goes, the frenetic pace of Nas' flow, his complex internal rhyme schemes, and his dense lyricism had people wearing out their cassette tapes, rewinding them over and over again in disbelief. It's the one album in all of hip-hop whose artistic value, regardless of the critic's personal taste, is unassailable. Even Nas' longtime nemesis, Jay-Z, frankly confesses that the first time he heard the album, "the shit was so ahead/thought we was all dead."

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Ten American missionaries accused of kidnapping 33 Haitian children were formally charged with abduction and conspiracy by a Haitian court yesterday. Haiti's ambassador to the United States, Raymond Joseph, says he hopes the move sends the message that Haiti's government is alive and well after the earthquake. From the Christian Science Monitor:

'By this action, I think the Haitian government is sending a clear message to the world that there is a government in place, and that nobody can just take it upon himself or herself to come and do in Haitii whatever they think is good,' Mr. Joseph said by telephone Thursday from Washington, D.C.

Joseph noted that the motives of the group, who were from Idaho and Kansas, will likely be taken into account at a later point in the prosecution. I have no doubt the missionaries believed they were helping. And we now know many of the children have living parents who gave them to the Americans because they were told they would be taken to a school in the Dominican Republic.

But what's bothered me about the case is what can only be the Americans' arrogance, even if it was well-meaning. It's beyond me why they felt they knew how best to help the children -- because they're Americans? because they're Christians? -- without checking with the Haitian government that their actions were legal or better than anything else already in place. And it's just another symbol of the problematic relationship we have with Haiti, that the U.S. feels that whatever it does to Haiti, it must be helping and never hurting.

--Monica Potts

We're accepting applications for the Prospect writing fellowship.

--The Editors

My crack yesterday, denigrating Ramesh Ponnuru's integrity and intelligence was admittedly mean-spirited, and he has justifiably responded to me in kind. But in the course of responding to my substantive claims, he has essentially acknowledged that economic forces drive anti-incumbency sentiment, but without addressing why any discussion of these forces is absent in his original essay.

To review, Ponnuru begins with a comparison between 1994 and 2010, stating baldly that the former was "first and foremost a referendum on the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency" and that the original Contract with America, while not entirely on the public's radar, nevertheless provided "the party with an image of being forward-looking problem-solvers rather than merely anti-Clintonites." Fair enough, and as Rep. Jeff Flake recently remarked, "In 1994, nobody had any memory of Republicans in power. Now they do, and it wasn’t pretty. And so we have something to overcome that we really didn’t in 1994." Ponnuru acknowledges the differences between 1994 and 2010, but it's after his review of this history that he goes astray.

Ponnuru chastises me for omitting his contention that 2010 will "primarily" (why not "first and foremost?") be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats. Fine. But what is the nature of this referendum? I think it's undeniable that 10 percent (now 9.7) unemployment would drag down any president, a point Ponnuru himself makes in his response. But this fact is not mentioned anywhere in his original essay. In fact, I searched the text for the terms "job," "employ," and "econ" to ensure I didn't miss some discussion of the economic conditions facing the country. Of "job" I found an unrelated reference ("That will be the job of Rep. Kevin McCarthy"), "employ" a hit against government workers ("Pay for government employees has been booming at a time of private-sector layoffs") and "econ" an attack against the supposedly dire consequences of cap-and-trade ("...economic damage that cap-and-trade legislation would entail").

The balance of the essay is devoted to describing how Republicans ought to harness public anger and incorporate it into a new Contract. He offers the usual boilerplate Republican solutions ("new energy technologies," "tax policies that are pro-growth and pro-family," "no new bailouts," repealing "Obamacare," fighting corruption, etc.) but does not offer even a vague proposal for dealing with unemployment. I presume that the tax policies he has in mind are across-the-board tax cuts that will somehow produce growth and hence create jobs. But therein lies the problem. As always with conservatives, a tax cut is the appropriate response to any economic situation. And viewed that way, such a tax policy is less a demonstration of competent conservative governance, and more a demonstration of rigid and thoughtless ideology. Ponnuru is taking it as axiomatic that a tax cut will lead to hiring and hence doesn't need to explicitly talk about unemployment. But from outside the bubble, the conservative response would seem to be let it burn.

This is why Ponnuru equates middle-class tax cuts with electoral success. He would like to believe that the public responded in 2006 and 2008 not to endless war and economic ruin but "in part" because Republicans didn't promise to cut taxes. He is recasting an ideological position (tax cuts are a permanent prescription) as a bread-and-butter issue, and assuming that the public will punish Democrats come November not just for being poor stewards of the state but being ideologically incompatible as well. As I keep saying, this is an article of faith in the conservative movement: the public, unchanging, ideologically conservative, is a permanent silent majority that occasionally takes leave of its senses and foolishly elects Democrats because Republicans lost their way and were not conservative enough. Ponnuru's essay doesn't say this explicitly, but his focus on a Republican strategy that exploits public anger without even acknowledging the source of the anger is quite telling.

--Mori Dinauer

“This macho bravado—that’s the kind of thing that leads you into wars that should not be fought, that history is not kind to. The quest for justice, despite what your contemporaries might think, that’s toughness. ... This is something that can get a rise out of me, the notion that somehow Eric Holder and Barack Obama, this Administration, is not tough. We have the welfare of the American people in our minds all the time. We’ll fight our enemies, and we’ll do that which is necessary, and we won’t turn our backs on the values and traditions that have made this country great. That is what is tough.”  -- Attorney General Eric Holder speaking to The New Yorker's Jane Mayer about trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts.

As I've said before, killing is just a means to an end with terrorism. In this case, the end is the self-destruction of American society in a vortex of hysteria. What's remarkable now is that Republicans are agitating for that self-destruction in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that utterly failed. They don't even need to kill us any more. Al-Qaeda screams "boo" and half the country is ready to throw the Constitution in the toilet. That's not "toughness." That's what an al-Qaeda victory looks like.

-- A. Serwer

Sen. Chris Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chair, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the commonsense financial reforms” needed by the public.

“The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that Wall Street’s intransigence was the reason for Congress’ failure to pass any bill to regulate the Street. “The refusal of large financial firms to work constructively with Congress on this effort borders on insulting to the American people who have lost so much in this crisis.”

In other words, it isn’t Congress’s fault. It isn’t the Senate Banking Committee’s fault. It certainly isn’t Dodd’s fault. The reason more than a year has passed since the biggest bailout in the history of the world and nothing has been done to prevent a repeat performance -- even as the biggest banks are doling out more than $30 billion of bonuses, even as Goldman Sachs is awarding its big traders $16 billion in bonuses (more than the $13 billion Goldman collected from taxpayers via the bailout of AIG), even as AIG itself is handing out bonuses -- the reason is … what, exactly, Senator? Because the Street has sent an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill?

Call me old fashioned, but I thought Congress was in charge of passing legislation, not Wall Street.

Dodd left out the most telling detail, of course. Wall Street is where the campaign money is. Dodd of all people knows that. He’s been on the receiving end of lots of it over the years.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

One interesting aspect of today's unemployment numbers is the up-tick in women's emplyoment. Economist Dean Baker writes in:

The unemployment rate fell to 9.7 percent in January driven by a 0.4 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate for women to 8.4 percent. The unemployment rate for men fell 0.2 pp (percentage points) to 10.8 percent... The improved employment picture was primarily a story for adult white women. Their unemployment rate fell by 0.6 pp to 6.8 percent, while their employment rate (EPOP) rose by 0.6 pp to 56.1 percent. The unemployment rate for black women rose slightly to 13.3 percental though their EPOP also rose 0.2 pp to 54.7 percent. It is striking that the EPOP for white women is now 1.4 pp higher than for black women. Until last summer it had always been lower, although the gap had been narrowing over the last three decades.

This reflects the long-time trend in recessions where typically "male" jobs bear the brunt of cut backs, and the more recent expansion of the health-care sector, which disproportionately hires female workers. Dana Goldstein discussed this trend on TAPPED earlier in the fall, highlighting the need to look for a balanced recovery, when a decline of women in the work force is expected. We also published a special report on women in the work force in June.

-- Tim Fernholz

The news of the day is that Sen. Richard Shelby has placed a "hold" on every single pending Obama nominee, until the Democrats give in to his blackmail and fork over a few billion dollars in defense pork for Alabama. This could be, as Josh Marshall suggests, a shark-jumping moment for the GOP. But I doubt it.

Republicans' audacity about these kinds of things has changed the standards of what we consider audacious. You might remember how, back when George W. Bush was president and Democrats were filibustering a few truly abominable judicial nominees, Republicans considered eliminating the filibuster on judicial nominations but keeping it on everything else. This idea was considered so radical it was termed the "nuclear option," in that it would incinerate the Senate and vaporize any hope of cross-partisan comity for all time. But now this kind of stuff barely raises an eyebrow, particularly among a press corps that has gotten used to the idea that Republicans play hardball, Democrats don't do anything about it because they're wimps, and therefore the latest outrage is barely worth taking note of. Jonathan Chait explains why this is possible:

Many of the changes in American politics over the past three decades have involved the two parties slowly doing away with social norms that preventing them from using every tool at their disposal. The Senate minority could filibuster every single bill the majority proposed, but you just didn't do that, until you did. You could use a House-Senate conference to introduce completely new provisions into a bill, but you just didn't do that, until you did. (The topic became common in the Bush administration.) The possibility was always there to use endless amendments to filibuster a reconciliation bill. But nobody thought to do that until Republicans floated the tactic this week.

The "hold" is a now similar tool to what the filibuster was forty years ago. It's a sparingly-used weapon meant to signal an unusually intense preference. A Congressional scholar reports that putting a blanket hold on all the president’s nominees has never been done before. But there's no rule that says you can't. It's just not done, until it is.

The main thing that keeps those kinds of norms in place isn't the good will of all involved -- it's the understanding that if you violate them, there will be some kind of cost. The problem today is that there is no foreseeable cost for this kind of move.

Take the filibuster, for instance. Under the rules that obtained when Strom Thurmond was bellowing from the Senate floor about the dangers of race-mixing, undertaking a filibuster had a cost. Namely, it was a huge pain in the ass -- you had to keep talking, and you weren't allowed to leave, even to go to the bathroom. Partly because of that, the filibuster was used only rarely. It just wasn't something you would want to do every day. Since then the Senate's rules have been changed, and now all you have to do to undertake a filibuster is express your intention to do so. When a party decides they'd like to just filibuster everything -- as today's Republicans have -- there's no reason they can see not to go ahead and do it.

If there's no practical cost, the only thing left to stop them from filibustering everything, or putting a blanket hold on every nominee to extort some pork for Alabama, is the possibility of a political cost. At this point, that's up to the Democrats to impose. It would require a little bit of toughness: they'd have to have everyone go out and say, over and over so it would take over the news, that Richard Shelby and his Republican friends are despicable extortionists who will sabotage the operation of the United States government for the sake of some pork-barrel earmarks. They could also fit it into a larger narrative about nihilistic Republicans who care so little about the country's fate that they will do virtually anything to subvert the administration, no matter what the cost, if they think it will gain them some advantage or some pork. If Democrats made enough noise about it, Shelby would back down, and it might even convince Republicans to think twice the next time one of them considers undertaking this kind of extortion.

Is that something Democrats are willing to do? Or are they afraid it would seem impolite?

-- Paul Waldman

(Flickr/Stephen Grose)

Matthew Yglesias on conservatives and due process:

The underlying issue here, as I’ve been saying, is that conservatives think that any constraint on the state security apparatus is too much. They believe, contrary to all of the evidence, that the rule-bound criminal justice system can’t or doesn’t function and that things would be better if we scrapped all the rules. And, indeed, in the civilian context they’ve worked steadily and systematically over a period of decades to weaken the constitutional protections as much as possible, and bring us as close as possible to their dream scenario of limitless state-sponsored violence. The desire to push certain categories of people (non-citizens) or certain categories of suspects (terrorists) out of the constitutionally protected realm is just part-and-parcel of that broad-based assault on the idea of a rule-bound justice system.

I don't really think this part about "certain categories" is peripheral to this argument. Conservatives didn't merely support "state violence," William F. Buckley's 1957 declaration that the South was "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically." This was an endorsement of vigilante violence against black people, so that white people might still clutch the reins of power. As long as the violence of the state is being used against a defined other who lacks the defined cultural "birthright," whether it be an illegal immigrant, a suspected terrorist, or a black kid walking home from school, such state-sponsored violence is inherently legitimate. The mere possibility that the state might use its resources against groups conservatives identify with provokes massive hysteria, and even when such concerns are legitimate, they don't extend to anyone outside a narrowly defined group. The point is that conservatives don't so much endorse "limitless" state violence -- it's limited in the sense that it should only be applied to "those people." This also may help to explain some of the paranoia about Obama's "re-education camps" and such -- for the first time, the head of state is one of "those people."

Just speaking for myself, when you grow up a minority in the United States, you learn early lessons about the violence of the state not being inherently legitimate, from friends and relatives if not first hand. The casual acceptance of state violence has always seemed to me dependent on one's individual ability to imagine that kind of force used against you, or someone like you, or perhaps even someone you care about. The torture wing of the GOP lacks that impulse entirely, being motivated solely by the intellectual principle at the heart of Buckley's pro-South manifesto.

-- A. Serwer

Sarah Posner on the religion trap that Obama has fallen into:

In advance of yesterday's National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama was under pressure to use the opportunity to condemn the anti-homosexuality bill pending in the Ugandan Parliament. The legislation, which would criminalize homosexuality and require the death penalty or life imprisonment for certain "offenses," has been described by human-rights activists as tantamount to instigating a genocide against sexual minorities, who are already persecuted in the African nation.

Obama, speaking just before the first anniversary of the launch of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, once again fell into the religion-in-public-life trap: Faith is intended for good, and we must present it as such -- regardless of its exploitation for ends that are less than pure, and regardless of one's stated commitment to secular government.

KEEP READING ...

The arguments against environmental regulation always include the pro-business folks who fear a huge economic hit. That underestimates business. It assumes every company, when faced with new regulations, would roll over, say, "Well, I guess we can't make profits any more," and die. It completely leaves out the other response regulation can inspire: innovation and competition.

In an effort to get ahead of the curve, Calpine Corporation, a company that builds power plants, has voluntary asked for a permit limiting the amount of carbon it can emit, according to the New York Times' Green, Inc., blog.

The permit, issued by a California state agency under rules set by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, sets those limits by using the output of the 'best available control technology,' said Donald R. Neal Jr., the company’s vice president for environmental health and safety.

But in anticipation of federal rules on carbon dioxide emissions, Calpine asked that the permit include a figure for carbon dioxide, derived the same way.

“The understanding by everyone is that by the end of March, the E.P.A. will issue the first rule to regulate greenhouse gases,’’ Mr. Neal said. That will be in light-duty vehicles, but at the same time, it will issue a rule specifying which stationary emitters will be covered by greenhouse gas rules in the future, he said.

Never mind that, for many of the regulations environmentalists call for on vehicle and power plant emissions, technology already exists to make it better. But a little anticipated government pressure is all it takes to get companies to use them.

-- Monica Potts

The jobs report out today shows a tiny decrease in unemployment, from 10.0 percent to 9.7 percent. This still follows 20,000 jobs lost in January and new revisions that measure the entire toll of this recession: 8.4 million jobs lost since the recession officially began in December 2007. Nonetheless, January's numbers show the smallest monthly job loss in over a year, suggesting that the unemployment market is beginning to stabilize, although economists forecast unemployment remaining at current levels for the rest of the year.

One interesting fact to note, however, is that the U-6 measurement, which includes people who have lost work hours and those who have given up on finding a job alongside the unemployed, dropped relatively dramatically, from 17.3 of the labor force -- where it had held steady for the last several months -- to 16.5 percent. This could augur well for the jobs situation: The decrease comes from part-time workers transitioning back to the full-time -- nearly 850,000 involuntary part-time employees made the switch -- a sign that broader hiring could be in the offing as demand for labor increases.

With discussion now turning to the jobs bill in the Senate, the question is whether Democrats can convince Republicans not to filibuster their effort to cut taxes on small businesses to encourage hiring. Let's not even talk about extending automatic stabilizers and investing in future jobs, or any of the other jobs-building priorities from the president's budget that will attract even more heat from congressional conservatives.

-- Tim Fernholz

Andy McCarthy tries to do a snow job on Jose Padilla and Ali Saleh al-Marri:

Jose Padilla (who, unlike Abdulmutallab, is an American citizen) was designated an enemy combatant and held without trial after being arrested inside the United States; so was Ali al-Marri. Ultimately, both were prosecuted in the civilian system — but only years later, after the intelligence community had ample opportunity to exhaust their capacity to provide useful information.

In fact, they were put back in the criminal justice system because the courts were about to wipe the floor with the Bush administration over Padilla, and as I've reported before, the Obama administration over al-Marri. They weren't put back in because their capacity to provide useful information had been "exhausted."  What I love about this line of argument is that it directly contradicts the ones Republicans make in favor of detaining Umar Abdulmutallab in this manner. Republicans argue that military detention allows the government to get otherwise "perishable" intelligence quickly, but Padilla was held for three and a half years in military custody, al-Marri for nearly eight. That's some pretty non-perishable intelligence.

Moreover, putting people in the criminal justice system doesn't preclude further intelligence gathering. Law enforcement and intelligence can go back to those wells whenever they want. McCarthy simply believes that suspected terrorists require "more" punishment than the criminal justice system can mete out -- his opinion has nothing to do with intelligence or national security.

And on the specific point that Padilla and al-Marri were exhausted for intelligence while in military custody, Jane Mayer says otherwise:

Confusion on this point may derive from the Bush Administration’s controversial handling of two suspected terrorists, José Padilla and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. Both men were arrested in the U.S. by law-enforcement officials, and indicted on criminal charges. But Bush declared Padilla and Marri to be “enemy combatants,” which, he argued, meant that they could be transferred to military custody, for interrogation and detention without trial. (Neither suspect provided useful intelligence.) The cases provoked legal challenges, and in both instances appeals courts ruled that Bush had overstepped his power. The Administration, not willing to risk a Supreme Court defeat, returned the suspects to the civilian system.

It's not entirely true that al-Marri was useless as an intelligence source, however. Once al-Marri was taken out of complete isolation in a military brig, according to his attorney, he spent "hours" helping investigators correct errors in intelligence they had previously gathered.

So basically, we put two terrorists in military detention for several years and got scratch zero out of it before they were transferred to the civilian justice system -- at which point one of the detainees started talking. McCarthy would like us to repeat this process just for funsies.

-- A. Serwer

My friend Ed Luce at the Financial Times has written what seems to me the best and most succinct rundown of what's gone wrong in the White House, with particular attention to the role of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

A concluding theme of the piece is that the White House, flush with the enthusiasm of an "amazing victory" in 2008, essentially carried the mood and tactics of the campaign into the White House. The November trip to China, in which administration officials with expertise on China were apparently kept at bay by Obama's inner circle, is described as, "the Obama campaign goes to China."

But in one important respect, the article suggests that the White House forgot the campaign's most significant political innovation, the one without which either Hillary Clinton or John McCain would be president. Here's a key quote from the piece:

“The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

In other words, the White House embraced a momentum strategy -- move fast, move big, and once things are rolling, they'll keep rolling. That's a very traditional way to see a new presidency. It's the legend of FDR's Hundred Days; it's Reagan in 1981; it's advice Obama probably got from almost everyone.

But momentum -- big victories beget victories -- was not the only strategy. And a momentum strategy has a significant downside: Since everything follows from the first victories, the only thing the other side has to do is stop the first, and the whole train runs off the rails. And while there is a powerful case that health reform should have priority on an economic and moral basis, putting it at the head of a momentum strategy, based on history, is not the soundest bet.

The thing is, momentum, or "victory begets victory," is the traditional advice given to insurgent presidential candidates as well. In place of health reform, put "New Hampshire," and the formula is the same. Presidential campaigns pour all their resources into Iowa and New Hampshire on the theory that if they win, more victories and more money will follow, and if not, they're doomed anyway. But the actual brilliance of the Obama campaign was to recognize -- after losing the Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary -- that every victory is its own accomplishment and none actually matters more than the delegates it produces. Rejecting a momentum theory, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe deployed resources to dozens of states that wouldn't vote for weeks, picking off a dozen or more caucuses and primaries through that patient, grind-it-out strategy that resulted in winning the nomination on points, not a momentum-driven knockout.

Could there have been a governing equivalent to the Obama political strategy -- a comparable patient, grind-it-out, accumulation of small wins, building up to bigger consequences? It's hard to say. Just like the political strategy, it's never really been tried -- certainly not by Democrats. And Emanuel is hardly alone in believing that a momentum strategy with health care in the lead was the administration's best and only option. Indeed, many of Emanuel's sharpest critics from the left would have been even more outraged if the administration had pursued a different strategy. But all that's finished now, and a more strategic, piecemeal strategy is the only option that remains. Fortunately, it's the one that Obama has already mastered.

-- Mark Schmitt

• The socialist Obama administration, in its authoritarian quest to control every aspect of our lives, has proposed spending $400 million to develop healthy food outlets in urban communities to increase livability. Doesn't he realize that the free market works best when it's free? For example, Dollar General (the Dollar Store) saw that there were more poor people in the market and has added thousands to its payroll to accommodate this demand. The invisible hand has thus been made visible.
  
• I think Ramesh Ponnuru's reputation for being a smart and honest conservative really ought to be called into question after reading his essay at National Review that games out a Republican Contract with America for 2010. He repeatedly claims that the elections will be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats, who will have controlled Congress for four years, without once mentioning the state of the economy, unemployment, or jobs. And his assertion that "[i]t may not be a coincidence" Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008 because they didn't promise a middle-class tax cut? Perhaps this alternative reality could be used in an upcoming episode of Fringe.
• But surely other writers at National Review are taking the prospect of conservative governance seriously, right? Veronique de Rugy, for instance, finds it "interesting" that a reader suggests eliminating the entire federal government save Defense, Treasury, and Justice. This reader also thinks Defense should be renamed "Offense" and ought to take over the State Department. Reader then concludes with, "If something breaks somewhere, figure out what state/county/town it’s in, and let them get to work on it. If they don’t care to fix it, they can live with it as is." Truly commonsense conservatism.
  
• I know what you're thinking. It's not fair for me to cherry-pick nonsense from some joke conservative publication. Surely congressional Republicans have ideas for the country? You betcha. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House GOP's top budget writer, has suggested privatizing Medicare and Social Security. Sen. Tom Coburn gets innovative and suggests we need looser gun laws, including allowing "mentally defective" veterans to buy firearms and honoring concealed-carry permits across state lines. And in the final analysis, Republicans are cool with the budget deficit, so long as taxes are not raised.
• Remainders: Republicans can't wait to get back in bed with eager Wall Street donors; polls that ask for ideological self-identification are meaningless; submissive Senate Democrats put on the leash and hand Obama the whip; Nick Baumann thinks revelations that the Bush administration considered military action in Georgia in 2008 is a non-story; Harold Ford hires someone to write as Harold Ford for a blog that's about Harold Ford; actually, I could do with a little less nationalistic chest-thumping, but politically it's certainly a winner; and Chris Wallace is a very serious journalist.

--Mori Dinauer

Greg Sargent already pointed out the absurdity of this Washington Post article, but there's something else of which we should take note. The article asserts that Obama is "a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it. As he arrived in Nashua, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all; almost half thought he did not understand their problems." As Sargent notes, according to the Post's own polling, 57 percent of Americans say Obama "understands the problems of people like you," while 42 percent -- that's the "almost half" -- say he doesn't. Seems pretty good, right?

And in fact, if you look back at their polls on George W. Bush -- remember him, the reg'lar fella who liked nothing more than chewing on some pretzels while watching football after a vigorous session of brush-clearing? -- Obama looks even better. Turns out that the high Bush achieved on that question was 61 percent in January 2002, just four months after September 11. By July of that year he was at 57 percent -- where Obama is now -- and he kept falling and falling, until the last time they asked it, in early 2006, only 37 percent of Americans thought Bush understood their problems (the data can be read at pollingreport.com).

So the Post could have written a story headlined, "Despite Rough Political Waters, Obama Retains Bond With Ordinary Americans." But they wrote the opposite story. Why? I would argue it's probably the same reason reporters always write this story about Democratic politicians, and almost never about Republicans. It's one of the greatest successes of the conservative campaign of browbeating the press. Reporters have internalized the conservative argument about class: It's to be understood not as a factor of money but of tastes and style. Bush, who went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and who had a senator grandfather and a president father, can be a regular guy, because despite his expensive education, he has contempt for book learnin' and talks like a simpleton. No reporter would ever have considered asking whether Bush was an "elitist," despite his impassioned advocacy for the interests of the moneyed class. Obama, on the other hand, despite being raised by a single mother, must be some kind of chardonnay-swilling elitist who can't possibly relate to ordinary people.

The fact that most reporters themselves fit their own definition of "elitist" is precisely the point. The views of regular, real, heartlandish people can just be assumed, regardless of what the polls might say. Go to a diner or a barbershop, interview a couple of angry Republicans, and you've got your story.

-- Paul Waldman

In discussions with Wall Street executives, Republicans are striving to make the case that they are banks' best hope of preventing President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats from cracking down on Wall Street.

GOP strategists hope to benefit from the reaction to the White House's populist rhetoric and proposals, which range from sharp critiques of bonuses to a tax on big Wall Street banks, caps on executive pay and curbs on business practices deemed too risky.

... Last week, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio made a pitch to Democratic contributor James Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of J.P. Morgan, over drinks at a Capitol Hill restaurant, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Boehner told Mr. Dimon congressional Republicans had stood up to Mr. Obama's efforts to curb pay and impose new regulations.

This shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Republican efforts to obstruct financial reform. What's really absurd about this whole scenario is that the Democrats can't seem to get any political points off of this, or the fact that Rep. Paul Ryan's alternate GOP budget demolishes Medicare and Social Security in an effort to balance the budget.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the revelation that Umar Abdulmutallab has been talking to investigators despite not being tortured and despite having been mirandized, the bottom has fallen out of the GOP's criticism of the way the Obama administration handled the attempted Christmas Day bombing.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to have grown particularly desperate trying to respond, making an absolutely indefensible statement about the men and women on the front lines of the fight against al-Qaeda (via Adam Blickstein):

MCCONNELL: They’ve seen on full display, the chaos of treating the Christmas bomber as if he has robbed a convenient store. This was a person who was trying to blow a plane out of the air from Nigeria. It’s clearly a case for the military and for our intelligence people, not for the U.S. court system. What happened? He was given a 50 minute interrogation, probably Larry King has interrogated people longer and better than that. After which he was assigned a lawyer who told him to shut up. That is not the way to deal with someone in the war on terror.

And again on Sunday:

“I mean, Larry King would have a more thorough interrogation of one of his [guests] than the Christmas bomber had by the Justice Department,” McConnell said, referring to the AP report that Abdulmutallab was interrogated for just 50 minutes before being read his Miranda rights.

This is an unconscionable statement. The men and women of the FBI put themselves on the line every day to protect the people of the United States from terrorist attacks, while politicians like McConnell puff out their chests and act like tough guys. They don't deserve to be disparaged by some high-ranking politician groping for a talking point on cable news.

McConnell owes the men and women of the FBI an apology.

UPDATE: Thinkprogress has video.

-- A. Serwer

E. J. Dionne had a talk with Joe Biden on the subject of American superiority (Biden is strongly in favor), which brings up yet another way in which the right and the left are often talking past each other when they appear to be talking about the same thing.

Progressives tend to find conservative jingoism distasteful, which conservatives sometimes interpret to mean that progressives hate America and want it to fail (indeed, one out of four Republicans believes "Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win"). The problem is that the two groups think about the subject of America and its awesomeness in different ways. Conservatives are far more likely to think that loving your country means you should, as often as possible, proclaim how awesome it is. These proclamations can be general ("U.S.A.! U.S.A.!") or specific ("We have the best health-care system in the world!"). The latter can get you into trouble if it's factually wrong, not just because you look foolish but because it actively prevents you from solving problems. Why would we need to reform health care, if we have the best system in the world?

When President Obama said in his State of the Union address that "I do not accept second place for the United States of America," he wasn't talking about the present, he was talking about the future -- whether we will retain our economic position. Progressives are much more likely to see this future as uncertain. Twenty years from now we might still have the most vibrant economy on earth, or we might not. The decisions we make between now and then will determine what happens. But conservatives tend to react negatively to even the suggestion that America could wind up in second place. That's because their focus is on the present tense, which it is assumed will be true for all eternity -- America is great, so of course it always will be great. We don't have to worry too much about what we need to do to keep it that way (apart from not enacting socialist policies), so long as we keep telling ourselves that it's true.

Is the person who devises a plan to improve America's health-care system more or less patriotic than the person who just declares that America's health-care system is great? That depends on how much importance you put on feelings, words, and symbolic gestures. Whatever else you can say about the two parties, Republicans are the ones who are much more concerned about these things (think about how often they complain that Obama didn't use a particular word or phrase enough, or used a word or phrase too often).

Nevertheless, they always seem a little flummoxed when confronted with patriotic-sounding proclamations from Democrats, like the one Obama made in the State of the Union. They know they're supposed to think he hates America, so it doesn't quite make sense. It could just be insincere, of course. But it might be better for them to just appreciate that he's talking about the future, while their patriotism is about the present.

Even though today he would probably be a Democrat, Gerald Ford's 1976 campaign had a song that pretty much summed this up. As the lyrics say, "I'm feeling good about America, I'm feeling good about me!"

-- Paul Waldman

What upset my stomach this morning wasn't so much the news that Google had partnered with the National Security Administration as it was that Google seems to have felt threatened enough by cyberattacks to do it. Google cherishes its reputation as one of the "good guys." The company counts how the public feels about it and its mission as one of the best things going for it.

And the NSA's public reputation ... You can make the case that among the damaging things caused by recent wiretapping excesses is the fact that a company like Google really has to think seven or eight times before allowing its information caches to be opened up to the federal government. The misuse of the U.S.' digital security capabilities weakened one of the defenses that is much needed on the cybersecurity front.

Of course, Google has to be very, very, very careful about protecting its users' data here. Its relationship with NSA has to be structured to limit things to the minimum of what is needed to track the intrusions into their systems that they cited as the reason why they're considering abandoning China, maybe even appointing some sort of special commission to oversee and ultimately audit the relationship.

But if Google was being accurate in that withdrawal statement and 20 other large companies in the "Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors" were victims of massive cyber-intrusions, then Google earns a little bit of respect for being the lone company (at least publicly) to do the difficult but responsible thing and ask for some government help tracing the attacks back to their sources. A recent report suggested thousands of American companies have been compromised online. Are those other corporations making the judgment that it's better for them and their bottom lines to sweep their cybersecurity weaknesses under the rug? Other companies have made that judgment before. But America's cybersecurity vulnerabilities are in some ways the sum total of those vulnerabilities. Their country needs them to step up and take this stuff seriously.

One big question now, of course, is what happens if and when the NSA traces back these attacks and the road does lead to a foreign government.

-- Nancy Scola

(Photo credit: RabunWarna)

Charter schools are often touted as labs for novel approaches to education, but one of these innovations isn't so new at all. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA today released a report showing that charter schools have become bastions for racial re-segregation.

The racial segregation cuts both ways. In certain states with high minority populations -- in the West and South in particular -- the composition of charter schools is overwhelmingly white. In other places, it is primarily black or Latino. And because these schools operate independently of state school districts, they are more free to skirt guidelines for racial and economic diversity.

The Civil Rights Project suggests turning to magnet schools for the specialized approaches to education currently offered by charter schools. But it's an incomplete recommendation: Magnet schools function just like charter schools, but operate within the purview of school districts -- and draw on their students. There is no guarantee that they will draw a representative sample of the district's students. So unless school districts make it an active goal to ensure a diverse student body, they just become segregated charter schools with an institutional blessing.

Personally, I have never understood why specialized educational initiatives can't be implemented as programs at public schools. My high school, on the U.S.-Mexico border, was plagued by many of the problems that school districts serving high-immigrant, low-income students face (35 percent ELL learners, low college grad rate). And yet the school offered the International Baccalaureate program, allowing nerds like me to get the specialized education we needed without having to be shipped off to another school.

-- Gabriel Arana

Over at Foreign Policy, Israeli scholar Danny Kaplan has an article about Israel's experience since it lifted its ban on gays serving in the military back in 1993. The piece's title -- "They're Here, They're Queer, It's No Big Deal" -- pretty much says it all:

The United States and Turkey are now the only NATO military powers that do not allow gays to serve openly, but Israel and other countries have shown that the participation of gay soldiers in combat units presents no risk for military effectiveness. What's more, acknowledging their presence might even improve unite cohesion.

It is important to understand that even without restrictions, most gay soldiers do not "come out" in combat settings. Only a few of the soldiers I have interviewed confided their sexuality in friends from the unit, and they often did so shortly before leaving their position. Most of them developed strategies to separate between their various personal and social identities. One soldier, a gay activist prior to his enlistment, explained to me: "I don't really see that the army and my identity have anything to do with each other. Just like there is a separation of religion and state, I draw a line between the army and my ‘religion.'" This ability to balance conflicting identities is hardly unusual in the army. Soldiers of various ethnic and religious backgrounds similarly adjust to the melting pot of military culture.

This is why the policy of "don't ask, don't tell" has little relevance to the reality of military life. Despite what military officials want to ask or insist on not asking, and despite what gay activists want soldiers to tell about their sexuality, most straight soldiers are not interested in hearing it, and many gay soldiers are not interested in telling it. They simply are what they are and find ways to function together. Policies restricting the participation of gay soldiers paradoxically make sexuality a more salient issue.

This couldn't help but bring to mind the now-infamous NPR interview with former Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter. When Melissa Block pointed out to him that there are lots of gay people now serving in the military, he replied, "But they aren't open about it, like you just said. It's like if you want to work for NPR, you don't go to work and on the first day say, hey, I want everybody to know that I'm gay." (Hunter also contended that the "special bond" between members of the military will be broken "if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites, to gays and lesbians.")

What are supporters of the ban missing that the Israelis understand? It has only been in recent years that the broader public has become aware of the mundane reality of most gay people's lives. Many older people like Hunter (and the Republican membership of the Senate Armed Services Committee, apparently), haven't quite gotten that message. They seem to believe that there are only two states of gayness: closeted, and RuPaul, with nothing in between. They seem to think that existence as a gay person, in the military or elsewhere, is one long gay pride parade, where everyone is required to dance in assless chaps (see the classic article from The Onion, "Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years"). An exit from the closet, whether by a soldier or anyone else, must be performed in hot pants, to the pulsing strains of "It's Raining Men."

If that's what you think, it's only understandable that the prospect of openly gay people serving sounds like a recipe for chaos. But chances are that when it actually happens, things are going to go a lot more smoothly than the ban's proponents fear.

-- Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman talks with Christopher Carrick about urban planning and regional inequality:

I suppose what was so attractive about Richard Florida was the idea that he had uncovered a foolproof path to economic and cultural vitality. What is the current thinking about what cities can, and should, do?

After many years of debate among economic-development theorists between those who argued that "people follow jobs" and those (Florida among them) who claimed "jobs follow people," the current consensus is that cities have to build local production systems and train their local labor force at the same time as they try to attract the "creative class." Unfortunately, Florida's ideas have been used to justify using scarce public resources to provide urban amenities that cater to the presumed needs of a very limited part of the work force.

Cities should focus on "the basics" -- the essential needs of middle-class workers such as civil servants, nurses, teachers, and other service workers and the displaced manufacturing workers who want to remain in the area where they grew up rather than migrate to the South or West in search of work. Rather than catering to the desires of downtown developers by subsidizing luxury lofts, cities should address their crumbling infrastructure (especially in transportation), dysfunctional schools, city/suburban inequality, crime, and the needs of small businesses.

denied citizenship to a man whose French-born Muslim wife wears a burqa.

France’s immigration minister said he is refusing citizenship to a Muslim man who called his wife 'an inferior being,' and forced her to wear a full veil in public, an announcement that plays well with French public support for a burqa ban. . . .

. . . (Prime Minister Francois) Fillon said the Moroccan man, who had married a French woman, failed to respect the 'values of the [French] republic.'

The assault against those who wear the burqa has continually couched xenophobia in language that expresses a faux concern for women. It's true that there is a strong history of secularism and women's rights in France. However the minister seems to fail to understand is the paternalism of his own actions. It is disturbing, and against France's stated values, to think of one's wife as an inferior being. But it's also unlikely that denying her husband citizenship is going to help.

What proponents of France's anti-burqa laws -- a ban in some public spaces still hasn't been enacted but there is popular support for it -- fail to recognize is that some women actively choose to practice Islam in such a way that requires them to wear a burqa. One could argue that their choices are informed by hegemony and culture in such a way that they're aren't really choices at all, but further marginalizing those women by outlawing a central tenant of their religion isn't going to magically make them un-oppressed.

The least paternalistic thing for the government to do would be to create a public sphere in which women have access to a full range of choices about what they want to wear and what religion they want to observe, even at the risk that those choices are made with the influence of a husband who thinks them inferior. Restricting choice based on an external idea of what is going in the home is just replacing the husband with the government.

-- Monica Potts

Fliers of a P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Army Air Force in Italy "shoot the breeze" during August of 1944, during World War II. Despite the fact that at the time, the American military remained segregated by race, black airmen served with distinction and ultimately their valor contributed to the military being desegregated in 1951.

(Flickr/U.S. Army)

Former New York State Insurance Commissioner Eric Dinallo has taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispel criticisms that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner misrepresented himself during his testimony on the AIG rescue that both men participated in during the 2008 crisis.

Mr. Geithner does not contradict [my testimony]. What he does say is that a bankruptcy of the parent company would have caused problems for the insurance companies, policyholders, and the insurance market as a whole.

I agree. If AIG had gone bankrupt, state regulators would have seized the individual insurance companies. The reserves of those insurance companies would have been set aside to pay policyholders and thereby protected from AIG's creditors. However, as Mr. Geithner correctly points out, AIG's insurance companies were intertwined with each other and the parent company. Policyholders would have been paid, but only after a potentially protracted delay.

The whole thing is, as they say, worth reading.

Dinallo had more power than your average state insurance commissioner simply because of his jurisdiction -- many major insurance companies are headquartered in New York and played a large role settling the AIG debacle. He also brokered a major settlement with the multiple international firms that insured the World Trade Center in the wake of 9/11, and was one of Elliott Spitzer's top attorneys going after Wall Street. Now Dinallo is seeking Spitzer's old job and has thrown his hat into the New York State attorney general's race. I have no idea whether he's got a chance of being elected -- New York readers? -- but he certainly has a very strong body of experience for the job.

-- Tim Fernholz

Stephen Hayes thinks he has Eric Holder dead to rights, quoting a 2002 CNN interview in which Holder says that interrogating a detainee with a lawyer present is “harder,” referring to “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

CNN’s Paula Zahn asked: “How much pressure should they put on this man to get information out of him as they interrogate him?”

Holder said: “Well, I mean, it’s hard to interrogate him at this point now that he has a lawyer and now that he is here in the United States. But to the extent that we can get information from him, I think we should.”

I’ll see Hayes’ Holder and raise him a former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey. In the same year, Mukasey ruled as a federal judge that detainees had a right to counsel and that “the interference with interrogation would be minimal or nonexistent.” So at best, we have Holder being to the right of Mukasey in 2002, and Mukasey being to the left of Holder. They’ve both changed their minds.

What hasn’t changed though, is that conservatives were dead silent as the Bush administration proceeded to try terrorists in civilian courts all through their two terms in office. Holder’s statement yesterday, that “the practice of the U.S. government, followed by prior and current Administrations without a single exception, has been to arrest and detain under federal criminal law all terrorist suspects who are apprehended inside the United States,” remains accurate. Hayes himself forgot to raise a note of protest at the 145 trials of terrorists conducted over eight years of Bush. He was apparently too busy fabricating a nonexistent link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and fluffing Dick Cheney.

Lindh's case differs from that of Abdulmutallab in that Lindh was an actual enemy combatant captured fighting for the Taliban in a zone of active military combat. Why wasn’t Hayes calling for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation when he recommended Lindh be given a civilian trial?

Again, the Obama administration hasn’t handled the Abdulmutallab case any differently than the previous administration would have. The only difference is the presence of knee-jerk conservative hysteria.

— A. Serwer

In the health-care portfolio, Matt Yglesias and Peter Suderman have been sparring about whether the passage of a health-care bill will benefit the Democrats; Suderman reaches the following conclusion:

So the choice for Democrats may actually be whether they want they want to be portrayed as so single-minded in their determination to push their unpopular agenda on the public that they are willing to use party-line voting and any sort of obscure procedural trickery they can come up with to get it passed, or whether they want to be able to make the argument that they responded to the public's clear concerns and backed off an incredibly unpopular piece of legislation when they had the chance.

That's one way to look at it. Then again, I think the choice for Republicans may actually be whether they want they want to be portrayed as so single-minded in their determination to obstruct a popular president that they are willing to use party-line voting and any sort of obscure procedural trickery they can come up with to prevent his party from governing, or whether they want to be able to make the argument that they responded to the public's clear concerns and backed off an incredibly unpopular legislative strategy when they had the chance.

Governing by poll is generally silly, but if you are going to break down health-care polls, people generally support individual provisions in the bill. They just respond negatively to the politicized package of "health-care reform." And many people who oppose health-care reform actually wish it went further. This should suggest to people who quite reasonably believe both that there is a serious problem with this country's health-care system and that the bills in Congress can fix some of those problems, that the responsible thing to do is pass them. Also, Suderman seems to forget that whether or not the Democrats pivot, Republicans will be criticizing their health-care plan for many months to come, so the Dems might as well pass their bill if they have to pay for it no matter what.

-- Tim Fernholz

Matthew Yglesias argues that the Quadrennial Defense Review has China wrong:

Pretty much everyone agrees that China is the only nation with any chance of challenging American military superiority in the foreseeable future. So it's awfully strange that the Department of Defense's new Quadrennial Defense Review has little to say about the country. Explicit discussion is mostly limited to a single paragraph atop page 60, which begins with the banal observation that "China's growing presence and influence in regional and global economic and security affairs is one of the most consequential aspects of the evolving strategic landscape in the Asia-Pacific region and globally." The Defense Department then reaches the banal conclusion that our two countries "should sustain open channels of communication to discuss disagreements in order to manage and ultimately reduce the risks of conflict that are inherent in any relationship as broad and complex as that shared by these two nations."

Dull, dull stuff. But beyond being boring, these kinds of considerations are surprisingly distant from the most important issues in the U.S.-China relationship.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Aafia Siddiqui was convicted for attempted murder and armed assault after she opened fire on American troops in Afghanistan without killing anyone -- a crime for which she now faces up to 60 years in prison.* Michelle Malkin strains to show how this vindicates her claim that civilian courts can't handle terrorism cases, because Siddiqui said some pretty mean things while she was being tried, and she wasn't convicted of "terrorism":

Today, she was convicted of attempting to murder a U.S. serviceman in Pakistan. Proof that civilian trials for terrorists work? Hardly. Note that while KSM named her as a principal in U.S.-based plots to bomb gas stations and counterterrorism investigators traced her bank account to Saudi terror funders, she was not convicted of terrorism.

Right. Infamous gangster Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion -- not bootlegging, racketeering, or murder. It's been decades since his conviction; is it finally time to institute mandatory military commissions for everyone accused of a criminal offense as a part of our new "war on crime"?

There's just a general hostility from some people on the right to the basic notion of due process that I fight hard to fathom. It basically comes down to a lynch-mob mentality, where trials are a mere bureaucracy that gets in the way of a good hangin'.

-- A. Serwer

*Charged by military commission, Siddiqui's sentence would likely have been lighter than it will be now.