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LIGHTNING ROUND: COLD DEAD HANDS.
- Deep thought: Given that he's a serial liar, why does anyone care what Dick Cheney thinks about torture, national security and the new administration?
- Greg Sargent has more details on the NY Times angle of the Jane Harman warrantless wiretapping story, getting a written statement from a Times spokesperson that seems to directly contradict Bill Keller's denial from yesterday. Maybe the executive editor and the Washington bureau chief ought to compare notes and get their stories straight, no?
- Nate Silver interprets a new Gallup poll to indicate that the libertarian wing of the Republican party is currently winning the battle for the GOP's soul at the expense of social conservatives who just aren't getting the same mileage out of their pet issues as they once did. It's an interesting thought experiment, to consider whether libertarians could find greater success under the umbrella of a currently-in-the-crapper but enduring political brand, but the GOP's political coalition is less about one faction triumphing over another and more about those factions finding some sort of peaceful coexistence.
- In case you haven't been keeping score at home, Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas has become the fifth Republican to say something mildly critical of Rush Limbaugh, only to "revise" his statement a few days/hours later. I tried to come up with a comparable relationship Limbaugh has to the GOP on the Left and drew a blank.
- Seems a member of the Ohio militia wants to organize a "peaceful demonstration" of "at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington." Even if such a thing could be organized, I'm pretty sure the Park Service -- to say nothing of the Capitol Police and the Secret Service -- wouldn't permit it. But I'm curious what, precisely, they would be demonstrating against. The best I could come up with was this totalitarian federal judge ruling that you can't bring concealed weapons into national parks.
- Remainders: Inhofe promises to filibuster a noncontroversial judicial nominee; Dave Weigel writes about the "civil war" between increasingly reasonable and non-crazy blogger Charles Johnson and the rest of the paranoid right-wing blogosphere; it's Bush v. Clinton on May 29th; and Yglesias asks a question I've been wondering, "Who is Meghan McCain?"
--Mori Dinauer
COMMENTS (3)
I don't really buy Dick Cheney's interpretation of national security. I think that the U.S. should focus more on soft power and increase the strategic foreign aid budget. The U.S. should be doing way more to address the Millennium Development Goals. The plan to end world hunger has been getting seriously ignored.
$30 billion: Annual shortfall to end world hunger.
$550 billion: U.S. Defense budget.
(source: borgenproject.org.)
Posted by: David Waters | April 21, 2009 5:32 PM
With respect to Nate, Republican voters always pretend to be libertarians when the Democrats are in charge, so I'm not surprised that the Gallup poll suggests they oppose "big government" today.
But of course, those same voters, pundits, and pols applauded every power grab under Bush, lauded him as their Commander in Chief and continue to make excuses for everything from the the suspension of habeas corpus to the obsessive secrecy of the Bush administration and the use of torture.
So I don't think the rest of us have to take them seriously as libertarians.
Posted by: Jinchi | April 21, 2009 5:47 PM
Damn, Jinchi stole my comment.
When can we stop pretending that a "libertarian" is anything other than a Republican who doesn't want to be arrested for smoking a joint or frequenting prostitutes? Even so, the idea that they have to pay taxes that might benefit some undeserving black or brown person will always keep them firmly in the (R) camp. They are not a different species of Republican; they are just socially moderate Republicans, like the Log Cabin Repubs.
The selfishness is the thing, you see.
Posted by: brewmn | April 22, 2009 12:00 AM