Todd Purdum’s VF piece on Sarah Palin contains lovely little tidbits like this one:
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”
And this is even better:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
And, happily, Purdum seems to have touched off yet another internal squabble inside the distressed and befuddled Republican Party. From Politico:
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. Are you as sick of this stuff as I am?
Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn’t conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming.
…
But it’s hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it’s more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time.
One of the really frustrating things about arguing with right-wing true believers is that they have a security blanket, and they cling to it. It’s the market. The magical market will fix everything. Capitalist fundamentalists are willing to ignore all manner of actual historical and economic evidence in order to assert that market forces are the best solution to every problem. This phenomenon is quite evident in the health care debate. Our system costs more, is less efficient, is more riddled with pointless bureaucracy, and covers far, far fewer people than the various systems employed by most other industrialized nations. Nevertheless, conservatives (American ones, anyway) cling to their security blanket. The market is always the answer - evidence be damned. Health care, their argument goes, is just another commodity, so the market will save the day. (In my view, a lap top computer is a commodity; access to health care should be a human right).
Paul Krugman’s recent post “Health care is not a bowl of cherries” is brief but makes an important point: the health care debate is bogus. There are many parties involved who are honestly trying to figure out how to improve the American health care system. Many on the right, however, are contributing nothing of value, and only making the process more difficult. Because they insist, with something that is quite close to religious zeal, that the market will always fix everything. Krugman responds, in particular, to people like Greg Mankiw and George Will. Here’s an excerpt from Will’s column, illustrating his childish attachment to market fundamentalism:
As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president’s reforms will result in health-care “rationing.” Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative’s task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.
Krugman’s response is spot-on (and I can identify with his palpable frustration):
Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.
I guess it doesn’t matter what economists know, or what evidence suggests. Conservatives will cling to their security blanket. It makes them feel good.
This time it comes from the tax-evading, prostitute-frequenting gasbag Dick Morris. Obama has already been accused of being Hitler, of hoping to institute Sharia law in America, of wanting to build concentration camps for children, of attempting to nationalize the whole American economy, and of generally being a terrorist’s best friend. Now, the revolting Morris tells us that Obama has effectively repealed the Declaration of Independence. I hesitated to post this video, as it is a particularly transparent and disgusting attempt to sell books. But it is also important to confront this sort of nonsense.
When it comes to health care, our right-wingers are just a lot more doctrinaire, less practical, and less humane than many right-wingers elsewhere. Case in point - in an attempt to show the superiority of America’s absurd and inefficient system, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) decided to diss Ontario. And he got an angry response from Conservative senator Hugh Segal of Kingston, Ontario.
In a blistering statement this week before the Canadian Senate, Mr. Segal took on the U.S. Republican Senate Leader who is leading the charge against government-funded health care in his country.
Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky made the mistake of suggesting that the residents of Mr. Segal’s hometown of Kingston, Ont., are provided with health care that is inferior to what is available in the United States.
…
“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average lifespan in Kentucky is 75.2 years and according to Statistics Canada, that number is 80.4 years in Ontario, 78.3 years in Kingston,” [Segal] told the Canadian Senate after discounting Mr. McConnell’s numbers.
“Furthermore, according to a Fraser Institute study, in 2006, the U.S. spent $6,714 per capita versus $3,678 in Canada.”
Mr. Segal said in a telephone interview yesterday that the statistics indicate that Canadians are actually doing a better job at health care than their southern neighbours.
Mr. Segal is a Conservative, both with a small c and a capital one. He is not a “socialist.” But unlike conservatives in the United States, Canadian cons seem willing to confront access to health care as a serious issue, rather than an opportunity to express their mindless loyalty to the concept of private insurance and their reactionary hatred of anything that resembles single-payer health coverage. And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the Conservative Party of Canada, in its statement of founding principles, includes the concept that “all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”
There have been a number of things about the Obama administration that have been somewhat disappointing thus far. But stories like this one show that there is reason to believe that Obama’s victory in November is resulting in some real, significant changes. In particular, it is important that we now have a president who seems interested in diplomacy as a path to progress in foreign relations. Unlike those of his predecessor, Obama’s first instincts aren’t to engage in sabre-rattling and pre-emtive war. And it is refreshing to have a president who doesn’t think that diplomacy and a desire for peace are signs of weakness. From TPM:
President Barack Obama has decided to return a U.S. ambassador to Syria after a four-year hiatus as talks between the two nations intensify, U.S. media reported Tuesday.
…
By returning a senior U.S. envoy to Damascus, Obama is seeking to carve out a far larger role for the United States in the region as he works to rehabilitate U.S. relations with the Islamic world and the Arab Middle East, the newspaper said.
“It’s in our interests to have an ambassador in Syria,” a senior administration official told CNN.
This is a strange story. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has been quite visible in the national media in the past year or so, and was often mentioned as a possible candidate for President or V.P., appears to be missing and out of touch. His wife says she doesn’t know where he is, but that she’s not worried. State law enforcement and the governor’s office say they haven’t been able to reach him since Thursday. And at least one state legislator wants to know who is in charge of the state if no one knows the whereabouts of the governor.
Doughy-looking strawberry enthusiast and Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis is apparently sick and tired of all of those poor, hungry kids in her state who are receiving - you guessed it - food. Food. Food for the hungry. Cynthia Davis is against food for the hungry.
(Here’s a shocker - she’s a Republican).
There are 100,000 more unemployed people in Missouri now than there were two years ago, and twenty per cent of children in the state live with hunger. Representative Davis, however, questions whether food assistance programs are necessary, since “hunger can be a positive motivator” and “if you work at McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.”
Cynthia Davis, you preposterous buffoon, I HATE WHAT YOU JUST SAID.
Conservatives love to denigrate any alternative to our ineffective and ineficient health care coverage system. “We have the best health care system in the world,” they like to say. It has become a ubiquitous cry. Well, millions of Americans without coverage aren’t wild about our system, nor are millions more who pay outrageous premiums for lousy coverage, all to support a bloated insurance infrastructure. And, by the way, the World Health Organization isn’t so sure that USA is #1, either. In fact, their research says we’re number 37. Here’s the top 40, as of 2000:
1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America 38 Slovenia
39 Cuba
40 Brunei
Matthew Yglesias points out that there is a wide array of healthcare systems out there, and that many of them work better than ours:
[Systems that work better than the U.S. system include] systems with Beveridge-style models (like the UK), systems with a single-payer insurance model (like Canada), and Bismark-style regulated-competition models (like Switzerland and the Netherlands)—all kinds of things work better than what we do. Another things liberals point out is that the Veterans’ Health Administration, which is an island of Beveridgism amidst America’s capitalist health fiasco, performs much better than the rest of the system.
It seems he’s at it once again (remember this time? And this one?) Pat Buchanan - who regularly appears in the big commerical media and is generally accepted as a mainstream (if idiosyncratic) pundit - appears to think that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is worse than segregation, slavery, etc. In other words, he likes the old-school racism better than affirmative action. Check it out:
Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.
…
…Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.
One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy” [bold added].
Lots of people have problems with affirmative action. I know. But this is beyond insane. The “old bigotry,” it seems to me, involved slavery, the slave trade and middle passage, segregation, beatings, lynchings, cross-burnings, and a host of other brutalities. The “bigotry” that Buchanan really hates, however, is that which helps people from traditionally oppressed groups get opportunities to go to college and such.
Center City employees and shoppers were given quite a scare this morning by a man who was ranting and wielding a knife for nearly an hour at 8th and Market streets, police said.
What they didn’t see was the hand grenade that police later recovered from his bag.
Witnesses said that the man, with the knife pulled, began ranting on the sidewalk shortly after 8 a.m., but police weren’t contacted for nearly an hour, said police spokeswoman Officer Tania Little.
When police arrived, they saw the man threatening passers-by with a large army knife. Authorities detained the man and found a hand grenade inside a camouflage backpack he wore, Little said.
If the government-sponsored “public plan” version of heathcare Obama favors is so much crappier and more inefficient than the current ones, why is the industry wasting so much money and resources to defeat it?
That beeping sound you hear is the ship of state being thrown into reverse. Obama just pulled a 180 and has now decided that releasing more detainee abuse photos will “endanger our troops.”
Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting post today (with a link to Michael Tomaskey) about the nature of partisan politics and sexual propriety. You wouldn’t think that sexual affairs would be judged by the party affiliation of their participants, would you? But you’d be wrong.
It seems that cheating on your cancer-stricken wife has career-ending implications if you’re a Democrat (John Edwards), but not if you’re a Republican (Newt Gingrich). Getting busted for enjoying the services of a hooker? If you’re a Republican (David Vitter), you keep your job; if you’re Democrat (Eliot Spitzer), you’re expected to resign.
Fascinating. It is especially curious since, as Yglesias points out, “only one of the two parties…puts a very high premium on the idea that state regulation of individual sexual behavior should be the main role of government.” And that same party is the one that most loudly trumpets the importance of protecting “the sanctity of marriage,” too. Fascinating.
But there’s more to this than just sex, it seems to me. For instance, if you opposed the Vietnam War, and took steps to prevent yourself from going, and you’re a Democrat, you’re loudly and repeatedly labeled a draft dodger (Bill Clinton). But if you’re a Republican, and you were in favor of the Vietnam War, and took steps to prevent yourself from going (Bush, Cheney, et al), you’re fine.
That’s totally backwards, isn’t it?
If you were opposed to the war, and you made sure you didn’t go, (whatever one thinks of that position), at least it is morally defensible and consistent. You didn’t want to fight in an unjust war, and you didn’t want others to have to, either. If you were in favor of the war, and you made sure you didn’t go, it seems to me that you’re a coward and a hypocrite. You thought the war was great, but there was no way you were going to fight it - you’d let others, especially those who didn’t have connections, fight it for you. But I suppose it isn’t exactly news that the likes of Dick Cheney are cowardly and hypocritical.
So if you’re a Democrat, and you have an affair, or you refuse to fight in combat, watch out. If you’re a Republican - well, it’s complicated.
There’s an article today in the New York Times titled “Industry Pledges to Control Heath Care Costs.” The article explains how the lobbyists of the health care industry have made solemn promises to the Obama administration that they will “voluntarily” work to reduce the cost of health care over the next few years:
Doctors, hospitals, drug makers and insurance companies will join President Obama on Monday in announcing their commitment to a sharp reduction in the growth of national health spending, White House officials said Sunday.
The officials said the plan could save $2,500 a year for a family of four in the fifth year and a total of $2 trillion for the nation over 10 years. That could make it less expensive for Congress to enact comprehensive health insurance coverage, a daunting challenge facing the Obama administration.
At this point, administration officials said, they do not have a way to enforce the commitment, other than by publicizing the performance of health care providers to hold them accountable.
By offering to hold down costs voluntarily, providers said, they hope to stave off new government price constraints that might be imposed by Congress or a National Health Board of the kind favored by many Democrats.
[my emphasis]
What I want to know is why the industry didn’t decide to do this before? You’re telling me it’s “voluntary” now? And all this time you’ve been telling me that the magic of capitalism is always working to ruthlessly enforce efficiency and innovation — thus ensuring that we receive services at the lowest possible price.
I can’t wait to hear these same people argue that government “price constraints” will introduce market inefficiencies that will reduce quality and increase costs.
The wild paranoid fantasies of the right continue. Republican Representative Pete Sessions of Texas apparently thinks Barack Obama is a really, really evil guy. Obama, Sessions says, hopes to wreak havoc on our country in order to carry out his power-hungry agenda.
At the beginning of April, a Fox News poll asked respondents whether they believed that President Obama “wants the financial crisis to continue so government can take over more businesses and grow the federal government.” Only 23 percent said that they thought Obama wanted it to continue, but that minority view was recently endorsed by a top-ranking Republican official. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the NRCC, told the New York Times that he believes President Obama aims to “‘diminish employment and diminish stock prices‘ as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to consolidate power.”
Sessions further argues that Obama’s platform is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”
At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the AP’s Jennifer Loven looked like the hooker you find passed out in a seedy hotel stairwell. The wench-hook earrings, gale-force coiffure and seaweed eveningwear will be tough to top next year.
And except for a pretty tasteless joke about Dick Cheney’s interrogation program — which reminded me of Bush’s “where’s the WMD” routine — I thought the president was pretty hilarious.
Any moderates in the house? MC Steele wants you to join the Sugar (Capitol) Hill Gang and the fresh GOP house party.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele appealed to the political middle Friday to join his party but added that the party itself wouldn’t moderate.
“All you moderates out there, y’all come. I mean, that’s the message,” Steele said at a news conference. “The message of this party is this is a big table for everyone to have a seat. I have a place setting with your name on the front.
“Understand that when you come into someone’s house, you’re not looking to change it. You come in because that’s the place you want to be.”
“That vote on the stimulus bill was the effectiveness of a party call,” he said. “That was a stand-up moment for every Republican. . . . And so, you voted yourself out of the party. We didn’t kick you out.”
Yeaahh, party call, you heard him.
Steele said under his leadership the party would attract more members - including young people - but it would not waver from its commitment to limiting taxes and spending.
“Lift up the young talent that comes to a convention like this on a Friday night,” he told convention-goers. “Don’t waste them.”
Steele - who appeared to be the only African-American in the room Friday - said when he visited a Maryland Republican Party dinner in the mid-1980s he was “obviously a stranger in the room.” But he said he was quickly embraced and rose to county party chairman two years later. From there, he went on to become state party chairman and lieutenant governor.
Steele said Republicans had to return to their roots to rebuild the party.
Here is another Bachmann treat for all of you who, like me, can’t quite get enough of the lunatic representative from Minnesota. Governor Tim Pawlenty is featured in this video, too, but he doesn’t provide quite the entertainment that Michele does. My favorite part of this piece is most definitely Bachmann’s Nazi salute about 35 seconds into the video (right after she uses the word “evil”). She also says that the government is “impovering [sic], enslaving, and fitting the next generation in shackles and chains,” which is good stuff, but you can’t beat a good Nazi salute.
From former W speechwriter Jay Nordlinger at NRO comes one of the strangest and most pathetic-sounding statements of partisanship and power-worship I can ever remember reading:
In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush. Certainly the less snarky and narrow. Most of the people I admire most, admire the 43rd president.
I am proud to be one of the worst people Nordlinger has never met.
And I find it preposterous that anyone - except maybe W’s mother - would suggest that one’s character is linked to one’s appreciation for our 43rd president. In many ways, Bush vividly represents what is worst about America. Coddled by privilege, he was handed everything he ever got in life. He spent much of his life underachieving and wasting the privileges he had been handed. A self-professed patriot, he used his connections to hide when duty called during Vietnam, allowing others to fight a war that he supported. And eventually, because of his name, and because of the many advantages that he didn’t earn, he rose to the highest office in America. Once in office, he enacted policies that would help protect the privileges of the few and reward his friends in coprorate America, in both cases at the expense of the health of the nation. He also started a war under false pretenses, ordered the United States to engage in torture, held prisoners (many of whom insiders now say were innocent) indefinitely without charge, ordered illegal wiretapping, governed in an excessively partisan way, and alienated our allies.
There’s more. But I think I’ve made my point. There are many things I admire about America. But Bush represents those things I like least about my country - the arrogance and entitlement of privilege, phony and hypocritcal patriotism, greed, militarism, and a willingness to sacrifice freedom and decency in the name of “security.”
Minnesota Representative and national embarrassment Michele Bachmann is at it again. This time, she’s pointing out that there seems to be an eerie correlation between swine flu outbreaks and - you guessed it - Democrats!
The fact that she was wrong, and the previous outbreak she referred to actually started during Ford’s term, not Carter’s, is sort of beside the point, isn’t it?
There was an episode of the Simpsons some years back, which contained a scene intended to lampoon Fox News. As the Fox reporter spoke, one of the stories in the news crawl at the bottom of the screen read “Do Democrats Cause Cancer?” At the time, I thought that was really funny.
Despite Arlen Specter’s defection, it is not quite the time to declare the death of the Republican party (remember Jim Jeffords?) But Paul Krugman sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well:
What strikes me, however, is the extent to which this is a self-inflicted wound. If [Republican Senate challenger] Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth weren’t so diligent about enforcing supply-side purity; if Republicans hadn’t made Rush Limbaugh the effective head of the party; Specter might still be GOP, and the Obama agenda much more limited.
Instead, though, we have a party that seems to be in a death spiral: the smaller it gets, the more it’s dominated by the hard right, which makes it even smaller. In the long run, this is not good for American democracy– we really do need two major parties in competition. But I’ll settle for getting that back after we get universal health care and cap-and-trade [bold added].
Long-time Republican Pennsylvania Senator, magic-bullet theory guy, and Howdy Doody lookalike Arlen Specter may be in electoral trouble. It seems right-wing challenger Pat Toomey is ahead of Specter by 21 points in the latest Rasmussen primary poll.
This could be good news for the Democrats. Specter, as a relatively moderate Republican, has had crossover appeal in the somewhat divided but nonetheless blue-ish Keystone State. (In Presidential elections, for example, PA voted for Clinton twice, Gore, Kerry, and Obama, and has a Democratic governor and junior senator). The arch-conservative Toomey, on the other hand, seems poised to do well in Pennsylvania’s closed Republican primary, but should have much less appeal with independents and Democrats in a general statewide election.
In his piece in the National Review titled “The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’,” Lowry tries to argue that the torture memos are something of which our nation can be proud. I am not kidding.
The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the “torture memos.” Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” as Pres. Barack Obama put it.
Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn’t have bothered [bold added].
With all due respect, Rich, the “while adhering to its legal commitments and norms” part is just plain wrong. The Bush administration was doing the opposite - the administration was trying to create legal language that would allow the administration not to adhere to legal commitments and norms. And this was a pattern. In the name of the war on terror, the administration rejected (even mocked) the Geneva Conventions, pretended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act didn’t exist, violated the fourth amendment, and threw habeas corpus out the window. Adhering to the law is not the same thing as creating language that allows you not to adhere to the law. Its the opposite.
The release of the torture memos is not an occasion to pat ourselves on the back, Rich. Rather, it’s the opposite.
Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman surveys the landscape of paranoid rhetoric coming from the right as of late. Since Obama’s inauguration, we have been treated to quite a mixed bag of insanity, including:
-Obama is a communist
-Obama is a fascist
-Obama is planning to build concentration camps
-Obama wants to send our children to re-education camps
-Obama is so bad that Texas might just secede from the union
-Obama is planning to take your guns away (an old favorite!)
-Obama is making plans for the one-world currency
-Obama is planning to declare martial law
And so forth. That such things might emanate from the tin-foil-hat set is understandable; there are always fringe elements (across the political spectrum) who embrace wild conspiracy theories and engage in paranoid rants. But the lunacy and fear mongering that has bubbled up in recent weeks and months has come, for example, from members of congress, a governor, and well-known figures at major media outlets. Disturbing.
Noted TV jackass and supporter of discredited economic theories Larry Kudlow recently took objection to what he saw as a “Boyz N the Hood handshake” between President Obama and Hugo Chavez:
It’s reappropriation days in the culture wars. Following the recasting of Thomas Paine as a modern day tea-bagger, Shakespeare is up next. The Wall Street Journal shows pointy-headed academics how to conduct real literary criticism, supreme court style:
In his 34 years on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens has evolved from idiosyncratic dissenter to influential elder, able to assemble majorities on issues such as war powers and property rights. Now, the court’s senior justice could be gaining ground on a case that dates back 400 years: the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
Justice Stevens, who dropped out of graduate study in English to join the Navy in 1941, is an Oxfordian — that is, he believes the works ascribed to William Shakespeare actually were written by the 17th earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. Several justices across the court’s ideological spectrum say he may be right.
This puts much of the court squarely outside mainstream academic opinion, which equates denial of Shakespeare’s authorship with the Flat Earth Society.
You can see where this is heading. Promising young literary scholar renounces his budding career in service of his country only to spurn literary study upon his return to the States in favor of law. Actually, it’s a fascinating biography of a distinguished American. And god knows that Republican moderates could use a reasonable figure to rebuild around. Then again an 88 year-old WWII vet isn’t exactly the face of the future that an out-in-the-woods political party needs. But this is the Republic party.
So what’s the WSJ really up to here? Read on:
“Oh my,” said Coppelia Kahn, president of the Shakespeare Association of America and professor of English at Brown University, when informed of Justice Stevens’s cause. “Nobody gives any credence to these arguments,” she says.
Nonetheless, since the 19th century, some have argued that only a nobleman could have produced writings so replete with intimate depictions of courtly life and exotic settings far beyond England. Dabbling in entertainments was considered undignified, the theory goes, so the author laundered his works through Shakespeare, a member of the Globe Theater’s acting troupe.
Nonetheless, the WSJ presses on, having dispensed with the so-called expert who’s the head of such a manifestly extremist organization. Journalism is about being fair and balanced, after all. “The bow-tied, 88-year-old Justice Stevens, who often leads the court’s liberal wing,” continues the article. Hold up one minute. While it is true that Stevens has famously sided with the majority on important decisions regarding abortion and gay marriage, his judicial record is decidedly up the middle. His Segal-Cover score is much, much closer to Clarence Thomas than to those hippies Souter and Ginsberg. Hell, he’s significantly to the right of famously up the middle Sandra Day O’Connor. Did mention that Nixon first appointed him to a federal court and Ford nominated him for the supreme court, both noted liberals. I rest my case.
Justice Stevens admits there’s a “fringe” element of anti-Shakespearians who spin elaborate but unlikely theories. “I think that’s one of the things that hurts the cause — and the fact that the guy who first came up with de Vere was named Looney,” he says.
On the other hand, “a lot of people like to think its Shakespeare because…they like to think that a commoner can be such a brilliant writer,” he says. “Even though there is no Santa Claus, it’s still a wonderful myth.”
Aha! Historical revisionism, favored tool of the liberal academic elite! And of course there’s the “wonderful myth” that originality is never to be found among the chaff of society. Everyone knows that the historical record tells us that only the wealthy and fabulous every did anything worth remembering. But isn’t it quaint to think of ol’ Will penning Hamlet and Frederick Douglass writing his own autobiography? And how did that commoner Keats manage to write some of the best poetry of the nineteenth century?
On this issue, Justice Stevens sees eye to eye with his frequent conservative antagonist, Antonin Scalia, who says that as a child he received a monograph propounding de Vere’s cause from a family friend.
“My wife, who is a much better expert in literature than I am, has berated me,” says Justice Scalia. “She thinks we Oxfordians are motivated by the fact that we can’t believe that a commoner could have done something like this, you know, it’s an aristocratic tendency.”
A plausible argument…if you’re a liberal.
Justice Scalia prefers to turn the tables.
“It is probably more likely that the pro-Shakespearean people are affected by a democratic bias than the Oxfordians are affected by an aristocratic bias,” he says.
Never mind. It’s probably more likely that you, dear reader, saw this move coming. This is vintage Scalia, the frequent conservative antagonist of the notoriously liberal Stevens. Thank goodness Stevens has seen the light on this one and sided with his more reasonable archenemy.
Unfortunately, the “great man” method of explaining history through exemplary figures whose sheer brilliance transcended the cultures that formed them invites these kind of pissing matches. We have access to the most important body of literary work in the English language with the added bonus of mysterious authorship (de Vere’s biography is every bit as colorful as Shakespeare), but let’s not get too caught up in “circumstantial evidence.” Disguise and misdirection were two of Shakespeare’s most formidable literary tools, after all.
You have often
Begun to tell me what I am, but stopp’d
And left me to a bootless inquisition,
Concluding ‘Stay: not yet.‘
Oh Miranda! Let us too drink to the bootless inquisition of discovering the author of Shakespeare’s works once and for all.
Seventy-two percent of those questioned in the poll released Monday disagree with Cheney’s view that some of Obama’s actions have put the country at greater risk, with 26 percent agreeing with the former vice president.
You know what might be interesting? A serious story interviewing an array of terrorism experts at length and asking whether there’s truth to Cheney’s claims. You could even expand the scope of the question and ask prominent terrorism skeptics like John Mueller whether it even matters if Cheney’s claims are true, or whether a slightly increased risk of terrorism is overwhelmed by the economic and diplomatic dangers posed by the Bush/Cheney approach.
But no. Instead, CNN asks whether the median American agrees with Cheney’s comment. Because the issue isn’t whether Obama has actually opened up vulnerabilities. It’s whether he’s perceived to have done so. There’s a sort of radical populism on display here that would almost be admirable if I was more certain that it was conscious.
In the interest of serious journalism, Fox News is hosting a “virtual tea party” on tax day. I am not kidding. They are not merely “covering” what they call the “tea party movement;” Fox News is essentially promoting it. The Fox newsbot in the clip below actually says “can’t get to a tea party? Fox nation hosts a virtual tea party - you can check it out on [the Fox News website].”
If, during the Bush years, a liberal organization had organized a movement with historically revolutionary overtones, like this one, and it was being “hosted” online by a network, the right would be screaming “treason.”
Watch this and gag:
I can’t wait for the virtual John Birch Society meetings, virtual NRA outings, and other such virtually journalistic services that Fox News will undoubtedly be providing sometime soon.
James Dobson, whose record is now 0-1 in Culture Wars
Focus on the Family Founder, bible-thumping culture warrior, dangerously repressed busybody, sexist homophobe, and all-around cretin James Dobson has come close to conceding defeat in the culture war. Bill Clinton and the internet, it seems, have combined with other generalized forces of evil to defeat Dobson and his righteous band of warriors. Unfortunately, he isn’t quite giving up. In any event, this is rather fun to read:
“The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the definition of marriage. We fought all those battles and really it was a holding action. […]
[W]e made a lot of progress through the Eighties but then we turned into the Nineties and the internet came along and a new president came along and all of that went away and now we are absolutely awash in evil. And we are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?
Personally, I hope he does give up, and I prefer evil. If “evil” means resisting Dobson’s call for biblically-mandated gender roles, if evil means promoting marriage equality, if evil means believing that “tolerance” and “diversity” represent something more than “buzzwords” - then count me evil.
The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.
In an e-mail to the agency’s work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be “promptly terminated,” and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.
The bad news:
Panetta, however, said that CIA officers who were involved in interrogations using “enhanced” methods authorized by the Justice Department during the Bush administration “should not be investigated, let alone punished” [bold added].
The message: We’re going to curb our most abhorrent behaviors, but we’re going to give the Bush administration a pass on its illegal actions.
Translation of the message: The law does not apply to the powerful.
How does fascism develop out of (or return to) a democratic state? Look no further than Italy. Last week we followed Berlusconi’s adventures at the G20 (and we didn’t even get to his antics at the NATO meeting in Germany). Predictably, the Italian press has been all over these gaffes, rightly noting how silly Berlusconi looks and how damaging such behavior is to Italian national interests. His response?
Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has made an ominous threat to the Italian press of “direct and tough” reprisals after unflattering reports of a number of diplomatic gaffes he committed at the round of summits in Britain, France and Germany.
Berlusconi berated journalists for their coverage after he skipped an official Nato photo and kept the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, waiting at the end of a red carpet while he finished a conversation on his mobile phone.
Last week, Italian and foreign newspapers had a field day when the eccentric billionaire appeared to irritate the Queen by shouting out to Barack Obama during a photo call (though Buckingham Palace later denied any ill feeling).
It is the first time Berlusconi, who controls most of Italy’s television networks, has made such intimidating noises about the press. The professional body representing Italian journalists said his comments were of “unprecedented gravity”.
Berlusconi’s remarks come amid mounting concern among opposition politicians over his apparent impatience with democratic constraints. Already this year he has clashed with the president, Giorgio Napolitano, over an attempt to override the judiciary, and with the speaker of the chamber of deputies, his ally, Gianfranco Fini, over his government’s use of decrees to sidestep parliamentary debate.
Speaking to reporters in Prague late on Saturday, Berlusconi said the Italian press had “no other aim than that of saying the prime minister has committed faux pas or gaffes”. In fact, he said: “I am here to represent Italy precisely because there is no one else [to do so], and out of a sense of responsibility.”
After accusing journalists of “defaming me and misinforming readers”, he added: “I don’t want to go as far as to talk about direct and tough actions in respect of certain newspapers and press personalities. But, frankly, I’m tempted.”
His government has already passed a bill handing down jail time for journalists who release portions of wiretapped conversations used in criminal investigations. As I have previously written, this was in response to the embarrassing transcripts of his own backroom dealings that were leaked last year.
But lest you think that this reflects a principled stand for privacy rights in Italy, it is my sad duty to inform you that Italy ranks first in the world in electronic surveillance of its citizens. As Berlusconi famously argued during one of his many corruption trials, that before the law, some people are more equal than others.
But let us continue:
The Italian press may be vulnerable to pressure from Berlusconi, below, on three fronts:
• Because of an 1987 amendment to an Italian law passed six years earlier, many smaller daily newspapers receive subsidies from the state that were originally intended for party organs. A television investigation three years ago found that between them, the papers received an annual €667m (£607m).
• One of Italy’s four national dailies, Il Giornale, is owned by Berlusconi’s brother, Paolo.
• The subtlest, but most serious, threat would be of pressure on media proprietors. The global recession has increased the government’s already considerable presence in Italy’s economy and handed Berlusconi vast powers of patronage over the industrialists and financiers who own Italy’s other main dailies.
Benito Mussolini was a journalist turned authoritarian politician. So was his brother. Uh-oh.
So, let’s make a Fascist pie shall we? Ingredients: Tough-talking anti-establishment blowhard. Check. Wild promises to restore the country to its former glory. Check. Restriction of civil liberties. Check. Oppressive control of national media. Almost there.
Mamma mia, let’s pop this sucker in the oven, I’m getting hungry!
President Barack Obama will outline in a major speech on Sunday a blueprint for ridding the world of nuclear weapons that calls for the United States to reduce its reliance on history’s deadliest arms and lead a new international effort to prevent terrorists from acquiring them.
The plan would reverse the former Bush administration’s policy that made nuclear weapons a central pillar of U.S. security policy by preserving an arsenal of thousands of warheads, expanding the targets against which they could be used and embracing the development of new weapons.
Under Obama’s proposals, the United States also would return to its previous policy of negotiating complex international arms agreements, an approach that the former Bush administration viewed as being too cumbersome and restricting of U.S power.
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina continues believe that it is more important to engage in ideological posturing than to help the citizens of his state. Rejecting stimulus money, which is intended to help South Carolina’s economy and educational system, has become a kind of crusade for the governor. He’d rather look like a true believer in the eyes of Grover Norquist types, apparently, than use federal funds to improve the lives of real people in his state.
He recently told an unemployed South Carolinian that rather than take stimulus money, he’d say some prayers for the unemployed. He also wants to reject stimulus money dedicated for educational purposes, even if it costs 4,000 S.C. teachers their jobs. For Governor Sanford, it doesn’t matter if your school is falling apart, or if your class sizes are getting out of control; what matters is that he makes a point about his dedication to his morally and economically bankrupt principles.
Sanford goes as far as to say that accepting federal aid for his state’s school system would be “fiscal child abuse” because it results from deficit spending and therefore isn’t sustainable. So if you are a teacher in South Carolina, and you find yourself unemployed, or if you are a student in a crumbling school, things may be pretty grim for you. But you can rest assured that your governor sleeps well at night, knowing that he is sticking to his belief that the magical market and small government will solve all of our problems. The fact that is isn’t true doesn’t seem to matter to Sanford at all.
