THE PRICE OF JUSTICE

A haunting story of what lengths people will go to in order to get law enforcement by the always outstanding Mac McClelland.

"It's about justice," Ruben, 29, tells me when I say it doesn't make any sense for victims to scrape together a pile of beating-up money after getting their cash stolen. "People want people either beat up or locked up. And on a reservation, they're probably not gonna get anybody locked up."


Statistically speaking, he's probably right. The rate of violent crime among Native Americans is twice the national average (PDF); on some reservations, it's 20 times higher. At least one in three American Indian women will be raped (PDF) in their lifetimes. Yet just 3,000 tribal and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officers—the only kinds of cops with jurisdiction on Indian land—patrol 56 million acres. In 2008, the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas had nine officers for 9,000 people in an area twice the size of Delaware. (A typical town with the same population has three times that number.) Tribal courts can only prosecute misdemeanors such as petty theft and public intoxication. They can't issue sentences longer than one year without meeting special criteria, and even then, three years is the maximum. More serious crimes must be handled by federal prosecutors, who turn down 65 percent (PDF) of the reservation cases referred to them.


Non-Indians commit two-thirds of violent crimes against Indians, including 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults. Yet thanks to a 1978 Supreme Court ruling, tribes can not prosecute outsiders who commit crimes on their land. (The case involved a white guy who'd assaulted a tribal police officer and another who'd attempted a high-speed getaway from reservation cops.)

 Like something out of a Tony Hillerman or Lee Child novel, only this is real.  Luckily, somebody is doing something about it:

In July, President Obama signed the Tribal Law and Order Act (PDF) in the White House's East Room. Standing beside him were two Indian men in headdresses, and Lisa Marie Iyotte, a Lakota woman whose rape case the feds had decided, without even interviewing her, not to pursue. (She couldn't stop sobbing, even after Obama put his arm around her.) The act includes reforms like increasing tribal courts' sentencing authority to three years—if they provide public defenders and trained judges. It mandates that tribal officers be instructed how to interview sexual-assault victims and collect evidence. It requires the Department of Justice to keep track of any Indian cases it declines to prosecute, and to gather more statistics on crime on Indian land. Obama called it "an important step to help the federal government better address the unique public safety challenges that confront tribal communities."

Most likely Americans never heard of the TLO Act, let alone that President Obama signed it into law.  But we're all too worried about what Obama hasn't done for us these days, and continue to ignore what he has accomplished.

TODAY IN VILLAGE IDIOCY

Politico's Ben Smith is 100% right for once...but 100% wrong as well.

The weekend collapse of the Adminisration's airline screening policy is hard to understand as a matter of messaging, with Clinton undermining the TSA's screening regime and the relevant official sending a hazy mixed message on the subject, even as the screening policy remains in place.

There's no doubt about who won on this issue: Matt Drudge chose it and drove it, illustrating both his continued power and his great sense of the public mood, and it now seems a matter of time until he gets results.

But the moment is also, a smart Democrat notes, representative of how this administration (and to be fair, everyone in public life) continues to wrestle with "populism as narrated by the Drudge Report." There are some echoes of the Shirley Sherrod mess in the panicked, mixed reactions.

Drudge still rules the Village whenever he sets the shiny ball rolling, but it's Villagers like Smith who follow it and then blame the left for saying "You know what?  He has a point for once."  Obama really is on the wrong side of this TSA problem, and it's not a messaging issue, but a "continuation of a moronic Bush policy issue."



Drudge wouldn't have his power if it wasn't for guys like Ben Smith, who manage to A) confirm that Drudge runs the Village High School Cool Kids and B) dump on the Left by equating anyone who thinks the TSA issue is a serious problem to Breitbart and his Shirley Sherrod story.  Ben Smith ought to know better than this.


Just because Drudge covered the story doesn't mean it wasn't a problem before he used it to attack Obama.


Ahh, but the real problem is the Left's reaction to this, and the normally excellent Kevin Drum is a prime example.

I know I'm totally off the reservation on this, which is a little weird since I'm a bit of a privacy crank. But I think liberals have been badly rolled on this. We're usually better about letting ourselves get sucked into the Drudge vortex.

Yes Kevin, you are waaaaaaaay off the reservation on this, and doing Drudge's work for him.  And giving into this silly theory is exactly what Drudge wants to do:  remove the fact that it was Bush, not Obama, who created the TSA from the public discourse.

SILENT COUP? IS THAT WHAT WE'RE EXPERIENCING?

Is Paul Krugman being hyperbolic when he writes this about the strong likelihood that Republicans won't compromise on such subjects as the debt, START, and the extension of unemployment benefits? I think what he says is an understatement -- I think I've said this before, but in discussing this, I think we need to start using words like "coup."

... The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it's doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party's cooperation -- cooperation that won't be forthcoming.

... the G.O.P. isn't interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House.

... everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the [START] treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it's an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.

...My sense is that most Americans still don't understand this reality. They still imagine that when push comes to shove, our politicians will come together to do what's necessary. But that was another country....

Or maybe "coup" is a strong enough word but not the correct word -- as I see it, for 30 years we've had a country that's nominally democratic, but in which presidents are allowed to govern only if they're Republican or forced to defer to Republicans.

Don't think of the Democrats and Republicans as the two major political parties in a democratic system; think of the Republican Party as the U.S. equivalent of, say, the people who really run Pakistan -- the generals and members of the intelligence establishment. Pakistan has elections, but if you're elected, you're still not free to do what that crowd doesn't want you to do. Cross them and you're likely to suffer the consequences.

We don't have literal coups or assassinations (so far), but that seems to be because our authoritarian permanent government doesn't need them, and because maintaining the illusion that we're not a country run by a strongman force strengthens the Republicans in the long run. As Krugman notes (and as Zandar notes), Republicans seem able to run the country this way without attracting any scrutiny from even the most plugged-in observers. Hard to imagine when that will change, if ever.

ADULT CONVERSATIONS WITHOUT THE ADULTS

(Hey folks, Zandar here.  Thanks to Steve for letting me give the wheel a spin this week.)

Dean Of The Village Serious People David Broder is SHOOOOOOCKED that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans are acting like spoiled brats instead of the adults that he thought the Tea Party Republicans were going to be.

Washington began last week to come to grips with the new order of things, a regime in which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell holds as much sway as the president of the United States. 

With the additional leverage that six more Republican senators and a new Republican majority in the House has given him, McConnell is challenging President Obama's agenda for the lame-duck session of Congress and signaling that he is prepared to keep up the fight right into the 2012 election. 

Whether it is tax rates or nuclear arms, Republicans are being assertive about their views and challenging Democrats to step up to the fight. Not one sign has appeared so far of any willingness to compromise. 

Oh well gosh, it's not like anyone saw THAT coming.  You know, except me, 95% of the blogs in the blogroll list there, all of you guys, and my brother's pet rescue ferret.  Republicans sure as hell knew this was coming.  Dems knew this was coming.  In fact, it seems the only people caught unaware of the fact that the Republicans were going to go complete scorched earth is David Broder and the Village.


Well, it's good of the old man to figure out what's going on, even if it was two years too late.  Maybe a sharply critical look at the Republican Plan is in order here by Broder and company.


And if you believe THAT's coming, well you've been asleep along with Broder here.

SLACKING OFF

I'm going to be posting only sporadically for the next few days, and then probably not at all from Wednesday through Saturday. Zandar says he'll be posting, however, so stop by.

REPUBLICANS: STUPID OR EVIL? DON'T MAKE ME CHOOSE

Steve Benen has a long post up on the question of whether Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the economy in order to regain power. It won't surprise you that I agree with him -- though I'm not sure their minds are just on sabotage, as I'll explain below:

Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?

You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You'd also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You'd no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.

You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You'd also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default.

You might want to cover your tracks a bit, and say you have an economic plan that would help -- a tax policy that's already been tried -- but you'd do so knowing that such a plan has already proven not to work.

Does any of this sound familiar? ...

I think Republicans do recognize that at least some of what they're opposing would help the economy get back on track, and certainly would give desperate people money and hope in the short term, and they don't want any of that to happen. (I'll add the caveat that I think Republicans sincerely believe some of these programs don't work at all, but even Republicans grasp, for instance, that unemployed people are better off financially with unemployment benefits than without.)

But I'm not sure I agree with what Steve says about Republicans' claims regarding their own policies. They don't believe their plan "has already proven not to work."

To talk about this, we have to leave the realms of politics and economics, and enter the realm of religion. Republicans have a religious faith in the power of "freedom" (which means whatever they choose it to mean) and tax cuts to solve every problem. They cherry-pick evidence and ignore whatever doesn't fit -- thus, they argue that Bush economic policies worked spectacularly, and assume that you'll pay no attention to the minor detail that at the end of the Bush ride there was a spectacular job-killing, budget-busting crash caused by the bursting of the Bush bubble, which wiped out the very gains they're bragging about.

As a result, Republicans don't think it's really a bad thing if the economy is hoorible for two more years. They don't feel they need to allow solutions other than their own to be tried, even if they think they might work, because the pain of the next two years will be nothing -- the magic Rand/Reagan fairy dust they'll apply in 2013 will simply make all the pain go away.

No, they don't believe it will be a tough slog, made even tougher for themselves because the economic trough is even deeper. Their policies are magic. They're divine. They're cure-alls.

So, in their own minds, they're not doing any real damage at all.

****

Related to this: Right-wingers think the lesson of the first Thanksgiving is that capitalism works and socialism is a failure. Go read.

BUSH'S MOM EXECUTES HIT FOR BUSH'S BRAIN?

The not-always-nice matriarch of the Bush clan slips in the shiv, subtly:

Sarah Palin may not have the biggest fan in former first lady Barbara Bush.

"I sat next to her once. Thought she was beautiful," Barbara Bush said. "And she's very happy in Alaska, and I hope she'll stay there."

Bush, along with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, spoke to CNN's Larry King in an interview set to air Monday....

This is just the latest hit on Palin from the Bushies, presumably at the behest of Karl Rove, who's attacked Palin a couple of times recently. In addition to that, there was ex-Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson's Washington Post column "The Sarah Palin Problem," as well as an anonymous report, said to be from a Bush insider, that "Naming Palin makes Bush think less of McCain as a man."

More to come, I'm sure.

AIRPORT "ISRAELIFICATION": DO WE REALLY WANT TO GO THERE?

I see via Steve Benen that Representative John Mica (R-Florida), who's likely to become head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, wants government workers out of airport security:

A Republican lawmaker, who is faulting big government spending, is suggesting that airports dump the Transportation Security Administration altogether, and opt instead to privatize security.

And some airports, fed up with poor service in a climate where travelers are outraged about the prospect of full-body scanners, are listening.

The consideration comes after Florida Republican Rep. John Mica -- a longtime critic of the TSA -- wrote letters to the country's 100 busiest airports earlier this month asking them to switch to private security.

I wasn't going to talk about this subject anymore, but it's practically the only subject anyone wants to discuss these days, so here goes.

As Steve notes, the private employees who are handling security at a few airports (a carve-out that was allowed when the TSA was created) still have to follow TSA guidelines. Would the patdowns and gropes that have offended so many people recently somehow be less offensive if the employees weren't on a government payroll? Aimai, in comments here, argues that people would find "private cops" doing this even more infuriating. I'm not so sure -- I think the next focus would be on scrapping or drastically altering the government guidelines themselves.

Mica is actually an advocate of Israeli-style behavioral profiling, and he complains that a behavior-profiling program known as SPOT that's used at some U.S. locations doesn't work very well, because, he says, the SPOT profilers don't follow procedures that work well for Israelis.

Is that the direction we're going to go with a Republican-dominated D.C.? If so, I have to ask whether U.S. flyers are ready for a security process that works like this:

... The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," {Israeli security expert Rafi] Sela said....

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer....

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes -- which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela....

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area....

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at ... the body and hand-luggage check....

Really? We're going to go for that?

Well, maybe we might -- if the system is blatantly two-tiered, as the Israeli system is, at least according to one observer:

This approach is both effective, time-consuming, and "racist": the profilers have a conversation with each passenger; as I'm an Israeli Jew, I always get the abbreviated treatment -- focusing more on where my bags have been since I've packed them. As a foreigner, you get a much more in-depth grilling. As a Muslim? They want to know your shoe size, and then a whole 'nother screener comes over and asks you everything all over again, just to see that you keep your story straight....

But even this guy thinks such a system wouldn't work here:

In the US, racial profiling is... unpalatable, and if each passenger / family got even a perfunctory 1-minute Q&A session with a TSA security officer, the system would crash.

Racial profiling here is illegal, but I could imagine that it might not be illegal for much longer. Is that where Congressman Mica wants to take our security system? And what message does that send to that Arab/Muslim world? (The point being, does that make us more or less safe? Does it protect our airports while increasing anger, thus encouraging more violence aimed at other U.S. targets? And could we even ethnically profile with any success when terrorist organizations almost certainly want to find attackers who don't match our stereotypes?)

And would we construct such an elaborate system of checks at every airport, or even every major airport? Could it possibly work efficiently? Who's going to pay for it? Or are we just going to do a version of this that's as pale an imitation as (according to Mica) SPOT is?

I don't know the answers. I don't know how this is going to work out. But this may be where we're headed.

THERE YOU GO AGAIN WITH YOUR LIBERAL ELITIST PRODUCTION VALUES

Not much going on right now, so let me just say I don't feel this never-aired Sharron Angle ad is as snicker-worthy as Jim Newell (writing for Gawker and Talking Points Memo) thinks it is:



Crappy production values? Every TV market in America has late-evening and late-night ads that run for years -- for thriving businesses -- that are as bad as this or far worse. (Ad-muting and compulsive channel-surfing are the rule in my household, but when I go to Boston to visit my octogenarian mom, who hasn't adopted these practices, I wind up exposed to repeated viewings of godawful ads for successful merchants such as Bernie & Phyl's.)

Angle was probably right not to air the ad, after her primary victory, for one reason only: she probably needed to put up something slick to help persuade the muckamucks who run and finance her party that she should be taken seriously. But the voters? I'm not sure the ones she was targeting would even have noticed how badly made the ad is.

In fact, I think this ad could have gone viral in the national wingnuttosphere -- or if it didn't, the only reason would have been that it didn't end with Angle herself arriving with a shotgun in hand and saying of Harry Reid,. "Let's go git 'im!"

COULD ACROSS-THE-SPECTRUM PUBLIC OUTRAGE STOP THE MAD DEFICIT HAWKS? (With a little help from the Masters of the Universe?)

Alan Simpson is gleefully awaiting a government shutdown in the spring over the debt ceiling, which he thinks will lead to the implementation of all or part of the Bowles/Simpson plan -- but is he celebrating prematurely?

Former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson, the top Republican on the President's bipartisan debt commission, ... predicted a government that approaches shutdown in April of next year.

"This is going to be beautiful politics -- The brutal kind," he told reporters in Washington at a forum put on by the Christian Science Monitor. "I love those," he said, with a twinkle in his eye and a jokester tinge to his voice....

"I can't wait for the blood bath in April. It won't matter whether two of us [on the deficit commission] have signed off on this, or 14 or 18. When debt limit time comes they're going to look around and say what in the hell do we do now? We've got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give them a piece of meat, real meat off of this package, and boy the blood bath will be extraordinary. And they'll say how the hell do you get meat off this package."

But in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that came out a couple of days ago (PDF) and was the subject of much too little discussion, it became clear that the public hates the Bowles/Simpson plan. And I mean huge percentages of the public across the political spectrum. As Chuck Todd and his crew reported:

... a whopping 70% of adults say they are uncomfortable with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and defense programs -- which just happen to be the biggest sources of federal spending. Another 59% say they're uncomfortable about raising taxes (on gasoline, for example) or changing the tax code (like eliminating deductions on home mortgages) to reduce the deficit. And another 57% are uncomfortable about raising the Social Security retirement age to 69 by 2075 to reduce the deficit.

Now, here's the best part:

What was even more amazing about this data: Fully 36% of EVERYONE we surveyed said they were uncomfortable on all THREE facets of the debt commission proposals. Nearly half of that 36% are African-American (46%) and the other half, self-described conservatives (46%).

Or, to put it another way:

Those who say they're most uncomfortable with these suggestions -- those who are against all three -- make up a group of strange bedfellows who are rarely aligned on policy matters: core Republicans and Tea Partiers as well as blacks, Latinos, union members, and suburban women.

And, in fact:

In the survey, Republicans were more negative than Democrats on the plan. Nearly half of Republicans called it a "bad idea" ....

In recent years, just about the only time public outrage has worked in the service of policies I support was when such outrage prevented George W. Bush from beginning the privatization of Social Security. That was one third rail. We're talking about multiple third rails here.

Ah, but won't the GOP just force a stalemate and blame it on Obama? Sure, that's the plan -- but I'm intrigued by Zandar's take on this:

Here's the problem with this particular game of chicken: The people that stand to lose the most here, especially from the threat of a sovereign debt default, are the investor class. They are the ones who spent billions to get the GOP into power, and the threat of default will annihilate the bond market. The big players, especially the hedge fund giants, stand to lose hundreds of billions from a treasury meltdown as interest rates on long bonds skyrocket and yields drop like lead elephants on gravity steroids....

Obama can win this battle if he holds his ground....

The Republicans will get reined in on this one damn quick. Count on it.

I'm usually not very good at identifying glimmers of hope, but is it possible that the crazy Republicans might get caught between a rock and a hard place on this?

DOES HALEY BARBOUR BELIEVE HIS OWN B.S.?

My first thought when I read this was that it was a bizarre attempt at reverse psychology, but the more I consider it, the more I think Barbour believes his own nonsense:

Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour may or may not run for president in 2012, but he has an opinion about a possible presidential bid by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"I hope Mayor Bloomberg won't even consider that," Barbour told CNN. "But if there were a strong third party candidate there's no question in my mind, that candidate would draw votes away from the Republican." He added a third party bid by Bloomberg would be "the best thing that can happen to President Obama." ...

Really? Barbour thinks an unmarried, Jewish, pro-gay, pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-Park51, ant-smoking, anti-trans-fat Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent is going to win Republican votes? Give me a break -- even GOP "moderates" have been dragged too far to the right by thirty years of Reagan/Limbaugh/Gingrich/Fox/tea party propaganda to vote for a guy like Bloomie.

But I'm not sure Barbour believes that. I think he really believes the transparently phony GOP propaganda about how the current crop of Republicans represent the "center-right." Or, more likely, he thinks Bloomberg will take away GOP votes if he, Haley Barbour, is the GOP presidential nominee -- he fears Bloomberg will split the let's-elect-a-fat-cat! vote with him.

I think it would be much more complicated than that. If Barbour or Mitt Romney or some other non-teabagger somehow emerged from a split GOP field with the nomination (much the way John McCain did in 2008), I think there'd almost certainly be a third-party challenger on the right. In fact, I could imagine a five-way race in 2012: Obama, Romney or Barbour, Bloomberg or a Bloomberg-financed sock puppet, a teabagger (not Palin -- running indie is too coach-class for her, but maybe someone like Tancredo or Pence), and (inevitably) Ralph Nader or a Nader wannabe running to Obama's left with a Firedoglake endorsement.

In that case, your guess is as good as mine -- but I still think the vast majorityy of Bloomberg's votes are coming from disaffected non-FDL-reading 2008 Obama supporters.

****

MEANWHILE: As Steve Kornacki notes, yesterday Barbour was "the subject of a flattering New York Times piece from Matt Bai." When has Barbour ever been the subject of MSM coverage that wasn't flattering? Can we please just make him President of the Beltway and get it over with, so all the journalists and hangers-on there can have the head of state they secretly crave?

FOX IS THE STORY, AND THE MAINSTREAM PRESS DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT

Last night, Jon Stewart brought back his Glenn Beck impersonation. This wasn't as sharp a segment as in Stewart's two previous performances as Beck -- but nevertheless, this was probably the widest media exposure Beck's appalling, crypto-anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros have received anywhere, apart from Beck's own broadcasts, which are watched mostly by the Beck cult. Maybe you knew that Beck had recently been redoubling his attacks on Soros, and maybe you'd heard that Beck was being accused of anti-Semitism, but did you actually watch any of it? Did you read any detailed descriptions of what Beck put on the air? Just go about 1:50 into this clip and get a sense of what Beck's putting out there:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
George Soros Plans to Overthrow America
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Soros as regime-destroying, election-stealing, currency-manipulating "puppet master"? It's awful stuff. It's Father Coughlin in code. And even if the rest of the segment went a bit off the rails, Stewart did a public service just by giving us a taste of what Beck is putting out there.

The mainstream press doesn't cover Beck this way, and it doesn't cover Beck the way Media Matters does -- here's a Media Matters compilation of Beck Nazi smears (e.g., "Beck compared TARP to 'what happened to the lead-up with Hitler'").

Most news outlets seem to think that Fox is just in the same business they're in, but with a somewhat different editorial skew. Maybe they think there's too much emphasis on ideology and opinion -- but they all seem to agree that what the people on Fox do is merely report the news and comment on the news. It's essentially a more right-wing, heated-up CNN or Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Jon Stewart and Media Matters understand that the content on Fox ought to be the subject of news stories. They know there need to be stories about what Beck and his colleagues are saying. It's important to make Fox the subject of news reports because (obviously) Fox is a political operation rather than a news operation, because Fox is extremely popular, and because Fox has the ability to inject hatemongering and conspiratorial lunacy into the national conversation. Fox is where this stuff comes from.

The press has never seemed to care about tracing lunatic memes back to their origins -- not wth Limbaugh, not with Michael Savage, not with any other radio talker since Coughlin. Failing to report where crazy people get crazy ideas is a bit like telling the public that two skyscrapers collapsed on 9/11 without mentioning that someone deliberately brought them down. Stewart's a comedian -- it shouldn't be his job to do this. It should be the rest of the media's job.

Here's the rest of last night's Stewart bit:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Manchurian Lunatic
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

DEMOCRATS: OFF THE MAT, BUT STILL A BIT WOBBLY

Last night I was reading some news and I found myself thinking, "Hey, what did you guys do with my Democratic Party?" Suddenly, the Dems weren't looking like pathetic, hapless losers. Steny Hoyer said that Democrats would vote on just the middle-class Bush tax cuts. Joe Lieberman, who's actually on the side of the good guys on this issue, was saying that there are 60 votes in the Senate for a defense authorization bill that repeals Don't Ask, Don't Tell (whileLisa Murkowski, for what it's worth, was quoted as saying she'd be willing to vote for a bill that includes repeal). And the White House was claiming it had 67 votes to pass the START treaty in the lame-duck session.

Fightin' Democrats!

And, yes, The New York Times says the White House really is fighting to get START passed -- pulling out all the stops, even though it's not at all clear that that's working:

...After months of quiet negotiations blew up this week, Mr. Obama on Thursday escalated ratification of the agreement, the so-called New Start treaty, into a public showdown, enlisting former Republican officials and assigning Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to work on it "day and night." An allied group, the American Values Network, kicked off a television and e-mail campaign.

"It is a national security imperative that the United States ratify the New Start treaty this year," said Mr. Obama, flanked by Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III and Brent Scowcroft, all of whom served Republican presidents. "There is no higher national security priority for the lame-duck session of Congress."

But Mr. Obama has no clear path to approval of the treaty without Senator Jon Kyl....

The White House has only one Republican supporter, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. A survey of 14 other Senate Republicans who were considered possible supporters found none who were willing to publicly back the treaty....

But wait a minute -- the White House has all these contentious issues on its plate and this is the one that gets an all-stops-out public campaign? This, and not the Democratic position on the Bush tax cuts (about which, of course, White House officials were waving a white flag last week)?

The message before the midterms was that Democrats didn't dare hold a vote on their tax-cut proposal, or run on it, even though voters agreed with them, because voters just hate whatever Democrats say or do on taxes, so it's always bad for them politically.

But that seems more likely to be true on foreign policy -- the only reason voters actually still like Democrats at all is that Democrats are perceived, vaguely, as being more in favor of the less well-to-do than the rich, whereas on foreign policy Republicans are (preposterously) seen as the people who'll always keep us safe. If you're going to make a lot of public noise on any issue, why not play to your strength?

But I think I know the answer to that. Barack Obama wants a public debate on START because it's centrist. There's less of a public campaign on the tax cuts or DADT because the Democratic positions are -- eeeuuuww -- liberal.

See, it's not that Obama doesn't hold liberal positions. He just doesn't want to shout them from the housetops. START is a different matter. Republican secretaries of state support START.

MISS HIM YET? UM, EVEN LESS NOW

Wow:

'Mission Accomplished' banner could go up in Bush library

As former president George W. Bush broke ground Tuesday in Dallas for his presidential library, officials weighed whether or not to display one item that few know is being held in storage there: the "Mission Accomplished" banner....

The banner now sits in storage and will become part of the library's collection. A decision on how or whether to display the red-white-and-blue banner hasn't been made, said Alan Lowe, director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum....

To give Bush his due, he's said on several occasions that he believes the banner was a mistake. But do you know what's going to happen if he does put the banner up? I predict that quite a few visitors -- many of them wearing Palin buttons and Gadsden flag T-shirts -- are going to have themselves photographed in front of the banner giving thumbs-up signs and other indications of "Hell yeah!" Just you wait -- that banner's going to be a rallying point for Real Americans.

WILL ROGER AILES DENOUNCE ROGER AILES?

Roger Ailes now, in an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Daily Beast:

Then he turned his sights on NPR executives.

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Roger Ailes, 2006:

Olbermann's "over the line" behavior in 2006 was, it should be noted, in response to one of Ailes's superstar talking heads, Bill O'Reilly, who on more than one occasion incorrectly accused U.S. soldiers of massacring unarmed troops in Malmedy, Belgium, during World War II. (In fact, the victims of the Malmedy massacre were Americans who were killed by members of the SS.)

Ailes's current comments, by contrast, appear to refer to NPR's dismissal of Fox News commentator Juan Williams, after repeated warnings, following which Williams received a substantial raise from Fox -- a sequence of events most victims of the Hitler regime are not known to have experienced.

****

UPDATE: Ailes pretends to apologize for the use of the word "Nazi," in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League:

"This morning you might be receiving calls because I used the word 'Nazi attitudes' to describe the NPR officials who fired Juan Williams," Ailes wrote. "I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word, but I was angry at the time because of NPR's willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough."

Ailes, later in the letter, apologized "for using 'Nazi' when in my now considered opinion 'nasty, inflexible bigot' would have worked better."

Ailes is a loathsome, hate-filled blowhard running a media operation that's a malignant tumor rapidly killing America. In a better world, all decent people would shun him like a child pornographer, and no respectable advertiser would want to be associated with his raw sewage dump of a cable channel.

Letter (in Scribd format) here.

EVILDOER FOUND EVIL -- BUT NOT EVIL ENOUGH, DAMMIT!

The editorial board of the New York Post is outraged at the Ahmed Ghailani verdict:

Is there any better proof that Team Obama's preferred approach to fighting terror -- through civilian courts -- is dangerously misguided than yesterday's acquittal of one of the 1998 US embassy bombers on all but one of 285 charges?

Ahmed Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in a civilian court, was convicted of only a single count of conspiracy to destroy government property and buildings using explosives.

Murder? No.

Terrorism? No.

He was up to his ears in a plot that took 224 lives, and he's not a terrorist?

Preposterous.

He might as well have blown up an empty phone booth in some desert.

Oh, and the typical sentence for blowing up an empty phone booth in the desert would be what exactly?

... Yes, Ghailani is facing 20 years to life -- but that's only about a month for each of the 224 people he helped kill.

Hmmm, let's see: Ghailani is 36 years old. If the sentence were straight life without the possibility of parole and he were to live to the age of, say, 76, that would be ... um, two months for each of the 224 people he helped kill. Much better!

And of course, there's no reason to assume he'll be sentenced to the minimum:

Ghailani could be sentenced to life in prison and faces a minimum of 20 years, according to the Justice Department....

Ghailani's sentence will be imposed by Kaplan, and prosecutors in New York said they would seek life in prison.

And even if he gets 20 years, he still might never be released:

The judge himself ... said in his ruling that Mr. Ghailani's status of "enemy combatant" probably would permit his detention as something akin "to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end, even if he were found not guilty."

Which I think also happens if you blow up an empty phone booth in the desert -- right? (I'm not an international-law expert -- I'll get back to you on that.)

Really, wingnuts? We can't try these people in civilian courts even after we've given ourselves permission to continue detaining any of them who are completely acquitted?

But, of course, this isn't about America's safety -- this is about anger and politics. In order to feed their anger, wingnuts want two things from the justice system for terrorist suspects:

1. They want the suspects to be punished by Republican presidents exclusively, and
2. They want the suspects to be mistreated in a way that angers liberals.

Point #2 means, of course, illegal prisons, torture, and then court proceedings that make a mockery of due process. If we're not complaining, they're never going to be happy.

S.E. CUPP'S LIBERAL DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

First of all, do I get anything for correctly telling you folks all these months that Sarah Palin is running for president? Just askin'.

Now that I got that out of the way, can we talk about people who have a really bad derangement syndrome? I'm referring to Sarah Palin supporters. They have liberal derangement syndrome. They're just beside themselves with rage and vitriol whenever they encounter a Palin opponent -- they're compelled to say preposterous, enraged things about us because they simply can't endure the notion that Palin opponents exist. How dare we? What's the hell is wrong with us? Why can't we simply fall into lockstep?

Consider S.E. Cupp of the New York Daily News (she's a frequent contributor to Fox News and Townhall):

...for [Palin's] detractors, nothing raises the ire of cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally unburdened, freethinking and self-assured conservative woman who has everything she wants and then some. And without anyone's help.

Sure, she'll tell you that Todd, her parents and her children are an invaluable support system. But ... Sarah Palin has made it ... on her own. John McCain's imprimatur certainly launched her into the national spotlight, but she became the youngest and first female governor of Alaska all on her own.

How dare she?

Liberalism, after all, needs to imagine an unhappy populace. Passing sweeping entitlement programs and convincing voters that big government is the answer only works if people are frustrated with their stations in life....

Oh yes, you're so right, S.E. We hate Palin because we want everyone to be poor, sick, and on public assistance -- even ex-governors, TV stars, authors of #1 New York Times bestsellers, and possible future presidents. In fact, that's our secret plan for global domination: outlaw happiness! Shoot smilers on sight! Confiscate the money of anyone who's financially comfortable and living a pleasant life, then give the money to ... nobody! That's our wealth redistribution plan!

Ban attainment of goals! Everyone must fail at everything, all the time! Misery uber alles!

You know what our ideal unemployment rate is? 100%! Not only do we want everyone to be a miserable person who's entitled to receive public assistance, we don't want anyone to have a job providing that public assistance! We want everyone on food stamps, but we don't want anyone growing food! That would be gainful employment for the farmers! It might make them happy! We can't have that!

This is how we're going to take over -- and it's a foolproof plan, right? After all, when things suck economically and seem likely to suck indefinitely and people are persistently broke and miserable, they just love Democrats, right? Wasn't that just proved convincingly a few weeks ago at the polls?

I'm mocking S.E. Cupp, but, see, I read a lot of right-wing bilge, and people like Cupp actually believe we liberals think this way. They think we resent Palin not because she's an ignorant, spiteful demagogue-wannabe, but because she's happy.

They're deranged.

THE COST OF OBAMA'S UNRELIEVED HATRED FOR WALL STREET

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now:

Wall Street is on pace to earn $19 billion, making 2010 its fourth-best year, according to a report by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

DiNapoli's report, released Tuesday, also said Wall Street's bonus pool may decline from last year, but the average cash bonus may be larger because the pool will be shared among fewer workers....

Oh, the humanity! This has been only the fourth-best year of the past thirty years for the Street! And fewer people are around to share in bonuses that are probably going to be even higher on average than last year's (which were 25% higher than 2008's) -- what a tragedy!

Thank God we'll probably elect a president in two years who won't continue trying to lay waste to the profit-making parts of America. I'm not sure Wall Street can survive many more years like this.

*****

(The report is in this PDF.)

IS BLOOMBERG'S SURROGATE GOING TO PRIMARY SOMEONE?

So first we get a Howard Fineman story at the Huffington Post speculating on the possibility of a Joe Scarborough/Mike Bloomberg independent presidential run in 2012. Then we get a story from, er, Bloomberg News saying that Mike Bloomberg doesn't believe an independent candidate can be elected president (because a split vote will throw the race into a Republican House of Representatives).

So ... um ... does that mean Bloomberg wants to run Scarborough (or run with Scarborough) in the Republican primaries?

I'm guessing that Bloomberg doesn't want to try to run another rumored surrogate, Evan Bayh, in Democratic primaries against Obama -- I assume he recognizes that that would be a suicide mission. But does he think Scarborough could be the moderate who collects enough non-crazy GOP primary votes to win while crazies split the crazy vote? That would sound like a plan -- if Mitt Romney didn't exist. But Romney does exist. So what on earth is Bloomie thinking? I can't think of any other explanation for these back-to-back media trial balloons.

WILLOW'S JUST A KID. HER PARENTS, HOWEVER, ARE ADULTS.

John Cole is right about Willow Palin and the anti-gay slurs she casually tossed off on Facebook:

Yes, Willow Palin said something stupid on her facebook page. Big deal. She’s sixteen, and most of the time when a sixteen year old opens his or her mouth, something stupid will fall out. Often times, they say things and don't even really think about what they are saying. So spare me if I refuse to get all worked up about what she wrote. There is a reason we call sixteen year olds "minors" and don't let them vote, drink, etc.

But, um, haven't some of us been taking such tossed-off slurs somewhat seriously in recent years? You know, on the assumption that kids who think the worst thing you can call another kid is a euphemism-for-a-homosexual are potential haters of actual homosexuals?

There are serious attempts to reach kids with just that message. You'd have to be naive to expect the idea to sweep the nation, with such slurs banished overnight, but some reasonable people think it actually matters.

In any event Willow may be a minor, but her mother and father are grown-ups, and her mother clearly wants to be president of the United States. Is it unreasonable to think she has a responsibility to weigh in on this? Does she approve of such talk? Does her husband? You can laugh, but as recently as two years ago, when we had a vice president who'd endorsed gay marriage (if only for his own daughter's benefit), Palin herself went out of her way to say her best friend is gay. For a brief moment there, it was looking as if homophobia, at least of the overt kind, was going to be rejected or downplayed by right-wingers with national ambitions in the future.

That moment is over, obviously, as seen in John McCain's Don't Ask, Don't Tell flip-flop and his wife's seemingly forced recantation. (By the way, what's the matter, John? The election's over. You won. You afraid somebody will put a hold on your nomination as Secretary of Defense in 2013 if you're not anti-gay?)

I'm wasting too many words on this, but I still think it's appropriate to ask? Sarah and Todd, do you think it's appropriate to use those words? I'd be happy with mild reproval. I just think reproval is appropriate. I don't think it's wrong to ask that of the parents.

Thought exercise: If Malia Obama called a white Southern classmate a "dumb redneck," how many people on the right do you think would say "it's just kid stuff"?