RUDY'S WORST POLICE COMMISSIONER (NO, NOT BERNIE): STILL A JERK

A lot of people who didn't have firsthand experience of Rudy Giuliani tenure as mayoral understandably ascribe the worst excesses of Rudy's police force to Rudy's best-known police commissioner. But Bernie Kerik became commissioner only after the deaths of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, and the precinct torture of Abner Louima. All that happened on the watch of Kerik's predecessor -- Howard Safir.

Who, we learn from today's New York Times, is still a jerk:

Howard Safir, a New York City police commissioner during the Giuliani administration, backed his sport utility vehicle into a pregnant woman on the Upper East Side on Friday afternoon and then drove away, the police said.

The woman, Joanne M. Valarezo, 30, of the Bronx, was not knocked down and was not seriously injured in the accident, which occurred at 2:25 p.m. in front of 1418 Third Avenue, the authorities said. They said she was able to jot down the license plate of Mr. Safir's black 2009 Cadillac Escalade.

Ms. Valarezo was taken by ambulance to New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she was treated for a bruised shoulder and then released, the police said. Ms. Valarezo's unborn child, nearing its seventh month, was apparently not affected, she later said.

Detectives ... determined that Mr. Safir was unaware that he had struck the woman before driving away, another law enforcement official said.

But the woman's account raised questions about that.

... "I was crossing the street in between cars and he hit reverse, and his female passenger screamed, 'Are you not looking, there's someone there,' and as he was reversing, he hit me on my shoulder and my knee and the side of my stomach," she said.

Then he started to drive away, she said.

"I confronted him and I said, 'I'm pregnant. Did you not see?' And he just disregarded that and kept going," she said. She said if the passenger had not screamed, causing her to turn, she would been hurt more seriously....

(The passenger was his wife.)

By the way, here's my favorite sentence in the story:

Mr. Safir's tenure as police commissioner was occasionally controversial.

Gee, you think? After the police brutality incidents, there was a series of protests in which hundreds of people, including ex-mayor Dinkins, Representative Charlie Rangel, and state comptroller Carl McCall, were arrested -- and even Ed Koch and Al Sharpton mended fences (Koch announced his intention to get arrested in an anti-brutality protest, though he backed out for health reasons). Safir was forced from office by the widespread anger.

Bizarre Safir factoid: He's a self-proclaimed Jimmy Buffett-loving Parrothead.

IS JOHN McCAIN A "DELIBERATIST"?

I've been seeing a trend on the right, and I just made up a name for it -- "deliberatism."

Deliberatists are right-wingers who believe not only that Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are destroying the country (all right-wingers believe that) but that Obama and the Dems doing it on purpose. I mentioned this line of thinking a couple of days ago when I quoted a review of recent books by Glenn Beck, Dick Morris, Mark Levin, and others; the best-known exponent of this theory is Rush Limbaugh,who told Greta Van Susteren last summer, "President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the U.S. economy. They are purposely doing it, I believe" and said a couple of months earlier on his radio show, "The objective is unemployment. The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state." Deliberatists believe that Democrats' ultimate purpose is to create permanent dependence on government.

You expect that kind of talk from Limbaugh and from teabag-friendly writers of right-wing screeds. But, um, John McCain? Don't teabaggers think he's a horrible RINO? Don't veteran D.C. pundits believe he's the epitome of centrist integrity?

So why, in his new reelection ad, does he say this?

"President Obama is leading an extreme left-wing crusade to bankrupt America."

He's not saying "crusade that will bankrupt America." That would be harsh, but within the pale. He's saying crusade "to bankrupt America" -- i.e., intended to bankrupt America.

That's deliberatist. That's something his ex-running mate would say. It seems like a dog whistle to Palinite/teabagger voters, who I assume are as likely to be deliberatists as they are to be birthers and deathers.

9/11 AS MULLIGAN

Count me among those who think Rudy Giuliani said something he genuinely believes on some level in an interview with George Stephanopoulos this morning:

... I spoke to the former mayor of New York City this morning on GMA, who assailed the Obama administration's decisions on national security.

"What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama,” Giuliani said....

Giuliani seems to have forgotten about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and shoe bomber Richard Reid....

I really don't think Giuliani is deliberately uttering a falsehood. Similarly, I don't think Mary Matalin was trying to lie when she said on December 27:

"We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history."

A lot of metaphors apply here: The gentleman's C. The mulligan. Salvation through faith rather than good works. Suffice it to say that Giuliani, Matalin, and their ideological soul mates heard Bush (and Cheney) say so many times that they'd kept America safe, and they believe Bush (and Cheney) sincerely mean this whenever they say it, so they're now at the point where the narrative has taken over their brains (needless to say, it dovetails perfectly with the notion that all evil is Democratic) and thus they believe that Bush did keep us safe, or if he didn't on a couple of regrettable days he sure meant to and deserves a do-over for the days he failed, or if he didn't keep us safe before 9/12 it doesn't count because that's before he got the terror-hating religion, and you can't judge a saved man by the sins he committed before he began to believe, or he's a gentleman (i.e., not a filthy Democrat) and people of breeding don't get failing grades from people of breeding.

I'd call it an emperor's-new-clothes effect: for these people, a Republican presidency is invested with such imperial grandeur that if His Majesty says he's dressed in raiments of success in the war against terrorism, then those raiments surely must be the finest ever worn -- even if His Majesty is, in fact, naked.

See also the notion -- sincerely believed, I think, by most right-wingers -- that the Republican Party needs to get back to principles of limited government and fiscal prudence ... just like that greatest of Republican heroes, Ronald Reagan.

(Via Steve Benen.)

****

UPDATE: Stephanopoulos posts a follow-up:

Through his spokesman, Rudy Giuliani has clarified the remarks he made this morning on GMA regarding terrorist attacks on the United States under Presidents Bush and Obama.

The Mayor's spokesman says that the remark "didn't come across as it was intended" and that Giuliani was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil." ...

Like I said: mulligan.

A COAKLEY WIN WILL BE EXCELLENT NEWS FOR JOHN McCAIN!

Oh, Christ -- in the Massachusetts Senate race, are we about to play another round of GOP Failure = Success?

... A Brown win remains improbable, given that Democrats outnumber Republicans by 3 to 1 in the state and that Ms. Coakley, the state's attorney general, has far more name recognition, money and organizational support.

But a tighter-than-expected margin in the closely watched race would still prompt soul-searching among Democrats nationally, since the outcome will be the first real barometer of whether problems facing the party will play out in tangible ways at the polls later this year.

"If I had to bet a week's salary," said Dennis Hale, a political science professor at Boston College, "I'd still bet it on Coakley. But this is going to be like in the military, where the bullet misses you but it still scares you to death."

Yup -- Bush becomes president in 2000 despite losing the popular vote by half a million votes and winning Florida only through mismarked ballots, voter caging, election-worker intimidation, and a partisan Supreme Court ... and he waltzes into the Oval Office as if he just won 49 states. And the Beltway accepts this as perfectly normal and appropriate. Whereas if Coakley wins this race by anything less than double digits, are we going to have idiot "soul-searching" Democrats babbling to reporters that it was a failure? And even if hack Democrats somehow refrain from shooting themselves in the foot this way, I guess it's clear now that the press and pundits are probably going to proclaim a single-digit win a loss. Sigh.

So, please, Massachusetts voters, turn out for Coakley -- just to get these clowns to shut up.

Oh, and by the way, single-digit Senate wins are not unheard of for Massachusetts Democrats -- John Kerry beat William Weld in 1996 by a 52%-45% margin.

JIHADIST WEB POSTING OR DEATH-METAL LYRIC?

Damn, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes:

Another blog posting appeared Thursday under the name of Abu Dujana al-Khorasani, eight days after the man who used that pseudonym blew himself up at a secret C.I.A. outpost in eastern Afghanistan. The headline: "When will my words drink my blood?"

"My words will die if I do not save them with my blood," read a posting that fellow jihadis on muslm.net said was written before the death of Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, 32, a Jordanian doctor of Palestinian origin who killed seven Americans and one Jordanian intelligence officer.

"My articles will be against me if I don't prove to them that I am not a hypocrite," the posting read. "One has to die to make the other live. I wish I could be the one to die." ...

Yeah, these bastards hate us and want to kill us (and sometimes do kill us), but, while I approve of taking the threat they pose very seriously, they're really such a bunch of adolescents, aren't they?

PARTIES? TWO, AS USUAL. YES, STILL.

Charles Lane, writing for The Washington Post:

Now, however, under the Internet-intensified pressure of recession, terrorism and global uncertainty, ... four parties are breaking out of the two-party mold that had previously contained them. On the Democratic side, President Obama finds himself torn between progressives demanding an ideologically pure health-care program, among other agenda items, and a pragmatic wing desperately attempting to hold together 60 Senate votes by whatever means necessary. On the Republican side, it's unclear whether the party's right wing is angrier at Obama or at its own leadership. Certainly the fury of the Tea Party and similar groups threatens here and there to overwhelm more conventional conservatives (just ask Charlie Crist in Florida).

Yes -- but the result isn't going to be any real splintering.

In the first place, neither restive group actually wants to split: Lefty Democrats claim to belong to "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," while far-right Republicans describe the Charlie Crists in their party as people who "want Republicans to be more like Democrats." So, see, there's still a sense of brand loyalty in both groups, however disgruntled they are.

And we can easily predict the end result, or results. Wingnuts are used to getting a great deal of what they want from the GOP (tax cuts, gay-baiting, liberal-baiting, jingoism) -- and they're going to get what they want this time, too. They're going to succeed in remaking the party in their own image -- it's going to get even wingnuttier. By contrast, liberals never get what they want from the Democratic Party; we're going to fail again, and, as usual, we're not going to leave. (The other group that never gets what it wants, moderate Republicans, is just as wussy as we are, and is also never going to leave, although there'll probably be another wave of impotent "It's my party, too!" foot-stamping from Christie Whitman types as the GOP tacks even further right.)

So relax, folks. There are no schisms in the works. Everything's just the same as it always is, only more so.

NICOLLE WALLACE MAKES A FUNNY

I realize that the first few paragraphs of this Daily Beast piece by Nicolle Wallace are just Wallace's way of greasing the skids for a partisan attack by seeming to heap scorn on partisan attacks -- but, unfortunately, I can't take what follows this seriously because I'm laughing too hard at its absurdity. Emphasis added:

What If the Bomb Had Gone Off?

What if the panty-bomber had been less incompetent? ... What if, heaven forbid, that plane had blown up in the skies over the Atlantic Ocean or above Michigan? What kind of national debate would we be having?

We would be a nation in mourning. We would pick up our morning papers and read, tearfully, the tragic stories of lives cut short by the murderous determination of another jihadist.... Our political leaders would call for calm and seek to reassure Americans that it is safe to fly.

... Without a doubt, the debate about what went wrong and who is to blame for the "systemic failures" that allowed a known associate of terrorists in Yemen to board a plane bound for the U.S. without checked luggage would have taken place. But the conversation would likely be less political. The tragedy would have kept the focus on the urgent need to fix -- once and for all -- the flow of information among intelligence gatherers and security implementers....

Stop, Nicolle, you're killing me.

After saying this, Wallace gives us the boilerplate GOP critique of Obama: he hasn't fired anyone, he decided to "play half a dozen more rounds of golf and take in Avatar with the kids before returning to Washington to ride herd on the bureaucracies responsible for the breakdown," he "seem[s] to display more enthusiasm for protecting the legal rights of terrorists and detainees at Guantanamo than winning -- or even referring to -- the war against terror." The opening paragraphs quoted above seem like a mildly clever way to set up the same-old same-old: None of us would now be engaging in partisanship if anyone had died, Wallace appears to be saying, but, since we don't have hundreds of deaths to mourn -- yet -- isn't there a brief window in which it's appropriate for me to make a partisan point?

Except that this is pre-teabagger thinking, if not pre-Fox News and pre-Limbaugh thinking. No one on the right would be calling for calm if the underwear bomber had succeeded and hundreds had died. The notion is absurd.

Everyone on the left figured out years ago that the right wouldn't have "rallied around" President Gore if 9/11 had happened on his watch, and we know there'll be impeachment calls if a cataclysmic attack is successful on Obama's.

What's new now is that there's barely anyone on the right who would piously protest otherwise. The residents of Fox/Limbaugh/Teabag Nation don't even pretend anymore that they'd rally around the president in a time of crisis, as many of them insisted they would have when we denounced Bush for the Iraq invasion or Abu Ghraib or Gitmo or warrantless wiretapping. There really aren't any Republicans anymore, except for a few Wallace-like throwbacks, who believe in standing foursquare behind the president in times of crisis; thanks to the tea party movement, patriotism is equated with Obama's removal from office, or his effective nullification by a teabag-inclined Congress backed by pitchfork-wielding mobs in the streets.

So Wallace is claiming high-mindedness at a time when no one on her side wants to be high-minded. She's invoking a shared sense of moral superiority that no one on her side actually shares anymore. She's yesterday's polemicist.

Chicken. Look it up, Jane.

The game of Chicken, also known as the Hawk-Dove or Snowdrift^[1] game, is an influential model of conflict for two players in game theory. The principle of the game is that while each player prefers not to yield to the other, the outcome where neither player yields is the worst possible one for both players.

I happen to agree with much of what Jane has written, over the years, on a variety of topics from Lieberman to NARAL to Emily's List. And I don't disagree with her that it is an astonishing failure of Emily's List's ideas about nominating women that their own bought and paid for politicians have so often spurned them on the topic of women's rights. But this bill, and even the egregious flaws of the health care bill with regard to women's rights, is no place to draw the line in the sand and demand that pro-choice politicians kill health care reform. Its a classic problem in power and leverage--these shift during the process of negotiation. You have lots of leverage the more important your vote, and the more intransigent you are, early in the process. That is why whipping the supporters of various progressive policies was extremely important early on. And that is why radical, dangerous, intransigent speech is good at the beginning. And why walking away from the negotiating table is good throughout the process. But at the very end of the process a completely different set of calculations has to begin to apply: a straight up cost/benefit analysis. And under those calculations a huge health care reform bill that benefits millions has a benefit that is not fully undercut or taken away by the fact that it actively harms, or continues the status quo of harm, a small proportion of women and their families.

Looked at another way a bill that is killed can't be fixed, but a bill that exists can be tinkered with. It is far easier to strip something out of a bill, or amend it, than to start the entire process over again. Again, its a matter of timing. Brinksmanship is a form of negotiation, and as in all negotiations whether something is a good strategy or not is always a matter of timing. The time for intransigence and for blocking the bill is long over.

--aimai

"The Producers" as a Campaign Strategy

Digby calls it "Ann Stone's Psychic Friends...," which is also pretty much on point. Basically, Center for American Progress reports that Roger Stone's ex-wife (the apple not falling far from the rotten grocer on this one) has been running a rather classic con on the wealthy, upper class, socially liberal Republican base. That is, there remains a sliver of a portion of a mite of the country that is Republican and also pro-choice. They have seen their party fall into the hands of the most rabid anti-choice factions but they still held out hope, somehow, that they could have tax cuts, permanent war, and abortions for their wayward children.

The Republican "pro-choice" scam is the flip side of the Tea Bagger scam, one raises money off the gullibility and alienation of wealthy donors, while the other skims it off the poor and working class. Both are selling hope in the form of letterhead, supposed campaign savvy, TV time, and a vow to push what the donors see as natural, desirable, and underserved political interests in a party that seems to have its power base locked up and its energies directed elsewhere. The whole thing, on all sides, reminds me of nothing so much as the selling of indulgences and it works in much the same way: take money from the faithful for an unverifiable reward that will come posthumously. Meanwhile, live large on the proceeds. Lather, rinse, repeat. But its always been this way. You wouldn't believe what comes up when you plug in "Republican Fund Raising Scams..." But I did find this one

As ABC's new ace investigative reporter Justin Rood reports today in his story on Alishtari, "the NRCC 'Businessperson of the Year' fundraising campaign, which gave such 'awards' to at least 1,900 GOP donors, has been derided as a telemarketing scam by political watchdogs."

Here's how it works, as reported in The Washington Post back in 2003:

The call starts with flattery: You have been named businessman of the year, or physician of the year, or state chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee's Business Advisory Council.

Then comes the fundraising hook: a request for as much as $500 to help pay for a full-page Wall Street Journal advertisement, then a request for $5,000 to reserve a seat at a banquet thrown in your honor. Can't handle that? How about $1,250 for the no-frills package?

Back then, the calls frequently featured a recording of ex-Majority Leader's Tom DeLay (R-TX). But the program is a long-time fixture of the NRCC's fundraising apparatus, dating back to 1998 and still going strong. And that's despite several news stories exposing the award as a sham. Apparently there are plenty of people who don't mind being hit up for thousands of dollars in order to receive an award: As NRCC spokesman told the Post back in 2003, "There are many, many happy members of the Business Advisory Council."

And then who could forget this one?

The College Republican National Committee has raised $6.3 million this year through an aggressive and misleading fund-raising campaign that collected money from senior citizens who thought they were giving to the election efforts of President Bush and other top Republicans.

Many of the top donors were in their 80s and 90s. The donors wrote checks — sometimes hundreds and, in at least one case, totaling more than $100,000 — to groups with official sounding-names such as "Republican Headquarters 2004," "Republican Elections Committee" and the "National Republican Campaign Fund."

But all of those groups, according to the small print on the letters, were simply projects of the College Republicans, who collected all of the checks.

And little of the money went to election efforts.

Of the money spent by the group this year, nearly 90 percent went to direct-mail vendors and postage expenses, according to records filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

And then I found the one I was looking for (here in the Boston Globe, here in Pro Publica, and here at TPM)

The handling of Chavez-Ochoa's campaign is another example of BMW Direct's questionable fundraising practices that were highlighted in a Boston Globe piece earlier this week. That story focused on Charles Morse, the long shot challenger to Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) whose committee raised more than $700,000, with all but four percent consumed by fundraising costs.

Representatives of the firm fiercely deny any wrongdoing and argue that the high cost of direct mail fundraising, particularly for little-known candidates, necessitates such expenses. Both Chavez-Ochoa and Morse dropped out before the candidates could reap the benefit of the early fundraising, they said.

In every case money was raised by marketing groups, on behalf of "The Republican Party" or its representatives or its imagined potential representatives (in the case of the Tea Baggers) and that money was diverted into the pockets of the corporations doing the fundraising. Its basically a version of "The Producers" where the play is supposed to flop and the proceeds, unaudited, stay with the producer. This latest version--the selling of a pro-choice agenda to a patently hostile Republican base--is simply brilliant.

REPORTS OF THE DEATH OF CRAZY ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED

David Weigel reports that GOP congressman Nathan Deal -- now a candidate for governor of Georgia -- is a birther; he's demanding proof of Barack Obama's eligibility to hold the office of president. Steve Benen sees this as a regrettable spark of life in a movement that, fortunately, seems to be sputtering out:

As 2009 progressed, it was nice to see "Birthers" quietly slink away. Right-wing activists started investing more time in attacking President Obama, not the legitimacy of his presidency.

The "Birther" legislation in the House (H.R.1503) picked up four co-sponsors in July, and one in September, before Republican lawmakers lost interest. By the fall, organizers of next year's Conservative Political Action Conference announced that there will be plenty of panel discussions at their event, but not one for the "Birthers."

Eventually, Lou Dobbs left CNN; Fox News moved on; and the whole insane crusade was left on the trash heap of stupid political stunts.

It's worth noting, then, that some far-right members of Congress still haven't let go....

But it's not just Deal. Please note that Sarah Palin -- possibly the next Republican candidate for president -- and Representative Michelle Bachmann will be joined as featured speakers at the First National Tea Party Convention by uber-birther Joseph Farah of WorldNet Daily, who wrote today at WND, "I am recommitting my energies and resources to the search for verifiable truth on this matter of eligibility."

Oh, and for good measure, another of Farah's fellow speakers will be Fox News contributor Angela McGlowan.

Anyone think the selection of Farah as a speaker is going to cause Palin, Bachmann, or McGowan to drop out? Me either.

OH NO! THEY'RE ON TO US!

We thought we could fool them into thinking that the resignations of Byron Dorgan and Christopher Dodd were a setback for Democrats. But we've been found out! This wingnut blogger has figured out our evil secret plan!!!

...My first thought was rats abandoning a sinking ship with the prospect of an even bigger electoral swing. [But] it hit me that this is going to be very bad news for the country.

As long as the prospect of losing an election was in the back of their minds, we have some leverage over these democrats concerning Obamacare. There was the possibility that they might be persuaded to kill the bill.

But like Japanese pilots in world war 2 they have decided to give their seats to the emperor of socialism government healthcare. The prospect of changing the country and creating a dependent population is too juicy, the post congressional rewards given by the party are too lucrative, their loyalty/fear of party and the powers behind it overrides any worry about what the voters think or what the bill actually contains.

The prospect of regaining an inordinate amount of seats pales before the prospect of this bill passing. Once passed it will NEVER be repealed and the damage to the country will be significant. These Kamikaze Democrats will give up their seats for Soros the sake of Obamacare....

Dodd and Dorgan's secret -- unveiled! They don't want to be reelected! They don't want to be popular in their respective states! They want to seize power for the great Sorosist cabal, destroying America in the process!

And though this guy doesn't say it in so many words, I'm sure he believes Democrats are destroying the country knowingly and deliberately. David Bernstein of The Boston Phoenix, in a year-end roundup of the biggest-selling right-wing books of the year, summed up the wingnut groupthink:

...these writers say: our liberal leaders are not "wrong" -- rather, they are lying.

Democrats don't actually believe that their policies will work, they write -- nobody could be that stupid.

[Glenn] Beck repeatedly accuses liberals of lying in Common Sense. "The snakes responsible for this scheme know that it isn't going to work," he writes at one point....

Democrats use these lies to deceive Americans while concealing their true motivations, write [Dick] Morris and [Eileen] McGann. The authors repeatedly claim that liberal policies -- including the economic-stimulus package, immigration reform, and changing of unionization rules -- are driven not by a desire to improve people's lives, but to turn them into government-dependent Democratic voters....

Several of the authors claim that liberal leaders are pushing climate change concerns not because they fear for the planet, but because they want to increase government control over business and the economy. [Mark] Levin adds a twist to this theory: liberals despise the automobile, which "provides the individual with a tangible means to exercise his independence through mobility." Clever statists.

Yes, very, very clever statists -- not above destroying their own political careers in order to accrue more power for the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy!!!!

Riddle Me This:

In a long, interesting, article on the long term crash of gentrified New York condo housing its clear that the City is staring down the barrel of a huge crisis--first gentrification, helped with generous doses of government money and financial speculation; then overbuilding of overpriced luxury condos, destruction of neighborhoods, inability to finish units, and finally inability to sell units at all in a down market leading to wholesale abandonment of apartments. Why shouldn't the City wait until these buildings are in foreclosure, buy them at cut rates, and then run them as affordable housing? The article makes clear that the landlords will otherwise use the bubble and loose money to buy up buildings, evict tenants, and then sit on the empty buildings or abandon them and destroy whole neighborhoods for years to come. Right now the city seems to be trying to find some interim accommodation that induces landlords to turn some portion of these buildings over to "affordable housing" by, essentially, overpays the landlords for units they can't sell at all, puts low income tenants into them for a short period of time, and then allows the landlords to call them back off the affordable housing market by 2030. This seems doomed to failure since very few people who can afford these units want to live next door to people who are subsidized into the same housing so you are probably killing the private market at the same time that you are only artificially pumping up the affordable housing market. San Francisco seems to be working on a more interesting concept but focused on the land and not the housing stock itself.

In San Francisco, any project that gets a loan from the city has to sell its land to the city in exchange and then lease it back. Local officials came up with the idea because they were sick of pouring billions of public dollars into affordable housing only to see developers reap huge windfalls down the road. "If we don't do something for permanent affordability now, we're doomed to replace the units we've lost," says Olson Lee, who masterminded San Francisco's land-lease program. "We learned from our experiences. We asked: What can we do differently?"

THE DEMOCRATS' ANTI-TEA PARTY IN NEW YORK

Republicans have a tea party movement that's endorsing very right-wing challengers to GOP candidates. The Democrats? Well, here's what we have in New York:

Encouraged by a group of influential New York Democrats, Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman from Tennessee, is weighing a bid to unseat Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand in this fall's Democratic primary, according to three people who have spoken with him.

Mr. Ford, 39, ... moved to New York three years ago....

Yeah, now there's the perfect candidate for one of the bluest states in the nation -- a guy who voted for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage (um there are a few gay people in New York), said he would vote for torture under some circumstances, supported GOP congressional efforts to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, not only backed the Iraq War but said "I love my president" during the Bush years, fragged John Kerry ... need I go on? That's the direction the Democratic Party should go -- in New York?

Ah, but I guess he's appealing for the only reasons that matter: the top-drawer Gotham movers and shakers like him and he's one of them.

... About a dozen high-profile Democrats have expressed interest in backing a candidacy by Mr. Ford, including the financier Steven Rattner, who, along with his wife, Maureen White, has been among the country’s most prolific Democratic fund-raisers.

Among those who have encouraged Mr. Ford to consider a run are Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, whose husband, James, is the chief executive of the Loews Corporation, and Richard Plepler, the co-president of HBO, according to people who have spoken with them.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has publicly tangled with Ms. Gillibrand, is open to the possibility of supporting a challenger of Mr. Ford's stature, according to those familiar with his thinking.

... "Harold can raise the money," said an executive who has pledged to back him if he runs.

... In New York, Mr. Ford took a job as vice chairman of Merrill Lynch, where he cultivated close ties to many of the Wall Street executives who are now encouraging him to run....

Yeah, what could be more appealing to, say, an unemployed pipefitter from Buffalo this year than a carpetbagger who's also a Wall Street fat cat? I won't even get into the question of race, except to say that if the Beck crowd can tap neo-racist notions of internationalist capitalist/communists deploying swarthy Obama as both scary Negro and fellow elitist, the same can be said about bankster Ford.

In a way, this is the antithesis of what's happening in the GOP -- but, looked at another way, it's the same phenomenon: rich people pulling both parties to the right.

But if the GOP is being pulled further to the right, where's the force that would help pull the Democratic Party in the opposite direction rather than the parallel direction? I agree with The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson about what's conspicuously absent:

...if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement.

The America over which FDR presided was home to mass organizations of the unemployed; farmers' groups that blocked foreclosures, sometimes at gunpoint; general strikes that shut down entire cities, and militant new unions that seized factories. Both communists and democratic socialists were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the civil rights movement, among whose leaders were such avowed democratic socialists as Martin Luther King Jr. and James Farmer, provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms.

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills.... in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

And the Democratic Party isn't feeling any popular pressure to move leftward.

The teabaggers and their fat-cat allies are in sync; we'd be at loggerheads with Democratic fat cats if we got organized and angry. But we could effect some pushback, at least. And we don't seem able to do that right now.

****

And yes, I know the woman Ford might challenge, Kirsten Gillibrand, is no progressive prize, but as a senator she seems to be telling us, "If you don't like these principles, I have others." Hell, she even backed ACORN in one vote. At this point, she seems less right-leaning than Ford.

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION

Let's see: Christopher Dodd's approval/disapproval numbers in Connecticut are 40%-54%.

By contrast, the approval/disapproval numbers of the guy who's likely to replace Dodd as the Democratic Senate candidate in Connecticut, state attorney general Richard Blumenthal, are 78%-13%. (See question #32 at the link.) (UPDATE: Blumenthal says he's in.)

Am I supposed to be upset that Dodd's not running for reelection?

IT'S A DIRTY JOB, BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT

I read three articles today by people for whom I have very little respect -- Mark Halperin, David Brooks, and Richard Cohen -- but, much as I wanted to sneer at what they said, I couldn't thoroughly disagree with any of them.

In the left blogosphere, the most mocked of the three is Halperin, who (in "A Report Card on Obama's First Year") declared that one of the "five things Obama is doing worse than you think" is "wooing official Washington"; Halperin chides Obama because,

politically and personally, the First Couple and their top aides have shown no hankering for the Establishment seal of approval, nor have they accepted the glut of invitations to embassy parties and other tribal rituals of the political class. In the sphere of Washington glitter, the Clintons were clumsy and the Bush team indifferent, but the Obama Administration has turned a cold shoulder, disappointing Beltway salons and newsrooms whose denizens hoped the uber-cool newbies would play.

I have contempt for this horrible Beltway world; I have contempt for Halperin because it's clear that he thinks it's good that the Beltway demands this idiocy of a president....

And yet: I have a job in which I often have to do ridiculous, pointless things to placate powerful people who should know better. Chances are you have a similar job. Obama shouldn't have to kiss these people's rings, but couldn't it be argued that he should do it anyway, or find some other way to either mollify or intimidate these bastards, just because it will smooth his path and make it easier for him to do what he wants and needs to do?

Halperin also blames Obama for failing to change the tone in Washington. It's an appalling bit of victim-blaming -- it's clear the Republicans and their allies settled early in Obama's term on a strategy of total war -- and yet ... what was Obama's Plan B? It's idiotic to say he could have changed the tone in Washington, but why isn't the public angrier at tea party crazies and name-calling conspiratorialists and other mad dogs? Why hasn't Obama managed to make them look like the menace to the Republic that they are?

Brooks says the tea party movement has the passion that the Obama campaign had in 2008; he writes,

In almost every sphere of public opinion, Americans are moving away from the administration, not toward it. The Ipsos/McClatchy organizations have been asking voters which party can do the best job of handling a range of 13 different issues. During the first year of the Obama administration, the Republicans gained ground on all 13.

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

Given America's relentless know-nothingism, it's a wonder any idea associated with the educated classes ever had even temporary popularity -- but why didn't Obama seize the moment? Why didn't he recognize that it was a moment, not a generational shift (at least not unless he could sustain it)? He lost a year by failing to demonstrate that knowledgeable people can be the ones who truly have ordinary Americans' interests at heart; America needed to see more done on the economy, and needed to see it done by smart guys. That was a missed opportunity.

Cohen grumbles that Obama doesn't seem to stand for anything concrete:

In Obama's case, his misfortune is to be a leader without a cause.

He wanted a health-care bill. Why? To cover the uncovered. Maybe. To rein in the insurance companies. Maybe. To lower costs. Maybe. What mattered most was getting a bill, any bill. This is not a cause. It's a notch on a belt.

I don't think that's it -- I think he really thinks changes have to come as partial, incremental advances, made in an ugly way like sausage; if so, he has a point -- but couldn't he be a bit more inspiring, a bit more populace-rallying, in any case, even if the end result isn't going to be revolutionary? He gives a great oration, but orations aren't everyday tools, and he needs an everyday way to inspire (if only to counter Fox). He needs day-to-day, fireside-chat eloquence. It's about job skills; it's just something he has to do to get his work done properly.

HEADS HE WINS, TAILS HIS FANS BLAME ACORN

Isn't that pretty much where attention-whore pollster Scott "Orly" Rasmussen stands right now with his shocking! amazing! exclusive! poll showing Democrat Martha Coakley with a 9-point lead over Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race? Sure, he'll look smart if she somehow loses, or wins by less than double digits, but really, what downside is there for Rasmussen if Coakley blows Brown away by 20 or more? The righty bloggers and blog readers who regard every poll of his as confirmation of a wingnut bullet point (which is precisely what they're all intended to be) will just blame sinister dark (and I do mean dark) forces for the discrepancy between the actually existing vote and Rasmussen's wish-fulfillment prognostication. And he'll just keep cranking out polls that seem to emerge from Fox Nation rather than America.

Still ... 9 points? I thought he'd claim the race was closer, just to get his fans' pulses racing. I guess he has some fear of getting egg on his face or he'd say the race was within 5 or 6. (I absolutely discount the possibility that these are real untweaked results.) I figure this means Coakley's winning margin is really somewhere in the mid- to high teens. I think Rasmussen is still attempting something more or less like honest polling, and then just putting a little English on it to stir up the fans. I don't think he's just making numbers up yet -- though I'm not sure his fans would know the difference.

PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ANTI-PALINISM

I suppose I'm not really in a position to respond to Jennifer Rubin's Commentary article "Why Jews Hate Palin" -- I haven't read the piece, which is behind a pay firewall, and I'm not Jewish -- but if I can believe the characterization of the article by David Frum (who's Jewish and conservative and a Commentary contributor, though no Palin fan), it's a nasty bit of work:

... Rubin offers four general grounds of explanation for Jewish anti-Palin feeling.

First, says Rubin, Jews greatly value (and possibly over-value) formal credentials.

Jews, who have excelled at intellectual pursuits, understandably are swayed by the notion that the presidency is a knowledge-based position requiring a background in the examination of detailed data and sophisticated analysis. They assume that such knowledge is the special preserve of a certain type of credentialed thinker (the better the university, the more unquestioned the credential) and that possessing this knowledge is the key to a successful presidency.

Second, Rubin continues, Jews under-value traditional American folkways: hunting, fishing, the frontier, military enlistment.

Her personal life made her even more alien to American Jews. She comes from the wilderness, brags about hunting and eating native animals, and is a proud gun owner.

Third, Jews disdain working class occupations like those in which Palin labored.

Palin and her husband had labored at jobs most professional and upper-middle-class Jews would never dream of holding --waitressing, picking "strawberries in the mud and mosquitoes . . . for five cents flat," sweeping parking lots, and many "messy, obscure seafood jobs, including long shifts on a stinky shore-based crab-processing vessel." Her populist appeal and identification with working-class voters are rooted in a life experience that is removed by one or two generations from the lives of most American Jews. Her life is what they were expected to rise above.

Fourth and last, Jews hate Palin because Jews disapprove of large families -- and especially because Jews quietly favor the abortion of disabled children.

Frum deftly disposes of that last argument:

Jews despise large families? How then did Bobby Kennedy's popularity among Jews manage to survive?

I'd go further, referring you to this tabulation of the Jewish vote in presidential elections since 1916. Let's see: 82% of Jews voted in 1960 for JFK (military background, massive family); a whopping 90% for LBJ in '64 (rural, non-elite education, often lacking in couth); 71% for Carter in '76 (peanut farmer, military background, Southern); and 76% for Kerry in '04 (military enlistee, three Purple Hearts, military-themed convention).

As for the rest ... um, Jews disdain waiters and waitresses? You mean, the waitstaff at every restaurant in New York is 100% actor/dancer/Gentile?

Oh, and no Jew in recent years has ever done any work of any kind anywhere except behind a desk or in front of a laptop? All Jews are white-collar workers? Not only has no Jew in the past half-century ever needed to do blue-collar labor, or wanted to, but the clean-fingernailed are repulsed by anyone who's ever broke a sweat on the job? Really?

I don't buy the whole characterization -- and I know I'm not the person who should be getting upset about it, but it strikes me as dangerously close to an anti-Semitic Jews-as-fifth-columnists-and-New-Class-elitists stereotype. It's Jews vs. "Americans," with "Americans" being Palin's "real Americans." It's Rubin internalizing a somewhat watered-down version of "the International Jew."

And, of course, it turns out that there's no evidence behind this at all:

Rubin passes lightly over the question whether Jews in fact do hate Palin more than other people do. The sole evidence she cites on behalf of her assertion is a September 2008 poll in which Jews disapproved of Palin by a 54-37 margin. That does not look like foaming hatred to me, and anyway those numbers are now 15 months out of date.

Those numbers actually come from the American Jewish Committee's 2008 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion. And it turns out that Jews didn't disapprove of Palin 54-37, they disapproved of McCain's choice of Palin by that amount? A meaningless distinction? I'm not so sure. It's not as visceral. It's not hate.

And why did they disapprove? Look at the rest of the survey. Democrats outnumbered Republicans 56%-17%. Liberals constituted 44% of respondents, and moderates another 30%; only 24% called themselves conservative. These respondents disapproved of McCain's choice because they disapproved of everything conservative. They're liberals.

And there's this question:

What is the best way for the United States to handle its energy needs -- by encouraging greater energy production, by encouraging greater energy conservation, or by developing alternative energy sources?

Greater energy production 7
Greater energy conservation 6
Developing alternative energy sources 75
All three (vol.) 10

The Jews surveyed favored alternate energy -- and Palin was the Queen of "Drill, Baby Drill!" Of course they disapproved of her.

Sorry, this is a crock -- and, if I may say so, an offensive one.

I REALLY DON'T THINK THIS IS GOING TO END WELL

Talking Points Memo is reporting that health care reform is now getting tangled up in the issue of immigration:

Lawmakers who want to extend health coverage to illegal immigrants will not block the passage of the final health care reform bill so long as the White House offers a substantive promise to start pushing comprehensive immigration legislation this year.

... Those familiar with the talks say any immigration legislation will include various amnesty provisions to allow for health care coverage....

David Dayen's response to this is absurd:

Keep in mind that comprehensive immigration reform which offers a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented workers would essentially defuse the most controversial piece of the health care bill. Under the Senate structure favored by the White House, undocumented workers would not be allowed to purchase insurance coverage on the exchange with their own money. If immigration reform passes, there will be no undocumented workers, at least in theory.

Really? That's going to defuse controversy? That's going to make rabid immigrant-bashers happy? "Those people we hate who shouldn't get health care because they're illegal? They're not going to be illegal anymore, so they're going to get health care! We feel so much better now!"

Yes, yes, I know what the conventional wisdom is: that hardcore opposition to immigration reform is the cause of a very small group of disgruntled right-wing throwbacks. They may have scuttled the Bush administration's attempts to get an immigration bill, but their electoral clout is actually minimal -- a pro-immigration-reform candidate won the GOP presidential nomination, for heaven's sake, and Tom Tancredo's presidential bid tanked.

I don't buy that. The midterms are going to be low-turnout -- and this is even more motivation for the already extraordinarily motivated voters who are now threatening GOP vengeance at the polls. It's not going to sit well with Hillary Clinton beer-and-a-shot Democrats, either, especially in a recession.

Oh, and the timing?

If Congress considers an immigration bill this year, it would have to happen in the spring, says Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. "The Senate would go first in January or February, and the House would follow in March or April... it will have to happen within that window." Any later and White House would risk pushing the looming fight too close to the midterm elections, exposing vulnerable Democrats to even greater political blowback.

So this is going to happen now -- it's going to be another major undertaking at a time when Americans really want a focus on jobs and the economy? (And is the belief that this can be wrapped up by April coming from the same people who thought health care could be wrapped up by August and Gitmo could be closed this month? Give me a break. This will be demagogued for months and months. There's no way to keep it from "exposing vulnerable Democrats to even greater political blowback.")

Look, I'm not endorsing the immigrant-bashers' views. I'm just saying that this has a very good chance of being yet another fight in which Obama and the Democrats don't see that they're overmatched. I don't know if this is enough to scuttle health care, but it's enough to make 2010 as ugly as 2009.

AND QUIST DIFFERS FROM OTHER REPUBLICANS HOW EXACTLY?

Previously semi-obscure House candidate Allen Quist (R-Minn.) has appalled reasonable people (and probably catapulted himself to Joe Wilson-esque wingnut folk-hero status) with this statement:

"... I, like you, have seen that our country is being destroyed. I mean, this is -- every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom. This is our fight. And this is our time. This is it. Terrorism, yes -- but that's not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C., with the radicals. They aren't liberals, they're radicals. Obama, Pelosi, [Democratic opponent Tim] Walz -- they're not liberals, they're radicals. They are destroying our country. And people all over are figuring that out."

Quist seems to describe this as a new Obama-era threat -- but really, doesn't the right always think liberals and Democrats are the #1 enemy?

Why did the Bush administration invade Iraq and start torturing? To some extent it was out of a sincere if misguided belief that doing so would keep America safe -- but to a much greater extent it was because, after nearly all of America rallied around the president and supported a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Karl Rove knew the GOP needed a wedge issue going into the 2002 midterms. Furthermore, George W. Bush wanted to stick it to all the dirty hippies who'd snickered at him at Yale. And Dick Cheney wanted to get back at all the liberal bastards who'd thwarted the Nixon White House's quest for greater and greater executive-branch power.

The real enemy wasn't them -- it was us. It's always us. For Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol and their ilk, we're the #1 enemy, and we always have been.

So Quist isn't pushing the envelope. He's just saying what all his fellow righties believe.

****

By the way, as you may have read elsewhere, Quist (who once ran unsuccessfully for governor in Minnesota) did ask an undertaker to place his unborn fetus in his deceased first wife's arms, in a glass-fronted casket, after the wife died in a car accident. (This was in the 1980s, years before Rick Santorum and his wife brought their stillborn fetus to Mrs. Santorum's parents' home so the family could bond with him -- and, presumably, so that Santorum could later discuss the incident with reporters.) Quist also proclaimed that male dominance in marriage is "instinctive," and his career as a state legislator included "an undercover foray into a sex-oriented bookstore in Mankato [and] hours and hours of speeches on the House floor railing against homosexuality and pornography." He's also written a number of books, including America's Schools: The Battleground for Freedom (2005), which claims that "the New Left uses our public schools and our tax money to indoctrinate our children with a radical agenda," which, because of "international agreements, signed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton," includes "world government." (See? We were the enemy years ago. Poppy Bush was an evil liberal.)

IT'S CALLED "SEARCH," MARTY

Marty Peretz yesterday:

President Obama used the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" six times in his weekly address to the nation. I don't know how long it has actually been since he's uttered those words. But my memory is that it's been a very long time.

Since Peretz, or whatever bright-eyed pup intern he has in his employ, or a combination of the two, managed to get onto the White House Web site to provide that link, you'd think an additional two seconds' worth of effort might have been expended to search the site and get an answer to question. In fact, the last time appears to have been New Year's Eve.

This morning, I spoke with John Brennan about preliminary assessments from the ongoing consultations I have ordered into the human and systemic failures that occurred leading up to the attempted act of terrorism on Christmas Day....

And before that it was December 28:

THE PRESIDENT: Hey, guys. Good morning, everybody. I just want to take a few minutes to update the American people on the attempted terrorist attack that occurred on Christmas Day and the steps we're taking to ensure the safety and security of the country.

... a full investigation has been launched into this attempted act of terrorism and we will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.

... I've ordered two important reviews because it's absolutely critical that we learn from this incident and take the necessary measures to prevent future acts of terrorism. The first review involves our watch list system, which our government has had in place for many years to identify known and suspected terrorists so that we can prevent their entry into the United States....

The word "terrorism" even showed up twice in the Nobel speech.

Peretz also adds:

The New York Times also tried to make its amends ... or, rather, was forced by circumstances into doing so. And, yes, its editorial also used the words "terrorism" and "terrorist," locutions it otherwise quite faithfully avoids, especially in its news reports, lest the opprobrium of ideological murder prejudice the readers of the Times against its practitioners.

This was written a day before the Times posted the text of an upcoming Magazine story called, um, "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism," in which some form of the word "terror" appears 65 times, not counting the title.

The story, by the way, is a profile of John Brennan. Brennan's title in the Obama administration is, er, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.

Miles To Go Before We Sleep

In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison, where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an immigration judge."

Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.

Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the obituaries

Read the whole thing, the link is embedded in the title. This is the Nation's report on our "secret" ICE warehouse prisons. It will take years of serious Civil Liberties action to begin to unwind the crazy of the last eight years. And if Obama and the Dems are not on board the secret state will simply continue to grow.

My Warrior Ethos is Formless, Like Water.

Great article, but this had me scratching my head:

“You’ve got almost two extremes,” Henry Crumpton, who led the C.I.A.’s operation in Afghanistan after Sept. 11 and who later served as counterterrorism chief at the State Department under Bush, told me several weeks before the Christmas Day attempt. “You’ve got Bush 43, who aspired to have a warrior’s ethos. He was driven, I think, by that, and in some ways it hurt us with the lack of rigor and examination of some of the consequences of our actions, Iraq being the most horrible extreme. Obama comes at it from the other extreme. He comes at it like a lawyer would, someone who may not accept and may even reject this idea of a warrior’s ethos. And it is a war. You’ve got guys out there who want to kill us.”

So, Bush's "warrior ethos" was defined by a "lack of rigor and examination of some of the consequences of our actions..." and led to a moronic and disastrous war with people not at war with us, but Henry Crumpton still misses it and thinks that Obama needs a bit more of it because "You've got guys out there who want to kill us." Isn't there something in between stupid warrior tricks and the imaginary Spock Obama? Isn't there anything between the two? When you read the whole article you discover, of course, that Obama himself is somewhere between the two--somewhere good. But Crumpton's point reminds us of just how stupid our elite national discourse is that it could even bandy about pop psych terms like "warrior ethos" to describe Bush's political decisions. The man was a noted coward and member of the fighting chairborne brigade, and his political decisions were masterminded by "five deferments" Cheney. If any "ethos" could have been said to inform their actions it was not that of a "warrior" anymore than a couch potato can be described as having the "ethos of a great athlete."


-aimai

RICH COSSETED REPUBLICANS WHO WANT TO BE PRESIDENT

This is no surprise, obviously:

Later this winter, Mitt Romney will strike out on a national book tour....

The March 2 release of "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness," will kick off a monthlong tour taking the former Massachusetts governor to at least 18 states, including Iowa....

(Romney has yet to confirm appearances in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two other early primary states.)...

But this seems like the triumph of hope over experience:

St. Martin's will print 200,000 copies of Romney's book....

Obama, the Clintons, and Sarah Palin sell in the seven figures, as do rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, but your typical presidential aspirant's book? Five figures at best, and I don't mean the high five figures.

On the other hand, the thesis of this one is going to be Fox- and talk-radio-friendly:

The title refers to what Romney describes as President Obama's pattern of apologizing for American behavior in speeches abroad.

Is that enough to fill out a whole book? In Wingnuttia, sure it is. But is Romney, as a messenger, sufficiently hardcore to put this across -- especially if he tries to dole out the red meat in portions that are merely moderate, because he thinks that's how he'll remain a viable candidate among non-crazy voters? He might pull off this balancing act, but I wonder if this is going to be an early fizzle. We'll see.

****

Meanwhile, what brain-tissue-eating virus circulates among political journalists in this country that makes them feel compelled to argue every few months that Haley Barbour could become president of the United States? It was just the Yazoo City Herald in Barbour's home state of Mississippi back in '04 -- but later it was The Washington Post in '05, and recently U.S. News, the Post again, and now Newsweek.

What's infuriating about the Newsweek piece is the way it suggests that possible objections to a Barbour candidacy are as much the result of multiculti political correctness, unfairly imposed by slickster political consultants, as of Barbour's legitimate handicaps as a potential national candidate:

Haley Barbour is not well equipped for the age of Obama. Just look at the man's office. The Republican governor of Mississippi keeps a large portrait of the University Greys, the Confederate rifle company that suffered 100 percent casualties at Gettysburg, on a wall not far from a Stars and Bars Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis. Then there's the man himself. Rather than walking across the street from his office to the state capitol, he rides a hundred or so yards in the back seat of a large SUV, air conditioning on full blast.... The cofounder of one of the nation's largest lobbying firms may or may not be the Good Ole Boy Republican Fat Cat his liberal critics make him out to be, but he certainly looks the part.

A year ago, when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the Serious, Responsible people who appear on Sunday-morning talk shows agreed that, if it wanted to survive, the Republican Party needed to stop letting men like Barbour appear as its public face.... No longer could Republicans count on the basic conservatism of the American people, the reflexive hostility to candidates who favor big government. The electorate had changed: white Reaganites and religious conservatives no longer held sway. Now the power lay in the growing Hispanic population and all those teeming masses of idealistic people, yearning for something cool.

The next great Republican leader wouldn't be someone who looked like Haley Barbour -- chairman of the national Republican Party in the '90s, an insider's insider who has been involved in every presidential election since 1968. The man (or woman!) to lead the party out of the wilderness would have to remake and reform until the Grand Old Party was unrecognizable to its former self. That was the only equation for Republican revival: unrecognizable + cool + Hispanics + Twitter + being nice to gays + Facebook.

Translation: it's somewhat about Barbour as a fat cat and a far-too-unreconstructed product of the Jim Crow South ... but what's really holding him back is all this foolishness about Twitter and multiracialism and maintaining a proper body mass index. It's your fault, latte-swiller! If it weren't for you, this fine man could be president!

Er, no. It's about the corruption. And the ties to racists like the Council of Conservative Citizens.

(Even Newsweek notes that, back in the '80s, after an aide in his Senate campaign made a remark about "coons," Barbour compounded the outrage by "warn[ing] the aide that if he 'persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.'" But this is treated not as a shockingly offensive remark, but as a youthful indiscretion -- a sign that Barbour "still had a lot to learn about politics.")

Oh, and did I mention Barbour's bizarre record of pardoning men who've murdered their wives and girlfriends?

(And he also, Newsweek tells us, wants the party to be a moderate-friendly big tent, which surely means that even the tea party crowd won't touch him.)

We find the mainstream press's Newt Gingrich fixation baffling, but this makes even less sense. Nobody really wants this guy to run -- except insider journalists.

I GOT NOTHIN'

But I do want to update the blogroll with a few heretofore unrolled blogs mentioned by Aimai on New Year's Eve: Experimental Theology, Taibblog, and The Inverse Square Blog. Welcome aboard.

SEPARATING US FROM OUR MONEY -- PROGRESSIVELY

In today's New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai asserts that Barack Obama, while not a "populist," is certainly a "progressive." The evidence?

By the definition of the word as it came to be used in the early part of the 20th century, Obama is indisputably in the progressive tradition. Like both Roosevelts and Woodrow Wilson, he has pursued financial regulation -- radical by the standards of the last two presidents -- that would seek to temper the power of the markets without controlling them. His recalibration of campaign fund-raising, achieved through the triumph of small-dollar donations over the influence of lobbyists and corporations, would have delighted progressives like Robert La Follete, who fought in their day for women's suffrage and the direct election of senators. And Obama's relentless pursuit of health care reform, even at the expense of provisions that liberals held sacred, may well place him alongside F.D.R. and Lyndon Johnson in the pantheon of progressive presidents who were able to substantially amend the nation's social contract.

We can argue forever about whether Obama-style health care reform is really reform for anyone other than insurance companies, and I'd say the jury is still out on the question of whether Obama "has pursued financial regulation" with any kind of real vigor.

But as for that bit in the middle ... really? At this distance from the '08 campaign, do we really regard all that fund-raising from us non-fat cats as progressive?

It seems to me that, by that standard, Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart and all the other mountebank TV preachers of the last half-century were also progressives in the tradition of La Follette. So are the folks who run payday lending companies rather than merchant banks.

Yeah, I remember: at the time the Obama fund-raising method seemed progressive, but was it? It's not as if Obama refused large gifts, like Jerry Brown turning back any contribution over $100 in his 1992 presidential bid, so, really, what was the impact on how we practice campaign finance? Wasn't aggregating a lot of small donations just the clever way the Obama campaign found to run with the big boys -- who also came on board?

Lately I've been thinking that the deeply compromised health care bill would be a step of some kind in the direction of helping at least some ordinary people. I still think some reform of Wall Street may happen, however compromised. And the administration has kept a few people employed with the stimulus who otherwise wouldn't be, and may possibly work harder on jobs in the months to come.

That's all TR-style progressive, I suppose. But all those fund-raising e-mails we received in 2008 (and since)? They aren't.

WEEP FOR THE BANKSTERS

I'm a bit late getting to this, but according to an article in yesterday's New York Times, next year might be a terribly painful year for the banksters:

Most banks are hunkering down in anticipation of another big wave of real estate and consumer loan losses. Small and midsize banks are expected to be hit especially hard: They must absorb nearly $900 billion of commercial real estate losses over the next few years....

The big banks, meanwhile, face a range of new regulations that take effect in 2010. Rules curbing overdraft fees and predatory practices in the credit card business are expected to squeeze the flow of billions of dollars from penalty income. They will also have less wiggle room as regulators require them to hold larger cash reserves, reducing their returns and forcing them to be more conservative.

That heralds a sharp drop in profits, especially if the ebullient stock and bond markets, which generated billions in trading revenue last year for Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants, tapers off in 2010.

Omigod! It's going to be just horrible for banks!

How horrible? This horrible:

Analysts say that bank profitability might fall by a third from its precrisis levels, to where it was in the '60s, '70s and '80s.

I hear you gasping -- understandably! Why, it's a cataclysm! They'll only make two thirds of what they made during the boom! They'll only make what they made under Ronald Reagan!

So no wonder this is happening:

Wall Street has responded by beefing up its financial lobby in Washington to win big concessions. Among other things, the industry is working to ease rules governing derivatives and to weaken a proposal for a consumer financial protection agency.

OK, enough sarcasm -- good Lord, this is what a cooling off looks like for these guys? A third less in profit, after a spectacular year, while the rest of us are dying out here?

The Times article then reverts to a meme I utterly despise:

Already, there is the sense that the political momentum to force meaningful changes has ebbed....

This is what the fat cats, the pols, and the journalists keep saying to one another: we've lost the momentum for real change. Er, guys? You may have lost the momentum, but remember us? Out here in America? We've got your momentum for change -- right here. To us, change isn't so nine months ago. We still want it -- badly.

Then we get a quote from someone who now seems like one of the good guys, or less-bad guys, in the administration:

"This is no time for a return to business as usual," Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said in a recent speech in Germany. "The rally in world stock markets from recession lows has brought renewed hopes on Wall Street and the City of London for a return to outlandish bonuses for financial operators and a vigorous defense of established vested interests."

But Volcker is the Colin Powell of this administration. Maybe he resists administration groupthink on the economy more vigorously than Powell did on foreign policy in the first Bush term, but, like Powell, he's the guy nobody in the administration listens to. If he wants to make the case that we need a return to Glass-Steagall-style regulation and an end to "too big to fail," he should have the guts to resign, making it obvious that he's not doing so "for personal reasons." He should write a book. He should speak out against business as usual as an independent gray eminence. He should, in other words, be outside the tent pissing in, rather than the opposite, which is just where it suits the fat-cat-friendly administration to have him.

BAMBOOZLEMENT FROM THE BLOB

Surely I'm stating the glaringly obvious when I say that this statement from Rush Limbaugh about his hospitalization in Honolulu is absurd:

"The treatment I received here was the best that the world has to offer," Limbaugh said. "Based on what happened here to me, I don't think there's one thing wrong with the American health care system. It is working just fine, just dandy."

Limbaugh said that despite his celebrity he received the same treatment as anyone else who would have called 911 and been taken to the hospital in his condition.

"I got no special treatment," he said....

I don't really have to explain why this is absurd, do I? If O.J. Simpson had said, after his very expensive dream team won him an acquittal on murder charges, "The U.S. system of justice is wonderful -- I got the same treatment a poor kid with a public defender would have gotten if charged with the same crime," we'd have said he was being ridiculous. If a rich Hollywood star caught with massive amounts of powdered drugs got sentenced to ritzy rehab and probation and said, "The system works -- a street junkie would have gotten the same deal," we'd just laugh.

That's the equivalent of what Limbaugh is saying. He's in no position to say a poor, uninsured person would have gotten the same treatment -- that's for poor and uninsured people to say.

(Longtime readers of this blog know that several times I've cited a New York Observer column from 2003, which recounts a Limbaugh broadcast in which he explained that he doesn't believe in health insurance, and that he always pays for his medical treatment out of pocket -- which is easy for him because he has vast reserves of cash and makes nearly $40 million a year.)

But Limbaugh knows that, at least to part of the country, his let-them-eat-cake statement actually sounds plausible. To these people, Limbaugh isn't an Ivy League, big-city elitist, even if he is filthy rich and incredibly influential. To them, the insiders are "liberal elitists" like the president of the United States and all Democrats (every one of whom is, by definition, a real or honorary big-city latte-swilling elitist) ... as well as every poor, uninsured person who needs health care. In the wingnut narrative, that's the enemy: the unholy alliance of the elite and the unwashed. The elite, you see, use the poor as a weapon to destroy civilization as hard-working, rock-ribbed regular Americans know it. And one of the most regular, most non-elite guys around is ... Rush Limbaugh! He didn't go to Harvard! He isn't a swell! He's just a regular guy from Missouri!

So when Limbaugh says the health system works, part of America thinks he's really qualified to judge. It doesn't ring false at all. They don't even recognize the completely reversal of class roles embodied in Limbaugh's statement.

If I'm right about this, we live in a very sick country.

WITH GOP DADDY GONE, BROOKS AND CHAREN CALL FOR A D.I.Y. WAR ON TERROR

I suppose we'd need a third example to have a trend, but today we have David Brooks and Mona Charen declaring that we shouldn't really expect to be protected from terrorism by government because, y'know, government is icky and disgusting and can't do anything right (something conservatives tend to point out a lot when conservatives aren't running the government).

Charen:

It may not be President Obama's fault that our multibillion-dollar Homeland Security apparatus is more Keystone Kops than "24," anymore than it was President Bush's fault that city, state, and federal agencies failed to respond adequately to Hurricane Katrina. The federal government is (alas) a vast ungovernable enterprise. And the bigger it gets, the less effective it will become....

Brooks:

... we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved.

... the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

...In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, "Listen, we're doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through." But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways....

If that's really the case, why would it be? Charen doesn't say it, Brooks doesn't say it, but if we feel entitled to perfection in this area, could it be because, for seven and a half years after 9/11, we were told by Bush and Cheney and their surrogates that they were giving us perfection? That we should pay no attention to the anthrax attacks, or to the endless deaths of the wars, because they were keeping us 100% safe?

****

It's been noted that George W. Bush remained on vacation after Richard Reid's attempted shoe bombing of an airliner, not commenting on it for six days, yet he wasn't criticized as Obama has been for a much faster response. Why was that? Let's look at a transcript of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on December 28, 2001, six days after the shoe-bombing attempt. Our old pal David Brooks is in the conversation, along with Mark Shields and Margaret Warner:

MARGARET WARNER: David, a very different George W. Bush as the year ends than when it began.

DAVID BROOKS: ... he has expanded in scope. He has become less of the small neighborhood caring guy, more of the big President, the Superpower leader, and he has filled the role.

MARK SHIELDS: George Bush in the words of Jeff Geran, the pollster, said, he began the year as a question mark; he ends it as an exclamation point. And I think that's great truth to that. He was inaugurated January 20th. He became President really after September 11, and there's no doubt about it. There was a sense of confidence there that he did not demonstrate early in the first half of the year in his presidency....

MARGARET WARNER: Even his adversaries, his political adversaries, David, are readily acknowledging that he's a very effective as a wartime President.What makes him effective?

DAVID BROOKS: ... you can break down the last couple of months into a series of crucial decisions, and he's made the right one just about every time.

Should we trust the Northern Alliance? Yes. Should we go after the states that harbor terrorists, not only the organizations? Yes. Should we move out ahead of the coalition, possibly rupturing relations with Russia, others? Yes. That worked out okay. Should we downplay anthrax? Not personally get involved? Yes.

A series of correct decisions, and so we can talk about his style, which is very important, but he has actually made the right decisions on matters of substance.

Osama had escaped, the war in Afghanistan wasn't won, the worst foreign policy blunder of our lifetimes was on the horizon -- and yet he'd bamboozled us into believing he was Superman. He'd certainly bamboozled Brooks, Shields, and Warner. Eventually, when we'd realized that he was a failure, we were still holding him to this standard of godhood.

More:

DAVID BROOKS: This sense we have found our moment and our mission, his personal mission, but looking at him today my reaction to the whole event was, could he have been more Gary Cooper?

I mean, if you took in a bunch of cultural historians and said, what are the elements of the simple, straight talking American, he'd have them all naturally and authentically. You know he said he didn't want to talk about himself; I don't look in the mirror. He had the ranch behind him; he had the leather jacket.

He talked about fishing and clearing brush late in the press conference. This was somebody who'd almost risen to Reaganesque levels of tapping into deep American stereotypes, and that is something I didn't see, I don't think many people saw a year ago, and if I was just speaking politically as a political consultant, that's magic, which not everybody has.

That was, I believe, this press conference, in Crawford, which ended as follows:

Q What are you doing with your days here?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I'm up -- I was up this morning at 5:00 a.m., spent a little quality time with the First Lady. And I just finished my book, Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris, which is a fabulous book on Teddy Roosevelt. I recommend people reading it. I am going to -- I would have gotten up and run three or four miles this morning, which I'll probably do that this afternoon. I'm going to take Tommy around to show him parts of the ranch. But if Tommy weren't here, I'd be working down there, a little chain-saw work, clearing some brush, burning some brush.

We're making great progress in one of our -- one of the bottom areas that was heretofore relatively inaccessible. One of these days I'll take you down there. It's a beautiful place. It's a bodark grove -- bodark tree is a native tree, real hard wood that grows these giant green, kind of apple-looking things. But I'll spend time doing that.

And then this afternoon -- it gets dark here about 5:30 p.m., and so I'll probably watch a little University of Texas football tonight.

Q What about the tree you planted yesterday?

THE PRESIDENT: Tree plant, very good. My senior staff gave me a beautiful oak, 10-inch oak. And we planted her right outside the house. I haven't written my thank-you note yet, so I'll give them a verbal -- thanks for the tree. It is a beauty. And we planted about -- I think we planted so far about 35 trees, live oaks and cedar elms here. And it's going to be a beautiful sight for when these trees -- when they take off.

Did a little fishing yesterday, by the way. Not very successful. The water is cold, the fish are at the bottom. They're not biting very much. But just the fact that I was able to fish was a nice treat.

Thank you all.

A press conference three days later, also at Crawford, had these remarks near the end:

THE PRESIDENT: ...It's going to be a great year because people are going to be able to find work again. It's going to be a great year because our military is going to do the job the Americans expect. It'll be a great year because at home we'll protect the American people. And it's going to be a great year primarily because Americans have taken a look inward, reassessed their values; have realized that some of the basics in life are that which is most important -- love of faith, love of family. And as a result, our communities have been stronger. So I'm really looking forward to 2002.

I'm also looking forward to my cheeseburger. (Laughter.)

Q Any resolutions?

THE PRESIDENT: Resolutions? Eat fewer cheeseburgers. (Laughter.) Thank you, all....

Cheeseburgers. But it was OK, because he was keeping us 100% safe, and was making all the right decisions, and couldn't have been more Gary Cooper. Unlike Obama.