AND WHILE YOU WEREN'T PAYING ATTENTION, CHRIS CHRISTIE DROPPED OUT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
(updated)

Well, no, he didn't exactly drop out -- but he destroyed any chance he has to win the Republican nomination:

Flanked by Hispanic leaders, students, and immigration reform advocates, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie celebrated the signing of his state's so-called DREAM Act on Tuesday, hailing the new law a sound economic choice and an object lesson in bipartisan cooperation....

The bill grants in-state college tuition rates to undocumented high school graduates who attended a New Jersey high school for at least three years....

The headline of this Business Insider story says it all:

Chris Christie Just Made The Decision To Own Immigration Reform For 2016

And there's even a photo that can appear in every anti-Christie flyer distributed before the South Carolina primary:

Chris Christie has given his conservative detractors another "hug" moment.

About two hours after holding a ceremonial signing New Jersey's version of the "Dream Act," Gov. Chris Christie tweeted a photo with one of the "Dreamers" the law will benefit, a New Jersey high school student who immigrated to the U.S. without authorization at a young age:

This is Diana Paneque. She's in the 11th grade at Union City HS. An impressive young lady & also a Dreamer. pic.twitter.com/SuA94tzxuW

— Governor Christie (@GovChristie) January 7, 2014

I was sure that Christie was going to start tacking to the right ten minutes after the polls closed last November and he'd won his reelection rout. But it looks as if he's running a Morning Joe greenroom campaign -- he's listening to too many people who think that the key to victory in 2016 is Scarborough-style conservatism-with-a-few-dollops-of-centrism. I'm sure it's what his hedge-fund-manager fans want from him. I'm sure the thinking is that the Chamber of Commerce types are going to take the party back from those crazy tea types any minute now, you betcha.

But immigration is the third rail of Republican politics, and that was true wll before there was a tea party. In 2008, John McCain got away with having been an immigration reform supporter, but that was because he embodied militarism at a time when what Republican voters hated the most about Democrats was skepticism about Bush's wars. Christie doesn't have that advantage. (And, of course, even McCain had to repudiate his own immigration position during the primaries.)

Christie's taking the wrong course -- and that makes me happy, because he's been the strongest Republican in the general election polls. Nice knowing you, Chris.

****

AND: I think Christie's stance on immigration will have much more impact on his 2016 chances in the GOP primaries than the lane-closure thing, unless somehow that can be linked directly to death or serious harm (at least of a white person) as a result of emergency personnel being ensnared in a traffic jam. I think, and I'm sure you think, that the incident is illustrative of Christie's character -- vindictive, petty -- but the smallness of the issue, in national terms, is what's going to make GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina shrug it off. In fact, it might be seen as a positive among those voters, who'll assume that if he was behind the punishment of Fort Lee's Democratic mayor, well, the mayor must have done something to deserve it. Christie's strength has been the sense (among wingers and lovestruck media centrists who thrilled to his Fox-promoted YouTube videos) that he's good-bad but not evil -- he dresses people down, but only when they have it coming, and he's a cuddly guy otherwise. The right will assume the bridge story is more of the same. Immigration is another matter altogether -- he'll be on the defensive about that throughout the primaries.

AND I SHOULD HAVE ADDED: The revelation today in the bridge scandal is "that one of the governor's top aides was deeply involved in the decision to choke off [Fort Lee]'s access to the bridge," according to emails -- evidence that this was a political vendetta against a mayor who wouldn't endorse Christie. Yeah, but if there's never a smoking gun linking Christie directly, people who want to dismiss it will say it was the aide's fault. Aides can be fired. This still seems as if it will be contained sooner or later.

MAYBE LIZ CHENEY DROPPED OUT TOO SOON

So I guess the whole neo-Paulite, neo-isolationist, don't-bomb-Syria, don't-drone-me-bro moment on the right is over, and now it's cool again to attack President Obama as the guy who lost Afghanistan and Iraq. Is that right? Or is it just old-school guys like Robert Gates and the guy who wrote this article about Gates's memoir, Bob Woodward?

In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president "doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his. For him, it's all about getting out."

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was "skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail," Gates writes in "Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War."

And the lack of respect! In dealing with people in the military establishment, Obama has such a swelled head you'd think he imagines himself to be ... oh, I don't know -- commander in chief or something!

... Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the central commander in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, made remarks to the press suggesting he was not comfortable with setting a fixed date to start withdrawal.

At a March 3, 2011, National Security Council meeting, Gates writes, the president opened with a "blast." Obama criticized the military for "popping off in the press" and said he would push back hard against any delay in beginning the withdrawal.

According to Gates, Obama concluded, "'If I believe I am being gamed...' and left the sentence hanging there with the clear implication the consequences would be dire."

Gates continues: "I was pretty upset myself. I thought implicitly accusing" Petraeus, and perhaps Mullen and Gates himself, "of gaming him in front of thirty people in the Situation Room was inappropriate, not to mention highly disrespectful of Petraeus...."

Disrespectful of David Petraeus! Fetch my smelling salts!

Is this (plus new trouble in Iraq, which has John McCain all worked up) a signal that it's time for the GOP to start defending George W. Bush's wildly unpopular wars? Damn, and it was just yesterday that Liz Cheney dropped out of a Senate race, accused of carpetbaggging and flip-flopping on gay marriage, but also of being out of step with her party on foreign policy. National Journal:

Liz Cheney didn't struggle in the race because of her foreign policy views. But they didn't bolster her credentials, either. That itself is a sign of how much the Republican Party has changed in the last decade. Republican candidates used to gain political traction by criticizing opponents as weak on terrorism. Now those voices find themselves leading from behind.

Dave Weigel:

... in 2013 and 2014, Cheney's quaint support for drone warfare and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put her in the minority of her party.

But maybe that's not true anymore. Maybe Liz bowed out just before the wingnut zeitgeist shifted her way again. And when Republicans hate Democrats for making us vulnerable to evil foreigners, the Republicans who wrn of the apocalypse can even be for gay marriage -- just ask Liz's dad! So maybe Liz just missed the return of her moment by a day....

DUMBEST OP-ED OF THE YEAR SO FAR: S.E. CUPP ON WEED

S.E. Cupp writes in the New York Daily News that marijuana legalization is excellent news for John McCain terrible news for progressives:

Pot could put progressives in a tough spot

... some obvious extrapolations make it clear that the legal weed experiment could at least put the politics of progressivism -- all the rage in liberal circles now -- in a tricky spot.

For one, there are glaring inconsistencies between the liberal argument for pot legalization and positions on other issues. An obvious one is gun control.

The same argument used against guns is used for pot: that legalizing pot and making it more available will reduce crime. No good liberal would say the same of guns, though there is substantial evidence to prove more guns equal less crime.

Wait -- what? "No good liberal" would argue for legalizing guns? Do you suppose that may be because owning guns is, um, already legal? How do you compare the laws on guns, ownership of which is legal in every state, with possession of a product that, until recently, was 100% illegal for 100% of citizens, and didn't become fully legal for people lacking doctors' notes until about a week ago, and only one state? Is Cupp's point that demanding greater legal access to anything and everything is the only position a left-winger can take that's intellectually consistent, regardless of current levels of legal access? So if we oppose decriminalization of privately owned anthrax, we're hypocrites, too?

And if we're going to compare the nation's gun laws and Colorado's new pot laws, let's take a look at some of Colorado's restrictions: you can buy pot in Colorado if you're over 21, but only an ounce at a time if you're a resident, and only a quarter ounce if you're from out of state. You can share with friends, but you can't sell to them. You can't smoke in public, or even in the pot shops themselves. Communities can ban pot shops altogether. You can grow your own, but you're limited to six plants -- three immature and three mature -- and the place where the pot is grown must be locked and enclosed. Only licensed dealers can sell, and licensees were limited to those who already had licenses to sell medical pot. Oh, and you can still be fired in Colorado for smoking pot, even if you smoke on your own time.

Substitute guns for pot in the list above, and just try to imagine the gun community shrugging and accepting any comparable restrictions.

Oh, and Cupp herself notes,

... there are already complaints in Colorado that pot is over-regulated and over-taxed. There's a 15% excise tax levied on "average market rate" marijuana, a special 10% sales tax and the state's general 2.9% sales tax will also apply. Yikes.

Economists suggest this could make Colorado's pot industry too costly for the state and the consumer, in which case users rely on an inevitable black market to pop back up, making Colorado a tourism-only pot state. Will progressives really admit, in that case, that their own high taxes and burdensome regulations crippled an industry with so much potential?

Actually, they will: we learn here that Colorado state representative Jonathan Singer, the sponsor of the legalization bill, is willing to reconsider the tax level to prevent black market sale of weed. On the other hand, the fact that pot is selling out tells us that, at least for now, supply has definitely met demand at a market-clearing price. (And the price may drop if this changes.)

But let's backtrack: here are fairly high taxes on weed. When you try to raise taxes on guns, the gunners howl. Sorry, S.E., but guns are still far less regulated than Colorado weed.

And perhaps this would be a good time for David Waldman to weigh in on the analogy:

I was cleaning my legal pot & accidentally killed my neighbor. http://t.co/l4EFPHDF6g

— David Waldman (@KagroX) January 7, 2014

Every teacher should smoke pot in the classroom. For safety. http://t.co/l4EFPHDF6g

— David Waldman (@KagroX) January 7, 2014

If I walk down the street w a giant bag of pot over my shoulder, cops will walk on eggshells if they dare stop me. http://t.co/l4EFPHDF6g

— David Waldman (@KagroX) January 7, 2014

Heh. Indeed.

****

Cupp also argues that pot legalization is hypocritical for people who want to ban trans fats and restrict sugar and salt and tobacco. That that seems reasonable on the surface, but I don't accept it. Support for legalizing marijuana stems from the belief that it will be smoked no matter what, and jail isn't the right place for adults who do the smoking -- just as with alcohol. Decades ago we concluded that alcohol prohibition was a failure, but legalization hasn't stopped us from investigating alcohol's risks to individual and public health. We have designated drivers and sobriety checkpoints and pressure on bartenders not to serve the severely intoxicated and recommendations that pregnant women avoid alcohol -- all in the context of legal alcohol. Maybe we'll do the same for pot, if we can ever decouple the health research from the process of jailing people for pot.

****

Oh, and I love this from Cupp:

... some are suggesting the Colorado law could have a libertarian ripple effect. In the conservative National Review, which supports legalizing marijuana, editors hoped that "Colorado's recognition of this individual liberty might inspire some popular reconsideration of other individual liberties, for instance that of a working man to decide for himself whether he wants to join a union, or for Catholic nuns to decide for themselves whether they want to purchase drugs that may work as abortifacients -- higher liberties, if you will."

If pot legalization emboldens libertarianism in just such ways, it would have a pretty devastating effect on progressivism.

Yes, you read that right: Cupp seriously thinks people are going to look at pot legalization, even though it's backed by liberals, and think: "Wow, libertarianism!" -- and then support right-to-work laws or the end of the contraceptive mandate. Really? If she's serious about this, I think she's high ... on paint fumes from political talk show greenrooms. Only political pundits think in categories like this. Normal people never do.

OMG

I mentioned Valerie Jarrett in a post last night, and now this has turned up, with a link to my post, on the website of Orly Taitz:





I'm at a loss. I have no words. I had no idea the loons believed anything like this about the Obama kids.

VOTERS WILL AGAIN VOTE FOR A PARTY THAT PROMISES TO BLOCK EVERYTHING THEY WANT

Greg Sargent argued yesterday that the American public is not, in fact, politically polarized -- there's actually a broad consensus on a fairly liberal agenda:

... E.J. Dionne's latest column notes there is majority consensus behind ideas about "economic justice" and the safety net, but that it's obscured by the degree to which one party remains captive to a conservative minority that wants to unravel that consensus:

... A survey released at the end of December by Hart Research, a Democratic polling firm, found that Americans supported extending unemployment insurance by a margin of 55 percent to 34 percent. Several recent surveys, including a Fox News poll, found that about two-thirds of Americans support an increase in the minimum wage. [...]

...most Americans broadly accept the New Deal consensus.... there is far more agreement among the American people than there is among Washington lobbies, members of Congress or political commentators on the core proposition that government should help us through rough patches and guarantee a certain level of economic fairness....

... Majorities support immigration reform with a path to citizenship. While people tell pollsters they don't like Big Government, they support getting our fiscal house in order through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes, as Democrats want, and majorities oppose cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Large majorities support federal spending on infrastructure to create jobs. Majorities backed the core ideas in the American Jobs Act, which included spending on road repair and tax credits for job training, paid for by taxes on the rich....

And yet -- as Larry Sabato notes today, confirming the general consensus -- Republicans are likely to do extremely well in this year's midterms:

Republicans Really Could Win It All This Year

... At this early stage, the combination of ... factors suggests a good election year for the GOP. The president is a Democrat and his approval is weak. The economy may be improving, based on GDP growth (4.1 percent in the third quarter), but voters still don't believe their personal economy, at least, has picked up much. Instead, the major national issue of the moment is Obamacare, which at this point is a loser for Democrats. The structure of the election in the House and Senate also bends in the GOP direction.

Well, what else do we expect? Democrats motivate their voters in presidential election years; Republicans motivate their voters -- and pique the interest of a certain percentage of swing voters -- every day of every year, because they've constructed a highly efficient noise machine that turns politics into drama, with outsize heroes and villains, and clear notions of good and evil.

And even when Democrats get their act together and start making efforts to motivate voters by talking about some of the issues mentioned by Sargent and Dionne, it doesn't matter, because Republicans make it their business to block any Democratic effort to enact this agenda. Big Business offers a huge assist to the GOP, by lobbying against a New Deal-style agenda, and by reminding Democrats that campaign cash depends on not rocking the boat in a way the plutocracy dislikes.

The GOP can't always enact its agenda, of course. It can't repeal Obamacare (so far), and (so far) it can't quite get government small enough to drown in the bathtub. But the right's noise machine is excellent at creating liberal villains, both in D.C. government and out, from Nancy Pelosi to Melissa Harris-Perry. The GOP is much better at this than the Democrats -- hell, the right has worked harder to demonize Bill de Blasio, who's been in office a week, that the Democrats have to demonize Mitch McConnell, who's been in the Senate for nineteen years.

Voters are angry because Republicans are blocking what they want, but the only party successfully channeling voter anger is the Republican Party. So, alas, the GOP will probably do well this year.

FOLKS WHO THINK VALERIE JARRETT IS THE WHITE HOUSE'S SUCCUBUS NOW THINK RACHEL MADDOW IS MSNBC'S SUCCUBUS

I was trying to figure out why this National Review story about Rachel Maddow and MSNBC seemed so familiar, and I think I understand:

... In recent months, Alec Baldwin, Martin Bashir, and, most recently, Melissa Harris-Perry have awkwardly crashed into the trinity of sexual orientation, gender, and race, leading many to wonder if there are any adults in charge at MSNBC.

There is one such adult, actually, and her name is Rachel Maddow. Though she provides the network's ideological vision -- MSNBC president Phil Griffin has called her "our quarterback" -- she's neither an executive nor a manager....

Behind [Maddow's] back, colleagues call her "the queen," a not so subtle suggestion that Maddow gets what Maddow wants. And what she wants is a network filled with young wonks such as Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, Alex Wagner, and Harris-Perry, whose highbrow intellectualism can, she hopes, push the Democratic party, and the country, to the left. On Twitter, Harris-Perry's show proudly uses the hashtag #nerdland. Alex Wagner's move to the 4 p.m. hour, where Bashir's show once aired, has Maddow's fingerprints on it....

As Maddow's foes have suffered, her acolytes have prospered -- chief among them, 34-year-old Brown University graduate Chris Hayes, who last April replaced Ed Schultz....

Maddow ... is motivated by ideology.... "She is actually not that interested in reality; she is the most ideological person I've ever met. That is not somebody you want in charge of your programming, because she might put on a great show, but she cannot make rational decisions -- her agenda is changing America.... She really thinks she is changing America for the better. You can't have somebody like that in charge of your programming."

...It's good to be "queen" -- to be a liberal paid millions by a publicly traded company to spread the progressive gospel. Rachel Maddow, striding about Rockefeller Plaza in her colored sneakers, may be the luckiest woman in television. For now.

This is the same kind of crap wingnuts write all the time about Valerie Jarrett:

President Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible political harm to himself if the mission failed. Instead of listening to advisors from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State, Obama was acting on the advice of White House politico and close friend Valerie Jarrett. Valerie Jarrett?

This account comes from Richard Miniter's upcoming book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him. Miniter has written a half-dozen books on the war on terror. He is relying on an unnamed source within the U.S. military Joint Special Operations Command who was directly involved in the operation and planning of the Osama bin Laden kill mission.

Is the story credible? According to Edward Klein, a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep. Absolutely."

Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine for many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and consigliere." Klein -- who claims he used a minimum of two sources for each assertion in his book on the Obama presidency, The Amateur -- writes in detail about Jarrett opposing the raid on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored Jarrett's advice. Miniter tells us he listened to her, three times telling Special Operations not to take the risk to go after bin Laden.

We need to understand the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private and political life.

"If it wasn't for Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to complain about," starts Klein's chapter on Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context." ...

It's the same template -- sexism, albeit of a slightly nuanced variety because it seems to allow for the possibility that it would be fine for a woman to do this sort of thing if she were, y'know, qualified, like Condi Rice (or Sarah Palin?). But in each case, the woman not only gains power she doesn't deserve, she seems to do it through some combination of ball-busting and mysterious "feminine wiles." She does it for nakedly ideological reasons (Jarrett's family history is mined by the right for evidence that she's one of a long line of radical lefties). And she gets away with it because a weak man surrenders power (Obama at the White House, chief honcho Phil Griffin at MSNBC) -- unsurprising, right, given that these are liberal institutions, and we all know how liberalism shrinks men's gonads, amirite?

After reading the right's scheming-bitch porn about Valerie Jarrett, I come away with no idea of what her actual role in the Obama White House is. The same goes for Maddow at MSNBC -- I don't know whether I can believe a word of this story -- its narrative just fits the neo-sexist template too perfectly. (And no, the fact that it was written by a woman doesn't undermine this argument. Plenty of anti-feminist women find these sexist templates perfectly appropriate.)

PREEMPTIVE STRIKE MUCH, ROGER?

Gosh, I wonder why we're seeing this ridiculously hagiographic article today in USA Today from hackish media writer and Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff:

The unbeatable Roger Ailes

The Fox News chief continues to crush his cable news competitors.

... The 2013 numbers are out, and once more, for 12 years running, Ailes' Fox News trashes everybody else in the cable news space, with an audience larger than CNN's and MSNBC's combined.

It's a one-man business. Ailes is the beginning and end. Since he took the lead from CNN a few years after he launched the network in 1996, nobody has come close to competing with him. He gets larger, everybody gets lesser, creating perhaps the single most infuriating circumstance in modern media. Ailes, ever taunting the liberal media establishment, is ever further beyond its reach....

And I wonder why, at the exact same moment, we're seeing this:

Fox Takes Out Full-Page NY Post Ad Using MSNBC and CNN Quotes to Declare 'News Wars' Victory

... Fox News took out a full-page ad in Monday’s New York Post, using quotes from MSNBC and CNN to boast about its continued dominance in the ratings.....

Um, could it possibly be because of this?

Random House is preparing for a "shitstorm," to borrow the phrase Matt Drudge used in a tweet four months ago, that will surely ensue with the publication of Gabriel Sherman's forthcoming Fox News book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, which is scheduled for a Jan. 21 release.

Advance press copies are presumably starting to circulate among reviewers and media reporters, and today, the book has a brand new website that "will be a source for pushback against misinformation throughout the book's release," a source close to the publisher tells Capital.

Sherman, who is a contributing editor at New York magazine, isn't talking just yet about The Loudest Voice in the Room, a deep dive on the Fox News Channel and its pugilistic ringleader, Roger Ailes....

More:

Ailes has long seen Sherman's book as a threat to his legacy. Conservatives, including several affiliated with Fox News, have been trying to discredit the author for over a year now. In what sources described as an effort to counteract the book, Ailes denied Sherman all access while giving extensive interviews to another author, Zev Chafets, who published his largely favorable profile last March.

What amuses me about this is the road-rage quality of it all. Ailes is basically the permanent Minister of Information for one of our two major parties, the one that hasn't let a Democratic president actually govern for several decades. He's amazingly powerful -- and yet he's going after this book, as he goes after every real or imagined enemy, as if his life depended on the enemy's total destruction. He essentially commission an entire pre-buttal biography of himself as a dominance challenge to Sherman. You'd think a guy who's as tough as Ailes thinks he is could take a punch, but I guess not.

The Sherman book's website, by the way, is here.

IMAGINARY LOVERS NEVER LET YOU DOWN

Liz Cheney's decision to bow out of the Wyoming GOP Senate primary was inevitable, I guess, given her terrible poll numbers and inability to turn around negative coverage, but I actually thought it should have been possible for her -- or someone -- to run a successful primary challenge even against a solidly right-wing incumbent like Mike Enzi.

My first thought was that it would have taken someone who seemed to be utterly pure, in every possible teabagger particular -- a Wyoming equivalent of Ted Cruz -- to beat Enzi. To the crazy base, it's virtually impossible for an incumbent to be right-wing enough, or to deal out enough a sufficient amount of pain to liberals and Democrats. A fresh face from outside Washington politics can seem, to the right, like some desirable fantasy lover, someone who, unlike the old ball-and-chain, appears perfect. Liz Cheney couldn't have been that. She's never held office, but it's as if she's an old Establishment figure -- it's as if her longtime residence in the Beltway and multiple appearances on East Coast talk shows gave her the equivalent of a voting record that can be picked apart.

But there are some people who can overcome this kind of thing. How did Newt Gingrich become a born-again teabagger of sorts for a few weeks in 2012? What did he do that Liz failed to do?

Newt's survival skill is that he always seems to believe his own BS. This is true even when his current BS contradicts a previous version of his BS. Newt has a peculiar personality disorder that allows him to make pronouncements with absolute conviction, whether or not he's said exactly the opposite years or weeks or even hours earlier.

Newt's personality disorder is very different from Liz Cheney's, or her father's. Newt is messianic rather than (like the Cheneys) sadistic. If he'd done a shameless 180 on gay marriage, people might actually believe him, because he seems to persuade himself that he's telling the truth with whatever contradiction of past statements he's offering up now. Liz was never persuasive on this.

Messianic is what the crazy base wants. Maybe Liz just needed to do a lot of emotional paeans to "constitutional conservatism" and "limited government" and "taking our country back" and all that. The base finds all that inspiring. She wasn't inspiring. I think she could have overcome a lot of hurdles if she had been.

She was following her father's style, which is not classically messianic. But he was the right guy for his moment, the immediate post-9/11 era, when the base hated terrorists and liberals in equal measure and Cheney seemed to be leading the war against the former, and thus making the latter howl. All Liz was ever able to do was second her father -- she didn't actually get brown people tortured back when that was what the base craved most (partly, if not mostly, for how upset it made us lefties). The base remembers loving Dick for that, but it's a grandfathered emotion -- if you support a bellicose foreign policy now, you're called a "neocon" at Free Republic, and it's not a compliment. If Obama had really been a peacenik, closing Gitmo and refraining from drone strikes, Liz coulda been his antagonist -- and maybe she coulda been a contender.

YOU DO REALIZE IT'S BEEN EXTREMELY HOT IN AUSTRALIA, RIGHT?

This is at the top of the Drudge Report right now:





Yes, I know: there's a "polar vortex" affecting the middle of the country. Minneapolis temperatures will be down to 25 below tonight, and tomorrow's high will be 13 below. The high in New York City on Tuesday is going to be 13 above. Therefore, Al Gore is fat and there's no global warming -- right?

Well, it was 71 degrees here in New York City on December 22, shattering the old record of 63 for the day. That day, records were also broken in Newark, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, Delaware, as I learn from ... um, Fox News.

And before New York has that 13-degree high on Tuesday, we'll have a high of 50 tomorrow.

But this is nothing compared to what's going on in Australia:

On Thursday, parts of inland Australia reached temperatures around 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit.... There were reports of temperatures as high as 54 degrees Celsius, 129 degrees Fahrenheit, in the outback on Thursday.

More, from the Brisbane Times:

Archerfield, west of Brisbane, recorded its highest ever temperature since records began with a top of 43.5 degrees, just eclipsing the previous record of 43.3 degrees.

On the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore's 41.3 smashed its previous record of 37, while Nambour's 42.9 degrees was well above its previous record of 40.8.

Gympie equalled its record temperature of 42 degrees.

Records were also recorded at Redcliffe (40.3 degrees), Toowoomba (39.5) and Beaudesert (43.9).

As at 3.30pm, the hottest temperature recorded in Queensland on Saturday was at Lochington, south-west of Emerald, where it was 45.4 degrees.

(A partial conversion for the Celsius-challenged: 39.5 degrees Celsius is 103.1 Fahrenheit. 45.4 degrees Celsius is 113.72 degrees Fahrenheit. Google's converter is here.)

This Australian heat wave has been going on since before Christmas, as this guy noted on December 21:

Just landing in Australia after endless flight. Worth it. What's better than family Xmas, even in heat wave?

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) December 21, 2013

And:

The Pacific Islands experienced record temperatures in 2013 due to warmer oceans.

Neville Koop, the Meteorology and Climate adviser to the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program told [Radio Australia's] Pacific Beat increasing ocean temperatures have contributed to new highs in the region.

"Minimum temperatures in particular above average and we have seen warmer than normal daytime temperatures as well," he said.

"In some cases, we definitely have set new records, some places have recorded the monthly average temperatures that are warmest ever seen and over the course of 2013.

"I'm not sure if all of the stats are done yet but it would not surprise me if we saw annual records beaten in 2013 for many places in the Pacific."

So when right-wingers start cackling about the cold weather, please remember that America is not the planet. A cold spell of a few days in part of our country is not evidence that climate change is a hoax.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR SMITH & WESSON....

The New York Times has a story today about Dick Metcalf, a longtime columnist for Guns & Ammo and host of a TV show about firearms who's lost his television and magazine jobs after suggesting, in an October column, that some gun regulations are necessary.

Metcalf seems hurt by his banishment, and somewhat stunned:

"I've been vanished, disappeared," Mr. Metcalf, 67, said in an interview last month on his gun range here, about 100 miles north of St. Louis, surrounded by snow-blanketed fields and towering grain elevators. "Now you see him. Now you don't."

... Mr. Metcalf said he invited a reporter to his home because he despairs that the debate over gun policy in America is so bitterly polarized and dominated by extreme voices. He says he is still contemplating how a self-described "Second Amendment fundamentalist" who keeps a .38 snub-nose Smith & Wesson revolver within easy reach has been ostracized from his community.

"Compromise is a bad word these days," he said. "People think it means giving up your principles."

I'm not sure why Metcalf is surprised -- as a man who (in the words of the Times) "has devoted nearly his entire adult life" to the gun industry, doesn't he realize that gunners have been doing this for years and years?

I've written many times about the gunner boycott of Smith & Wesson, which began in 2000, after the company worked out an agreement with the Clinton administration to alter some of its distribution and manufacturing practices. The boycott lasted until 2003, by which time the company had been sold at a loss (and had agreed not to abide by the Clinton-era restraints). The gunners played hardball, and Simth & Wesson was forced to blink.

I've also written about Reed Exhibitions, which announced that it wouldn't allow the display of assault weapons at a gun show it ran just after the Newtown massacre; much of the gun community boycotted the show, and Reed eventually lost the right to run the SHOT Show, America's biggest annual gun show in America. Reed lost the SHOT Show only a few months before Metcalf wrote his column -- could he possibly have been surprised that the community turned on him the way it turned on Smith & Wesson and Reed?

But I blame the gun-buying public. It's clear from polls that support for at least some gun restrictions is widespread even among gun owners -- but the gun community sees itself as embroiled in a culture war with supporters of gun control, and supporters of wars really don't get upset at any harm that comes to anyone if it can be justified as part of the path to victory.

Still, you'd think some of these people would actually read Metcalf if he were published elsewhere -- which makes me think that maybe some publication outside the closed gun community ought to pick Metcalf's column up. Isn't that how the Internet is supposed to work? We get our news and opinions from a wide variety of sources? So why not gun news and opinions, too?

Maybe Metcalf should be hired by Vice, or BuzzFeed, or Reason? They don't rely on gun advertising, and maybe they'd broaden their readership and strike a blow for diversity of opinion in the gun world. Or maybe Pierre Omidyar ought to start a gun column in that new media venture he's starting for Glenn Greenwald and his pals.

Or, well, if this response to the Metcalf story isn't snark....

This is outrageous and unhealthy and conservatives and Second Amendment advocates should find it chilling: http://t.co/rqBvXbC7HZ

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) January 5, 2014

... then maybe Cooke's own National Review Online ought to pick Metcalf up. It would be like William F. Buckley taking on the Birchers back in the day, y'know?

Nahhh, forget it. It'll never happen.

DAILY CALLER IDIOT TRIES TO SMEAR NEW YORK TIMES BENGHAZI REPORTER WITH FAKE STORY FROM OLD STUDENT NEWSPAPER

If there were any actual journalists on the American right, they could conceivably challenge David Kirkpatrick's exhaustive report on Benghazi in last Sunday's New York Times. But journalism is far beyond the right's abilities, so Kirkpatrick's reporting, which utterly destroys the right's Benghazi narrative, stands as definitive. The right is left to try to smear Kirkpatrick in an infantile way -- for instance, by dredging up a story from a student newspaper during Kirkpatrick's undergraduate days, as the Daily Caller's Charles C. Johnson does here:

The author of the widely disputed New York Times article on Benghazi repeatedly posed naked as a Princeton student.... Kirkpatrick ... even posed for Playgirl."Kinky" Kirkpatrick had a "rather unusual habit of disrobing for photographers in public places," reported The Daily Princetonian in January 22, 1990.

"I've never been afraid to drop trou when it seemed like the right thing to do," Kirkpatrick said of a Playgirl photo shoot he had completed. "I just feel more comfortable in the buff."

The Daily Caller was unable to find a copy of the February 1990 issue of Playgirl to confirm that Kirkpatrick appears in the buff but did obtain a photo of Kirkpatrick streaking....

Um, you know why the Daily Caller was unable to find that Playgirl with a nude photo of David Kirkpatrick? Because the story is a fake. If you go to the link and scroll through the newspaper in which the story appears, the so-called Princeton Daily News of January 22, 1990, you'll see that it's a Weekly World News-style newspaper (apparently a humor insert to The Daily Princetonian). Here's the cover of that issue of the Daily News:




How do I know that the Kirkpatrick story in the Daily News is a fake? Let's just say the stories about Elvis and aliens elsewhere in the News tipped me off.

Is there an element of truth in the story? Yeah, sure. It appears that Kirkpatrick had a couple of moments of public nudity during his Princeton days -- the other link in the Caller story, which seems legit, notes that he posed nude on a bridge for a fellow student's art project, and he also streaked -- but in that he was part of a Princeton tradition that goes back decades.

The Playgirl reference in the Daily News story is -- to use the technical term -- a "joke." You know how jokes work? Here, let me explain. There actually was a Princeton student at the time named Oleg Urminsky who burned a flag. So that same issue of the Daily News did a story in which Urminsky set fire to his room. Har-har-har! Get it? (Urminsky, by the way, is now a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago business school. So much for youthful behavior being a predictor of one's adult life.)

Also, aren't right-wingers rooting for a guy who really was a nude model to win a New Hampshire Senate seat this year?

Kirkpatrick did a great job of reporting the Benghazi story. As for the wingers, this is all they've got.

****

UPDATE, MONDAY: Dave Weigel and Media Matters have called Johnson and the Caller on this, and now the Caller story has been edited to reflect the fact that Johnson got fooled by an obvious spoof.

YOU PUT YOURSELF ON RAND PAUL'S CAMPAIGN MAILING LIST, HE PRETENDS TO FIGHT THE NSA WITH YOU

Rand Paul is suing the NSA! Or at least he's going to sue the NSA any minute now, you betcha:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will file a class-action lawsuit against the National Security Agency "soon," his office confirmed to The Hill.

Paul had been gearing up for months to lead a suit against the agency, charging that the surveillance program gathering metadata on U.S. citizens has violated people's Fourth Amendment rights.

... His office did not give the specific timeline for when the senator would file the suit.

Breitbart News first reported that Paul would soon file the suit....

That's from The Hill. The Breitbart story tells us, "Via Paul's campaign website, more than 300,000 Americans have already indicated they will sign up for the suit when it is officially filed in D.C. District court." Oh, how nice -- this is being done via Paul's campaign site. And as The Hill notes,

The solicitation, which asks for individuals' names, email addresses and zip codes, also asks for a donation to help "stop Big Brother from infringing on our Fourth Amendment freedoms."

So in order to get the NSA out of their cellphones and hard drives, 300,000 people have (yes, voluntarily) turned over a hell of a lot of personal data to Rand 2016. But hey, it's worth it, because the suit is reay to roll -- right? Well, no, not yet:

Although no court documents have been filed in the case yet, Paul's advisers told Daily Intelligencer that the Senator's legal team is currently drafting a complaint....

So far though, the details of Paul's lawsuit are murky. A legal counsel for Paul told Daily Intelligencer Friday that he expects the case will be similar to another NSA suit filed by birther provocateur Larry Klayman.

So if the suit hasn't been filed, and it's basically going to duplicate an already existing suit when it actually is filed, what's the point exactly? Apart from amassing a campaign mailing list and collecting some checks?

And, as Yellow Dog says, isn't the point of being a U.S. senator that if you don't like what the government is doing, you have the opportunity to write new laws and use persuasion to try to get them passed? Isn't that Rand Paul's job?

****

What does this mean for the presidential race? New York magazine reminds us that Rand Paul "delights in antagonizing national security hawks in the Chris Christie wing of the GOP." I've been assuming up till now that this is going to be a real split in the GOP, but I'm starting to think Christie is seriously misreading the GOP primary electorate -- I think he thinks voters will go for tough Bush/Cheney-style talk about freedom and 9/11 and terrorism, but base voters seem to have amnesia about their own attitudes during the last presidency, and now associate all national security efforts with the hated Obama. I don't even think a serious terrorist attack on Americans will change this. There'll be no rally-round-the-flag effect among base voters, just because, well, it's Obama, and he's evil. Hell, if even Fox News, run by self-styled macho man Roger Ailes and long a champion of foreign policy muscularity, is promoting Rand's lawsuit, then you know things have changed. However, I don't think Christie knows. He may be as out of step with his party in 2016 as Joe Lieberman was in the 2004 Democratic primaries.

****

Another curious aspect of this Rand Paul thing is the identity of one of Rand's top allies:

Paul will also be getting an assist from Ken Cuccinelli, the failed 2013 Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate who will be out of his job as state attorney general next week. Sources say that Cuccinelli plans to join Paul's team as a legal advisor for the NSA suit, reprising his role as the Tea Party's most litigious firebrand.

Yes, NSA surveillance is very, very wrong, says the guy who wants a government-mandate wand in your vagina if you seek a legal abortion. This, alas, is going to lead to a lot of arguments on the left, as certain dudebros cheer on Paul and Cooch while the rest of us recognize that surveillance is just about the only issue on which they're not utterly appalling.

IN THAT COLUMN, WHAT DAVID BROOKS SAYS ABOUT OUR SOCIETY IS EVEN STUPIDER THAN WHAT HE SAYS ABOUT WEED

Everybody has had at David Brooks for what he wrote about marijuana in today's column. I'm not going to add anything new or interesting or amusing to the mix.

Instead, I'm just going to talk about this Brooks assertion:

Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I'd say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

Does Brooks think this describes our society? Really? Or even our society if we just worked a little harder to make it better?

Our society doesn't seek "to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship" -- certainly not on the part of our most prominent citizens. Our society wants aggressive sociopaths who would run over their own grandmothers to earn an extra .001% in quarterly profit, with the "self-governing" part being limited to making sure that only the have-nots experience the ill effects of the aggression. You want to package metaphoric toxic waste as triple-A-rated investment instruments and sell them far and wide until the global economy collapses? No problem! Just keep the profits flowing, and when it all blows up, let us know if you suffer any damage and we'll stake you again so you can repeat the process. And don't worry, we're working on naming that wing of the children's hospital after you.

And does Brooks actually believe this society "subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature"? I know this comes near the end of his column, and he's apparently trying to fill it out as if he's writing the world's most awkward personal ad. (It's not the column's only rough spot: several paragraphs up, Brooks writes about his high school stoner friends falling in love and, desperate for an original way of describing their emotional state, tells us that they "got thrills from the enlargements of the heart." This made me wonder if he was referring to coronary disease.)

But seriously: who around the large Applebee's salad bar that is America has been encouraged to pursue "the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts"? "The arts" are for un-American wussies. Same with nature, unless it involves extreme sports. America isn't that society. America is about football and fart jokes and expensively generated CGI low culture involving massive amounts of explosions. America isn't about "temperate, prudent, self-governing" citizens -- it's about narcotized citizens working to make the hyperaggressive few richer and richer.

So, since America has nothing in common with Brooks's ideal polity, those of us who choose to might as well get baked, right?

RIGHT-WINGERS NOW SERIOUSLY SUGGESTING THAT EXTENDED INSURANCE COMPANY HOLD TIMES DIDN'T HAPPEN BEFORE OBAMACARE

I know the right-wing plan is to locate every single story of a glitch that can be linked to Obamacare and run every one through the Mighty Wurlitzer, but seriously, folks? Are you arguing that this never happened to anyone in the pre-Obamacare days?

... Paperwork problems almost delayed suburban Chicago resident Sheri Zajcew's scheduled surgery Thursday, but Dr. John Venetos decided to operate without a routine go-ahead from the insurance company. That was after Venetos' office manager spent two hours on hold with the insurer Thursday, trying to get an answer about whether the patient needed prior authorization for the surgery. The office manager finally gave up.

"I'm not a happy camper," said Nate Zajcew, the patient's husband. The couple signed up for a Blue Cross Blue Shield bronze plan through the federal HealthCare.gov site on Dec. 16. "I understand it's just a matter of paperwork and yesterday was a holiday. I can be an SOB, too, at times, but since they're going on with the procedure, it's OK." ...

Gosh, imagine if some practitioners had been kept on hold for two hours in the early days of Medicare Part D under President Bush ... oh, wait, they were. Imagine if Blue Cross ever kept people on hold for hours in the pre-O'care days ... oh, that used to happen, too, according to onholdwith.com, which has collected a set of real-time Twitter complaints about BC/BS going back a couple of years. And for right-wing idiots who think government and government-related services have a monopoly on long hold times, well, yeah, HealthCare.gov and the Postal Service hve been getting a lot of complaints lately, but what's the excuse for everyone else in onholdwith's current top ten?





I see a lot of private companies on that list. Know what I don't see? Medicare.

Single payer, anyone?

I WISH "THE GOP'S DUCK DYNASTY PROBLEM" WERE ACTUALLY A PROBLEM

After recounting the worst of what Phil Robertson said about blacks and gays in that GQ interview, Salon's Brian Beutler writes about what he calls "the GOP's Duck Dynasty problem":

... Robertson's comments don't fly in most of America. If Robertson were, say, running for Senate in Missouri as a Republican, the GOP would have disowned him immediately. But Robertson isn't a politician. He's not a mouthpiece for a political party that needs to maintain a national brand identity. Rather, his remarks reflect the views of an American cultural subset the GOP depends on for its survival. His suspension made him a tribune of modern conservatism. Thus, conservative Republicans (not just opportunists like Sarah Palin, but party standard-bearers) felt impelled to rally to his side without actually echoing anything Robertson said....

You won't hear a lot of Republicans saying these things so plainly. But a lot of Republicans believe them. Republicans want to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage across the country. And of all the social spending programs in the country they're itching to cut or dismantle, the ones that disproportionately benefit poor minorities top the list....

The GOP's key dilemma right now is that it has to be a party for people like Robertson without letting people like Robertson speak for them. Which is why the party retrogressed to its old agenda so quickly after the 2012 election, and why it can't eliminate its Todd Akin problem simply by putting Republicans through finishing school.

I see Beutler's point -- saying that blacks were happy and content "pre-welfare," saying that homosexuality is as vile as having sex with animals, and blaming war with Japan on Jesus-less Shintoism would get a Republican Senate candidate in trouble -- at least in a swing state -- and would have a nationwide ripple effect in an election year.

But while trouble comes to GOP pols who say things like this in election years, Robertson got away without a scratch -- his suspension was brief and he's back on the air, and in A&E's good graces. Beutler sees the Robertson story, specifically the fact that Republicans such as Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal defended him, as a sign that the GOP has a serious election vulnerability; I see it as a sign that the reactionary resenters are much stronger than the rest of us between elections.

Why did Phil Robertson win? Why was his suspension from Duck Dynasty ended shortly after it began? Because rank-and-file right-wingers, goaded on by a very focused right-wing noise machine, went to the wall to defend Robertson. Right-wingers were much more determined to keep him on the air than we were to keep him off. We may rally to elect Democratic presidents, or to keep the Senate out of the hands of people like Todd Akin, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell, but right-wingers rally like that all the time, on nearly every issue. (This is how they win on gun issues despite being vastly outnumbered.)

Beutler sees the beliefs of Robertson and his supporters as an electoral burden. Yeah, maybe -- maybe it will keep the White House and Senate Democratic for the foreseeable future. But Republicans are unlikely to lose the House anytime soon, or fall below the number of senators needed to mount a filibuster. In fact, they're likely to gain seats in both chambers this year. And Republicans still dominate at the state level.

So they're doing well enough at the ballot box. And then, between elections, they run the country.

It's no surprise that the GOP "retrogressed to its old agenda so quickly after the 2012 election": supporters of that agenda fight like hell for it, even when Election Day is many months away.

OUR NATIONAL DIVIDE: GUNS VS. WEED?

A gleeful post from National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke:

Magpul, the Colorado-based firearms manufacturer, will be leaving the state. A press release issued today made it clear that the decision was the direct result of the gun control laws passed in 2013:

The company is relocating manufacturing, distribution and shipping operations to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Magpul is leasing a 58,000 square foot manufacturing and distribution facility during the construction of a 100,000 square foot build-to-suit facility in the Cheyenne Business Parkway. The Wyoming relocation is being completed with support from Governor Matt Mead, the Wyoming Business Council and Cheyenne LEADS....

The company began a nationwide search for a new base of operations after legislation was enacted in Colorado that dramatically limits the sale of firearms accessories....

"Moving operations to states that support our culture of individual liberties and personal responsibility is important," says Richard Fitzpatrick, Chief Executive Officer for Magpul Industries....

Meanwhile, there's this on the Facebook page of the Wyoming Highway Patrol, in response to another headline-grabbing Colorado law:

DO NOT BRING YOUR COLORADO PURCHASED MARIJUANA INTO WYOMING

Cheyenne -- The new law that went into effect January 1st in the State of Colorado making possession of marijuana legal to sell and possess in that State has generated many questions to our office from the media.

... The bottom line, any amount of marijuana in either dried or in plant form in the State of Wyoming is illegal to possess.

Individuals who have in their possession 3 ounces or less may be charged with a misdemeanor violation that carries a penalty of imprisonment for not more than 12 months, a fine of not more than $1,000.00 or a combination of both.

If found with an amount of marijuana over 3 ounces an individual will be charged with a felony which can result in imprisonment for not more than 5 years and/or a fine of not more than $10,000.00.

... Possession of drug paraphernalia is also a violation in the State of Wyoming....

I learned about this via Michelle Malkin's Twitchy, where the readers are cheering Wyoming on, and seeing social decadence in Colorado. (Gosh, I thought all those wingers were in favor of person freedom and libertarianism and all that. Guess not.)

Earlier today, at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman wrote this:

... One trend I do think will shape people's lives this year and in years to come is the increasing divergence between the places where lots of Democrats live and the places where lots of Republicans live. Yes, it sounds trite and overdone to talk about Two Americas, but it is true, and it's becoming more true all the time. And one question I'm curious about is whether we'll see an increase in people picking up and moving to places where public policy either accords better with their values or offers them important benefits they need to live their lives (or both).

... In Colorado you can walk down to a store on the corner and buy cannabis, and you'll be able to do the same in Washington in a few months. There are new restrictions on guns in blue states, and new laws making guns more ubiquitous in red states. There are also new laws in conservative states aimed at making abortions all but impossible for women to get, and making it as hard as possible for certain kinds of people to vote. And in one of the most critical changes, as of yesterday millions of Americans are getting health coverage through Medicaid -- if they live in the right place.

... there are more reasons than ever for people to get up and move to the states where the political leadership is working to make it the kind of place where people like them would want to live. The more we talk about it, the more conscious people become of it, and the closer a conservative in Maryland or a liberal in Mississippi gets to saying, "That's it -- I'm finally getting the hell out of here."

... if the number of people moving not just for a new job but for ideological reasons increases, then that will feed a cycle in which more states become even more ideologically homogenized, which leads to public policy even more ideologically one-sided....

Are people really going to move from state to state in large numbers in pursuit of laws that are more to their liking? I have my doubts.

But Wyoming and Colorado do seem to moving in opposite directions: you take the guns, we'll take the weed. I think that sort of polarization will increase, even if the citizens just shrug and accept it.

YOUR HEALTHCARE DOLLARS AT WORK?

Hey, Mr. and Mrs. America, that wealth ought to be trickling down any day now, because the New York Times business section tells us today that wealthy people are feeling frisky again:

Matt Hlavin, an entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a $165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle for his wife....

A legion of buyers like Mr. Hlavin, buoyed by a growing economy and a soaring stock market, are shedding whatever reluctance, or self-imposed restraint, they had during the recession by entering showrooms and leaving with trophy cars....

The sales gains at the highest end of the market are far outstripping those in the auto industry as a whole....

Maserati has led the way, with a 55 percent sales increase this year, followed by double-digit gains from Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, Lamborghini, Porsche and Bentley, according to figures from the Autodata Corporation. Many of the brands sold more cars in the first 11 months of 2013 than they did in 2007 before the recession.

Among the hungriest consumers for luxury automobiles are entrepreneurs amassing new wealth in industries like technology and energy, and executives in Fortune 500 companies whose stocks have soared along with the broader market, analysts and industry executives say....

I'm struck by the connection between healthcare spending and this newfound wealth. It isn't just that the enterprise run by Matt Hlavin, the Thogus family of companies, has a big medical and healthcare division. We also hear from this guy:

"It never would have crossed my mind to spend that kind of money on a car before," said Steve Seidman, a radiologist from West Bloomfield, Mich., who bought a Tesla Model S electric sedan in February. "I'm not really confident in the economy, but I'm comfortable in the direction it's going in."

Tesla buyers including Mr. Seidman are spending well beyond the $70,000 Model S base price by opting for a larger battery pack and options, including upgraded interior and technology packages, that can move the price to six figures.

And we read this:

Outside of Minneapolis, for example, Morrie's Luxury Auto received 16 of Maserati's Ghibli sedans two days before Christmas and had two left on Dec. 26.

Morrie's Luxury Auto, we learn from a photo caption, is located in Minnetonka, Minnesota, where the largest employer is UnitedHealthcare.

And we're told this:

A dealer near Cleveland, the Collection Auto Group, which owns 28 dealerships, including Porsche, Lotus, Maserati and Aston Martin, added Rolls-Royce last month, becoming the automaker's 35th dealership in the United States.

"Cleveland is in a renaissance," said Bernie Moreno, president of the dealership. "We call it the three Ms: medical, manufacturing and media."

"Medical" again. Yeah, yeah, I know: that Cleveland Clinic is really innovative, and was the medical facility Lou Reed chose to treat his liver cancer.

And Matt Hlavin? He isn't a bad guy, really -- hell, here he is retweeting a Van Jones article about the burdens of student loan debt.

But, um, I thought Obamacare was a ruthless destroyer of the dynamic spirit of capitalism in medicine. So why are all these medicine-affiliated folks -- buying Maseratis?

"THE NEW PROGRESSIVISM": LESS CELEBRITY AND LESS TIMIDITY, PLEASE

E.J. Dionne has a prediction today:

The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014.

And this reemergence is taking what form exactly?

... the new militancy on the Democratic left is a consequence of a slowly building backlash against the skewed nature of our politics. A dramatic manifestation of this sentiment was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's unabashed attack on inequality in his inaugural address Wednesday....

Discussions about entitlements have revolved almost exclusively around the question of how much to cut them. By contrast, progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) say we must begin dealing with a coming retirement crisis fostered by the near disappearance of traditional private pensions....

More generally, the Democratic left is animated by the battle against growing inequality and declining social mobility -- the idea, as Warren has said repeatedly, that "the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families." ...

I know that E.J. Dionne is not the last word on this sort of thing, but it worries me that when we talk about a resurgent progressive movement, we're talking about (mostly) rhetoric -- even if it's very good rhetoric -- from a handful of marquee politicians. Let's contrast this with the tea party four years ago: before 2010, we weren't talking about celebrity pols on the resurgent angry right -- we were talking about angry crowds of seemingly ordinary citizens (however well funded by the Kochs or well publicized by Fox). The movement seemed like a movement. Whether it was Astroturf or a genuine popular groundswell, the focus was on crowds of citizens.

In Dionne's column, the focus is on pols. Last fall's lefty superstar pol, Elizabeth Warren, gets two mentions, and the new star is Bill de Blasio. Did I use the word "celebrity" above? It wasn't chosen idly:

Chiara de Blasio's in Teen Vogue! http://t.co/YVWuOzmZrZ pic.twitter.com/ocSnrGZ4wF

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) January 2, 2014

I feel as if I'm living through the optimism -- and personality cult-ism -- of the early days of the Obama presidency, up to and including the transformation of family members into boldface names outside the realm of politics. (Chiara is de Blasio's daughter.) Yes, I know that the celebrification of the Obamas helped them maintain the public's goodwill, and thus helped keep the GOP out of the White House. But it also meant that progressives let their guard down and waited for the superstar pol in the White House to make everything all better. (He didn't, and couldn't have.)

I understand, of course, why the foot soldiers of the new progressivism aren't the new stars: they include non-white fast-food workers and undocumented Hispanic teenagers and the long-term unemployed. Unlike the teabaggers, they're not middle class (or aren't middle class anymore). They're not considered relatable.

The have-nots need to be front and center -- and it would be nice if someone, somehow, could figure out a way to communicate the message to heartland whites that black minimum-wage McDonald's workers and long-term-unemployed fiftysomethings and mortgage-crisis victims and young people without jobs facing crushing student-loan debt have enemies in common. A couple of years ago, Occupy Wall Street had the potential to get this message across, but Occupy became more interested in the process of protest than in the issues being protested, and an opportunity was squandered.

That shouldn't happen again. But I fear it might.

****

Dionne discusses the new progressivism as if it's a scary-seeming thing. Above, I quoted his first sentence. Here's the entire first paragraph:

The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don't be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.

And his conclusion:

And here's why moderates should be cheering [the new progressives] on: When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right's concerns about "big government" and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.

I see what Dionne is getting at, but I think it's preemptive surrender to say that the whole point of a new progressivism is to restore the center. I agree with BooMan:

... the status quo, or anything closely resembling the status quo, is not working right now. Undergraduates are emerging from college with record-setting personal debt (now at an average of $29,000) with poor employment opportunities. People who don't have college degrees have never been in such a hopeless position before. We're living in an age every bit as gilded at the roaring 20's, and we're getting set up for the same kind of fall. And we're still not getting remotely serious about doing what we need to be doing to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The way things have been set up over the last thirty-three years, since the Reagan Revolution began, the vast majority of people simply work for a bank. We are entering the work force as peon labor, or bankcroppers, who pay for the privilege of working, and whose labor serves mainly to finance our debt.

... With regard to educational attainment and health outcomes, our country is slipping to the back of the pack among advanced economies.

... on any subject you might choose to consider, the right wing in this country is wrong, and they have enough power to keep us paddling in place at best, and, more often, moving in the wrong direction.

That a portion of the left is waking up to the problem is a good thing. But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.

****

After reading Dionne on the new progressivism, I found myself wondering what his right-wing colleague Charles Krauthammer was saying in the early tea party days -- was he also reassuring centrists that they shouldn't be scared? Here's Krauthammer in 2009, just after Republican governors were elected in New Jersey and Virginia:

... the same conventional wisdom that proclaimed the dawning of a new age last November dismissed the inevitable popular reaction to Obama's hubristic expansion of government, taxation, spending and debt -- the tea party demonstrators, the town hall protesters -- as a raging rabble of resentful reactionaries, AstroTurf-phony and Fox News-deranged.

Some rump. Just last month Gallup found that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2 to 1 (40 percent to 20 percent) and even outnumber moderates (at 36 percent). So on Tuesday, the "rump" rebelled. It's the natural reaction of a center-right country to a governing party seeking to rush through a left-wing agenda using temporary majorities created by the one-shot election of 2008. The misreading of that election -- and of the mandate it allegedly bestowed -- is the fundamental cause of the Democratic debacle of 2009.

On the surface, it seems as if Krauthammer in '09 was saying what Dionne is saying now -- that the point of anger at the extremes is to reestablish the center.

But notice the difference. Krauthammer is saying that the teabaggers aren't radical. He's saying their protests were the "reaction of a center-right country." The only radicalism Krauthammer saw in 2009 was in the Obama White House and (then-)Democratic-controlled Congress.

That's how we should be talking about the new progressives. It should be seen as mainstream to want a minimum wage that approaches in real dollars what the minimum wage was in the recent past. It should be seen as mainstream to reduce the power imbalance between bankers and ordinary citizens, as it was reduced in the broadly prosperous period following World War II. It should be seen as mainstream to use Keynesianism as a way of reducing chronic high unemployment. And so on.

This isn't a matter of one set of radicals counterbalancing another. There's only one set of radicals with political power in America -- and they're on the right.

OMIGOD! A LIBERAL SAID IN HIS INAUGURAL THAT HE'D STICK TO HIS PRINCIPLES!

Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor of New York today, and the Very Serious People are collapsing on the fainting couch:

[De Blasio] used the word "progressive" seven times [in his inaugural address] ("New York" got eight mentions). He invoked the Occupy phrase, "The One Percent." And he ... promised to stay true to his detailed and ideological agenda.

"I know there are those who think that what I said during the campaign was just rhetoric, just political talk in the interest of getting elected. There are some who think now, as we turn to governing -- well, things will continue pretty much like they always have," the new mayor said. "So let me be clear. When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. And we will do it."

... Bloomberg's top political aide, Howard Wolfson, retweeted an Israeli journalist's take:

As outside observer, hard to understand the bitter partisanship at De Blasio ceremony. There's a time for everything, and this isn't it

— Chemi Shalev (@ChemiShalev) January 1, 2014

More from CNN's Jake Tapper:

He gave a very muscular argument in favor of what he wanted to do. But I have to say there is another reaction. A lot of times, inaugurals are times when people, when presidents or governors or mayors can reach out to critics, reach out to those who maybe didn't vote for them. This was not that.

Yeah -- remember how magnanimous Ronald Reagan was to his predecessors in his first inaugural address?

We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending....

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

And previous New York mayors? Shockingly, in their first inaugural addresses, they've been known to say that they would do things differently from their predecessors. Rudy Giuliani, 1994:

Change in many forms is coming to our city. But it must be built around respect for the law and justice. American cities can't survive as we know them if they remain so violent. Our priority must be to reduce the violence.

I'll place a much greater emphasis on stricter enforcement of the law to reverse the growing trend of ever-increasing tolerance for lawless behavior. I'll work for changes in policing and in criminal justice that will redress the balance that I believe is now out of balance....

If we have, in the words of Senator Moynihan, defined deviancy down, now we will instead raise standards and have greater expectations for the behavior of or people.

When you say, in your first speech as mayor, that you intend to place "greater emphasis" on something, you're saying your predecessor or predecessors placed inadequate emphasis on that something. Rudy Giuliani, replacing David Dinkins, did that in 1994. And nobody got the vapors.

The same goes for the now-revered conservative Democrat Ed Koch in his first inaugural in 1977:






I know, I know: Koch took office not long after New York City nearly went bankrupt. Giuliani took office not long after the worst of a crack-driven crime wave, and just after the first attack on the World Trade Center. Reagan became president in a deep economic downturn, and just as the Iran hostage crisis was ending.

Well, for a lot of non-posh New Yorkers, the recent past has been just as profound a crisis. It's a struggle to be a have-not in a city that increasing extends a welcome only to haves. So why can't de Blasio stand on economic principle?

STUFF THAT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, ACCORDING TO THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA

If you get into an argument with a right-winger on pretty much any subject having to do with domestic politics -- racism, gun control, the economy -- you'll be told that Chicago is an out-of-control urban hellscape and therefore definitive proof that liberal/Democratic policies are a miserable failure.

So this wasn't supposed to happen:

CHICAGO -- A year after this city, the third largest in the United States, drew national notice for its staggering number of homicides, killings have slowed here....

In 2012, Chicago witnessed more than 500 killings.... As of Dec. 30, Chicago had reported 413 homicides, a 17 percent drop from the same period a year before and the fewest killings to date since 1965, city officials said.

Shootings were also down by about 24 percent in 2013 from a year earlier, and reports of crimes over all had dropped by about 16 percent....

But didn't the FBI tell us that Chicago is "officially America's murder capital," as a Fox News story reported in September? Well, actually, the FBI report cited by Fox didn't designate an official murder capital at all. And if you want to know how Chicago compares...

... a Yale University analysis says that despite Chicago's grim numbers, the city's crime rate is not exceptional when compared with other large cities. It ranks Chicago 19th, with violent crime levels similar to those of Houston or Minneapolis, and half that of Detroit or St. Louis.

****

Also not supposed to happen? A population increase in Jerry Brown's California:

The United States population grew only 0.72 percent last year, to 316,128,839 in July from 313,873,685 a year earlier, according to figures released Monday by the Census Bureau....

There was strong growth ... in California....

The largest population increases over the year were in Texas (387,397 people), California (332,643) and Florida (232,111).... California this year became the first state to top 38 million residents, with a population of 38,332,521....

You may recall that in the early part of 2013, Fox became obsessed with the notion that California taxes were going to provoke a mass exodus from the state, after golfer Phil Mickelson said that he might become a California tax exile. "California Residents, Businesses Consider Bailing on Golden State Over Taxes," screamed one Fox story that featured a prominent picture of Mickelson; Fox also published "Look Out, Mr. Obama, a Tax Revolt Has Begun in America Led by Mickelson & Woods," an op-ed by Obama conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root, which cited as evidence not only Mickelson's musings about relocation, but the departure of Tiger Woods from California in ... um, 1996.

(Mickelson, by the way, did put his California house on the market for about $7 million, though as of a couple of weeks ago he and his family were still California residents.)

Oh, and the states in the bottom 15 in terms of population growth for 2013 include Wisconsin, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico -- all with right-wing/tea party governors. So what's the pattern?

SANTA FE, N.M., DEC. 30, 2013





(Hi, I'm back. Happy New Year. Thanks, Aimai, Crank, and Tom, for sitting in while I was gone. More posts soon....)