60

And we ain't talkin' Roger Maris chasing Babe.

Hunt Pirates

(via Megan McCardle) This is wild.

Brooks

As he does often, David Brooks puts his finger on the disparate feelings I've had for a while concerning Obama turning over so much power to Congrress in drafting his major policy bills.

The great paradox of the age is that Barack Obama, the most riveting of recent presidents, is leading us into an era of Congressional dominance. And Congressional governance is a haven for special interest pleading and venal logrolling.

When the executive branch is dominant you often get coherent proposals that may not pass. When Congress is dominant, as now, you get politically viable mishmashes that don’t necessarily make sense.

Bastion of the Right

(Via Yglesias):

Via Tyler Cowen, Thomas Sowell argues that “Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.”

And, yes, that was in National Review the flagship publication of the American right.

The Ricci Case

The Ricci case was handed down today ... it's been pegged as a "reverse-discrimination" case and the politics surrounding Sotomayor's SCOTUS pick makes it impossible to have a real discussion about the intricacies of employment discrimination law. But, lets just say that it's settled (and intentional) that disparate outcomes, such as the firefighter's test, may be used as part of a prima facie case of discrimination. The Trial court believed such evidence was sufficient, a 3 judge panel of the 2nd Circuit agreed (and Sotomayor signed on) and refused to hear it en banc. Then - SCOTUS narrowed/changed/clarified the law so that bare evidence of disparate impact isn't enough, by itself, to infer discrimination. This is what courts do ... and it concerns a grey area of law where judges can disagree (and politics necessarily must color their interpretation). It was a close call of law (Kennedy said it was "unsettled") and the conservatives saw it the way conservatives want to see it, and the liberals saw it their way.

Publius has a good post on the case - especially noting how odd (he calls it "political") it was that SCOTUS didn't announce the rule and then remand (which I guess would have garnered a 9-0 vote!) but instead announced the rule and then applied it as a trial court would (and SCOTUS is not supposed to). Glenn Greenwald does too. As do the guys at SCOTUSblog.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnaru (a National Review guy) has a great NYT op-ed about the hypocrisy of the right -- judicial activism is alright if it suits their agenda.

UPDATE 2: TNR's blogger has the "counter-point." Although he admits all I've said - that it was well settled that Disparate Impact could be used as presumptive evidence of discrimination until SCOTUS handed down the decision yesterday adding an additional step. There's many arguments before and against DI law - but lets just admit that the court clarified/created new law - and the Sotomayor thing is going to overshadow any real (interesting) discussion of DI law.

Under A Blood Red Geo-Engineered Sky

This month's Atlantic has an article on geo-engineering the earth - as last-ditch effort to fight climate change. The ideas range from feeding plankton, to emitting sulfuric dioxide into the atmosphere, to shooting reflective frisbees into space. And it's so cheap that a rich madman (or poor, desperate country) could do it unilaterally.

Think Blade Runner.

Toon

Souter's Last Day

Is Monday ... and fittingly, SCOTUS is hearing the controversial New Haven firefighter case that Sotomayor has been under (unfair) attack for.

The Dumb & Dumber Fiscal Plan

California is now paying its debt with IOU's.

"Those are as good as money, sir. They're IOU's"

Touche

Andrew Sullivan makes a good point regarding a quote from the new Nixon tapes released:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” - Richard M. Nixon. So the 37th president would have aborted the 44th.

Are You Pro-Marketplace or Aren't You?

Obama made the right argument today in favor of a public plan (w/o expressly endorsing it). The idea of a public plan is to insert a solid product into the market - and then let everyone compete to beat it!

OBAMA: Now, the public plan, I think, is an important tool to discipline insurance companies. What we’ve said is, under our proposal, let’s have a system, the same way that federal employees do, same way that members of Congress do, where we call it an exchange, but you can call it a marketplace, where, essentially, you’ve got a whole bunch of different plans….As one of those options, for us to be able to say, here’s a public option that’s not profit-driven, that can keep down administrative costs, and that provides you good, quality care for a reasonable price as one of the options for you to choose, I think that makes sense.

QUESTION: Wouldn’t that drive private insurance out of business?

OBAMA: Why would it drive private insurance out of business? If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care; if they tell us that they’re offering a good deal, then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That’s not logical.

Now, the — I think that there’s going to be some healthy debates in Congress about the shape that this takes. I think there can be some legitimate concerns on the part of private insurers that if any public plan is simply being subsidized by taxpayers endlessly that over time they can’t compete with the government just printing money, so there are going to be some I think legitimate debates to be had about how this private plan takes shape. But just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they’re giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can’t compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what’s the best deal, that defies logic, which is why I think you’ve seen in the polling data overwhelming support for a public plan.

On another note - concerning the CBO score from last week claiming health care would cost like $1.6 Trillion over 10 years (which was faulty b/c it didn't scored an incomplete bill that didn't include all the cost saving measures like a public plan) - I saw Julie Rovner (NPR) on the News Hour tonight and she mentioned that we spent something like $2.6T as a nation on healthcare in 2006 (and it keeps going up), so on the whole scale of things, $2B extra a year to improve the system and cover more people isn't that bad (even assuming the partial/faulty CBO score).

Obama's Strategy

Jon Chiat at TNR shows how by being conciliatory, Obama can be more ruthless.

The results remain to be seen. But it eerily resembles the way Obama has already isolated the GOP leadership. Obama began his presidency by elaborately courting the opposition party. Republicans in Congress believed that, by flamboyantly withholding cooperation, they could deny Obama his stated goal of bipartisan harmony and thus render him a failure. Instead, they wound up handing Obama the alternative victory of appearing to be the reasonable party. Polls showed that the public, by overwhelming margins, believed that Obama was trying to work with Republicans and that Republicans were not reciprocating.

Likewise, by defusing the complaint among Islamists that the United States disrespects their religion, Obama can more easily force the Iranian leadership to negotiate on the terms of its stated goals. This is actually "a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers," as American Prospect editor Mark Schmitt wrote in 2007. "One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in," Schmitt explained, "treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem."

This apparent paradox is one reason Obama's political identity has eluded easy definition. On the one hand, you have a disciple of the radical community organizer Saul Alinsky turned ruthless Chicago politician. On the other hand, there is the conciliatory post-partisan idealist. The mistake here is in thinking of these two notions as opposing poles. In reality it's all the same thing. Obama's defining political trait is the belief that conciliatory rhetoric is a ruthless strategy.

Toons

Clair Huxtable-Obama

A good article in the WaPo about how Michelle Obama is having to defined the black bourgeoisie to a generation of young Americans, since we don't see it on TV. You'd have to go back to Clair Huxtable to get a glimpse of the black uppper-middle class.

Jokes

Obama's top 10 jokes from this weekend's dinner.

“In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”

David Brooks is on-game today.

As is David Ignatius.

Depression-Era Americans Were Wrong About Deficits

With mounting (wrong) concerns about balancing the budget instead of getting out of this economic crisis, Paul Krugman digs up Gallup Polls from the mid 30's showing that citizens back then wanted (wrongly) to do the same thing.

Obama: don't listen to the chatter - restore the economy, then climb out of our debt.

p.s. Krugman was coming off this Economist article by Christina Romer (Chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors) reminding us to learn from the mistakes of our depression forefathers.

Heath Care Tab Dump

GOP leaders are the least-trusted group on health care issues ...

Steve Pearlstein writes that Doctors are no white knights - in fact, experts know that they are just as much a part of the problem as insurers, regulators, etc. (except the general public thinks they're white knights)

Ezra Klein thinks that the premature CBO score, and the HELP committee's response of an arbitrary $1 Trillion goal has put health care reform in peril.

EJ has a good column today. The gist:

It's one thing to compromise to pick up votes, which, one hopes, is what Baucus is doing. It's another to compromise in exchange for nothing at all. The first is bipartisanship with a purpose. The second is the bipartisanship of fools.

How Health Care Pans Out

... According to David Brooks. I think he unfairly characterizes the "public plan" (see previous posts) in his lede. But unfortunately, he's probably right about how things have gone and what negotiations will churn out.

The Senate

In the context of why it's hard for Obama to pass legislation (like the climate bill) in spite of his "mandate", Yglesias is right:

Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand, Bill Nelson, Dick Durbin, Roland Burriss, Arlen Specter, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, Carl Levin, Amy Klobuchar, Kay Hagan, Bob Menendez, Frank Lautenberg, Mark Warner, Jim Webb, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Evan Bayh represent 50 percent of the country’s population. But that only adds up to 22 Senators—you need thirty-eight more to pass a bill.
[...]
The American presidency is a weird institution. If Barack Obama wants to start a war with North Korea and jeopardize the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s not clear that anyone could stop him. If he wants to let cold-blooded murderers out of prison, it’s completely clear that nobody can stop him. But if he wants to implement the agenda he was elected on just a few months ago, he needs to obtain a supermajority in the United States Senate.

Why We Need a Public Plan

(via VH1) MUST READ: TNR has a good article explaining why we need a public plan option in the health care reform bill ... and reminding Democrats why they don't need to compromise preemptively.

UPDATE: Yglesias points out how the idea that gov't run health care is inefficient passes for common knowledge even though it's patently wrong.

Compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom — the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives.

Yoo Gets Sued

Via Politico:

A judge's decision on Friday to allow a suit by a former detainee against Bush-era Justice Department counsel John Yoo to ...

proceed marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially liable for the treatment of detainees held as enemy combatants -- and it places the Obama Justice Department in the uncomfortable position of defending one of the Bush appointees who penned some of the so-called terror memos that the new president has railed against.

The 42-page decision by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White allows the suit by Jose Padilla -- who was accused of planning a "dirty bomb" attack on U.S. soil and held in solitary confinement as a material witness for more than three years in the Navy brig in Charleston S.C. -- to proceed.

The suit accuses Yoo of personally approving Padilla's detention, and provided legal cover for it.

Yoo, a law professor at Berkley and visiting lecturer at Chapman University in Orange County, has not commented on the case, but White said Friday that Padilla had a right to sue "the alleged architect of the government policy," rejecting government arguments that their actions were beyond the scope of judicial review.

The initial charges against Padilla, a U.S. citizen, were eventually dropped, and in 2007 he was convicted to 17 years imprisonment by a civilian court on criminal conspiracy charges.

A separate suit by Padilla against a variety of current and former officials, including Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, is awaiting a ruling in a South Carolina federal court.

Toons

I Completely Agree

There's a lot of talk about how the GOP has said that the "public plan" in the Kennedy Health Care bill is a "non-starter" ... Broder's column today in the WaPo said that the Dems should scrap the public plan to achieve "bipartisanship".

I think that Yglesias is absolutely right in rejecting this by saying, in essence "if you eliminate moderates from your caucus, you eliminate yourself from bipartisanship". READ IT.

Women are "Better" Judges?

Dahlia Lithwick lays out a good argument in Slate. The part that made me think:

Reader Patrick St. John recently brought to my attention research that describes a phenomenon called "imaginative identification." The gist of it is that in order to get ahead in the world, you learn to see life through the eyes of those who have already succeeded. According to at least some anthropologists, women have had to get awfully good at understanding what it would be like to be a man. Men, on the other hand, are rarely forced to think about life in a woman's Manolos.
Anthropologist David Graeber makes this precise point, in an essay about women and imaginative identification. He argues, for instance, that women imagine life as a man every day of their lives. As he explains it:

A constant staple of 1950s situation comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men. Women's logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible. One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much trouble understanding the men. That's because the women had no choice but to understand men.

Graeber continues:

Faced with the prospect of even trying to imagine a women's perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, one popular trick among High School creative writing teachers is to assign students to write an essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what it would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. The results are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write long and detailed essays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal of time thinking about such questions; roughly half the boys refuse to write the essay entirely. Almost invariably they express profound resentment about having to imagine what it might be like to be a woman.

Now I am no social scientist, and this argument may be riddled with empirical holes. But it strikes me as intuitively obvious that in order to succeed in a white man's world, women must learn to see both sides in ways that men do not. If that is true, it just might make them "better" judges, at least in some circumstances. I don't know whether Judge Sotomayor was trying, albeit rather artlessly, to make some version of that argument in her speeches about the relative wisdom of Latina woman. But if I could ask her just one question at her confirmation hearing about that Berkeley speech, that would be it.

Sonia's Princeton Yearbook

So she quotes a Socialist? Hertzberg shows why that's not a bad thing:

Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister before he became the Presidential nominee of the Socialist Party in every election from 1928 through 1948, was a champion of many causes that had not yet been won—e.g., social security, unemployment compensation, equal civil rights for African-Americans, access to birth control, and labor’s right to organize—plus a few that still haven’t been won, such as universal health care. He was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, though he later accused the A.C.L.U. of “dereliction of duty” for its failure to join him (and precious few other prominent Americans) in opposing the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. He ran against F.D.R. four times, yet he was a welcome visitor to President Roosevelt at the White House and a close friend of and adviser to Mrs. Roosevelt. He was a passionate anti-Communist. As I’ve noted before, he was one of the most clear-eyed opponents of the Vietnam War, famously advising young protesters to wash the flag, not burn it.

Your Deficit

(via Ezra Klein)

No More Mr. Nice Guy

Saw this Toobin piece in the New Yorker a while back ... haven't read it ... but wanted to post it to come back to it.....

Great Pic

(via Syd O)

NYT Doing Cheney's Bidding

(via Andrew Sullivan) The NYT ran a story yesterday essentially claiming that all the DOJ lawyers were in agreement that the brutal interrogation techniques were legal. The report was based on some leaked emails written by Dpty. AG Comey in an obvious effort to defend Cheney's position ... and the NYT uncritically bought it. Glenn Greenwald has a good summary on how the emails really show the opposite.

Already this morning, here is George Stephanopolous' Twitter reaction to the NYT story:

Any rational and minimally well-informed person who actually read the Comey emails would walk away with the exact opposite point -- what is "stunning" was how extreme was the pressure from the White House to issue these memos and how compliant DOJ lawyers were to White House dictates. But that's how our media works: anonymous government officials tell them what to say; they write it down uncritically; and it then becomes conventional wisdom regardless of how false it is.

Abortion Stories

I have some thoughts on George Tiller's murder - but not sure I'm willing or ready to post them yet .... stay tuned.

In any event, Andrew Sullivan has compiled stories from his readers about their decisions to have, or not have, an abortion. It's absolutely worth a read.