Josh Marshall: A Feast of Metaphors
Jacob Heilbrunn says the GOP needs its own 'Secret Speech' repudiating the Cheney Era.
Definitely read Jacob's very amusing and insightful piece.
One thing he mentions is this meeting and vote the RNC is holding on Wednesday to vote and decide whether to officially designate the Democratic party as "socialist." I'm glad they're focusing on the things that are going to bring their party back to power. I haven't seen a nugget that so perfectly typifies the current GOP's mix of ideological obscurantism and dingbat sloganeering as this. I mean, they're not even in the bubble. They're like in a bubble within the bubble. They can't even emerge into the bubble proper.
Think Progress Limbaugh responds to Price: ‘How the hell’ can Price say Powell is better for GOP than Cheney?
Shirking secession May 18: Governor Rick Perry, R-TX, wrote an op-ed, saying he never advocated for Texas seceding from the union. Why is he suddenly changing his tune? Rachel Maddow is joined by Dallas Morning News senior political reporter Wayne Slater.This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough asked Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) if he believed that Rush Limbaugh and former Vice President Cheney were “somehow better Republicans than Colin Powell.” “Goodness, no,” Price responded. On his radio show today, Limbaugh respond to Price, asking, “How in the hell can you say that Dick Cheney was worse for the Republican Party than Colin Powell!?” Limbaugh reiterated his claim that Powell endorsed Obama entirely because of his race and proclaimed that Cheney was a model Republican because he “gets results”:
LIMBAUGH: How in the hell can you say that Dick Cheney is worse for the Republican Party than Colin Powell? It was Colin Powell who endorsed Barack Obama after the Republican party gave Colin Powell the exact kind of nominee he claims to want. [...]
The Vice President gets results! Do you not see what Dick Cheney was able to pull off last week? You basically have the Bush policy on Gitmo and interrogations intact. … And [Price] says that Dick Cheney is not as good a Republican as Colin Powell is?
Watch it:
The question now is if Price will, like other Republicans before him, deliver a mea culpa for publicly disagreeing with El Rushbo. But disagreements within the conservative movement aside, the “Bush policy on Gitmo and interrogations” is by no means “intact.”
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Yglesias: George Will’s Irritable Mental Gestures
It’s probably not fair to say that conservatives have no idea, but this entire George Will column is basically the same as the column he wrote about how he hates jeans, except this time it’s about how he hates Portland. But now he wants national policy to be driven by his hatred for Portland:
LaHood, however, has been transformed. Indeed, about three bites into lunch, the T word lands with a thump: He says he has joined a “transformational” administration: “I think we can change people’s behavior.” Government “promoted driving” by building the Interstate Highway System—”you talk about changing behavior.” He says, “People are getting out of their cars, they are biking to work.” High-speed intercity rail, such as the proposed bullet train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, is “the wave of the future.” And then, predictably, comes the P word: Look, he says, at Portland, Ore. [...]
Where to start? Does LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program “promoted” driving? Does he think 0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work? Intercity high-speed rail probably always will be the wave of the future, for cities more than 300 miles apart.
Where to start? LaHood didn’t say that Americans didn’t drive before we built the interstate system. He said that building the interstate system promoted driving. I don’t see how you could possibly deny this. Had we spent less money on highway construction and more on mass transit or intercity rail, then there would be less driving. That seems obvious. In a different context, completing WMATA’s Green Line promoted use of Metro. And this is true even though Washingtonians were avid Metro riders even before the Green Line was complete. A seven year-old ought to be able to master this.
Will claims to find it unbelievable that as many as 0.01 percent of Americans would ever bike to work regularly. But rather than tossing off ridicule, he might have looked up the Census Bureau’s statistics on commuting patterns and seen that right now 0.4 percent of commuters normally get to work on bicycles. Now that’s a small percentage. But it’s forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian. This would be like saying Dwight Howard is 2 feet tall.
As for high-speed rail, San Francisco and Los Angeles aren’t that much more than 300 miles apart. Indeed, they’re about as far apart as Barcelona and Madrid, which are currently served by a very successful high speed rail link. What’s more, while metropolitan San Francisco is about the same size as metro Barcelona (4.2 million people, give or take), metropolitan Los Angeles’s 12.8 million residents is a much larger city than Madrid with its 5.3 million.
But even if you accept Will’s idea that LA-SF HSR can’t succeed because it’s over the magic 300 miles line, the United States has plenty of city-pairs closer than that. For example, there’s Seattle and the dread Portland, Oregon. And Vancouver’s less than 300 miles from Seattle. Milwaukee to Chicago, Chicago to Indianapolis, Chicago to Saint Louis, Miami to Orlando and Orlando to Tampa, and Houston to Dallas—all fitting under the Will line.
Why does Newsweek want to offer its audience a columnist who wants to write about transportation polic but can’t be bothered to bring any facts or logic to the table?
Atrios on Toobin on Roberts
Toobin describes him perfectly.
Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
DougJ: Dowd’s plagiarism proves liberal bias
I didn’t see this coming from Malkin:
This makes twice in the span of four days that a major newspaper’s been caught cribbing material from nutroots blogs, which stands to reason. According to a survey of more than 200 journalists recently conducted at BYU, “despite equal awareness [of lefty and righty blogs], journalists spend more time reading posts in the liberal blogosphere.” Contain your surprise.
[....]
They’re taking more than just ideas, champ. In fact, the beauty of MoDo’s snafu is that not only does it show a major player in the media being led around by nutroots talking points, it involves her lifting stuff from a blog that’s actually called “Talking Points.” Glorious.
What I like about this is that it shows how nearly any event can be turned into an example of liberal media bias, given a sufficiently determined wingnut blogger. I also like a blog called “Hot Air” making fun of another blog for being called “Talking Points”.
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