Palin 2012!

Because why waste a good candidate on Barack Obama?

Seriously, what a maroon.

Remember Nothing, Forget Nothing

From the brilliant political mind of K-Lo, on George Voinovich's retirement. . .

An alternative to the RNC chairmanship for Ken Blackwell? Senator Blackwell?

Seriously? Is the goal here to become a 20% (excuse me, 36%) rump?

For your daily quota of disgustingness

Read the wonderful self-loathing on this AlterNet comment thread. A sample:

There's a potential silver lining here. As he condones and authorizes assassinations, a principle of International Law will kick in...the notion of reciprocity...and Young George himself might be targeted and taken out. Fine with me, so long as Cheney, Condi, and Rummy are with him at the time. :o)

At the risk of sounding like a member of the lizard army at LGF, just go to Canada or Amsterdam or Baghdad. We won't miss you.

You can have a legitimate debate about what sort of measures against terrorism are morally and legally justified. Insisting that President Bush be executed for crimes against humanity is not Step 1 of that debate.

The enemy isn't us

Dear John Quiggen:

Moreover, where it was once possible to treat occasional public manifestations of Freeperism as aberrations, it’s now obvious that this is how the Republican base really thinks. So, any Republican, no matter how superficially reasonable, must be regarded as either someone who shares Freeper/LGF views or someone who is willing to exploit the holders of such views in the pursuit of a personal or class interest.

You have a point here, no doubt. But our team hardly has a monopoly on wingnuts.

"REA-GAN GOOD!"

It has been highly amusing to me to watch the netroots demand ideological purity from their candidates at the expense of nominating people that can win elections, and then claiming that, "they just weren't pure enough!" (Hint: the reason that Congress's approval rating is even lower than the President's isn't that they haven't started on impeachment proceedings against the President.)

It would not be a good idea to follow their example, as Shawn Macomber so elegantly reminds us on the AmSpec blog. Support or don't support a candidate as you like, but leave room in the tent for the rest of us, please, and try to keep in mind that general elections are won by the guy or gal that appeals to the whole country.

How the Democrats can lose this election

It'll be a challenge, but they might just be up to it. Eating their own is probably a good start.

One of the things that I find most obnoxious about the Bush administration and the state of the Republican right is the insistence on orthodoxy. Like the Party in 1984, their command is not "Thou shalt," it is "Thou art." Our friends in the netroots despise this unwillingness to acknowledge the good faith of the other side, as do I.

Apparently, their solution is to emulate it. I don't think that is a winning position.

Two things I don't usually do

I don't normally think too much about abortion, and I don't base my votes on that issue exclusively. Also, I don't typically fear for society based on what I read on the internet; if I did, I'd never do anything else. Then I read something like this comment (scroll down):

To be forced to carry and give birth to a baby and then have it torn from you is unimaginable. For me, and for many other women, it's far worse than the ending of a life that has not yet truly begun.

Has our country really gotten so morally bankrupt that it's better to kill your own child than let them live if they can't be part of your life? And this point of view is celebrated?

An Argument I'd Wanted to Make

This comment was made on a thread about TPM's Golden Duke Awards. It's a viewpoint that I wish would get more play in our national discussion:

Guys!

This is all just left bashing right (Did I miss a lefty named somewhere?). What is going on in America with the increasing rise of hateful, poisonous, mostly emotional attitudes? This desire to to hate, to villify, to call criminal and call for impeachment because certain groups of people don't like a politician's POLICIES and VIEWPOINT, is a very perverted, dysfunctional, inefficient way for society to operate.

As much as I don't want to see Hillary make office, I certainly don't want to put up with 4 to 8 years of emotionally generated, attempted take-downs by the right.

I'm not a Bush supporter, but there are so many lefties out there who do not understand that Bush is PURPOSEFULLY challenging the boundaries of the Constitution and the very powers of the office of the president. But this is his position and right UNDER the Consitution. Our system actually has checks on a president going too far (even if they seem to operate slowly). Notice how NONE of these checks have come into reality even with a Democratic majority? There's a reason, and you don't know what your talking about until you know the reason.

Michael R.
Roswell, NM

Blackwater to kill Obama

You go, HuffPo. It's impossible to argue with closely reasoned logic like this. I mean, how can the rest of us compete with that?

H/T: NRO.

Supply-Side Follies

A lot of online ink has been spilled within the last few days regarding Jonathan Chait's new book "exposing" the supply-side thinking of Republicans. I hope he enjoyed burning down the straw man of supply-side because that's all he did.

There are a lot of serious reasons that tax cuts are good -- you don't have to believe that revenue will increase as a result of cutting taxes to believe that tax cuts are good in a given situation. Take a look at this story from the Economist economics blog.

If you want to say that Republicans are uninformed about economics and make stupid arguments, that's not exactly breaking news. I'm sure you can point to examples of Republicans saying any number of stupid things are any number of topics. So are a lot of Democrats -- economic literacy is not a requirement to be in politics. However, it's more useful to engage the legitimate arguments if you want to shed any light on a topic. It's bad argument to say that "This point that your side sometimes makes is wrong, therefore, you're not worth listening to at all."

You're throwing the baby out with the bath water if you ignore the fact that tax cuts can expand the economy, or, for that matter, the moral argument that the money belongs to the people and the government should use it efficiently.