I don't always get Netflix recommendations

One of these things is not like the others.

I'm done with the Tucson story

Actually, I was pretty well done after the president gave his speech. And I don't mean I'm done commenting -- though, yeah, there's nothing new for me to say at this point. I mean: I'm done reading. I guess in some months or years, when Gabrielle Giffords has (knock on wood) recovered to the point that she can give an interview, or if the shootings prompt some significant and likely-to-be-passed legislation, I'll pay attention again. But at this point the number of Tucson stories vastly outweighs any value I can draw from them; there's more reportage than there is news to report. And I can't take it anymore. Maybe this makes me a bad journalist-citizen. (And certainly the victims and their families can't quite so easily move on; I recognize that and they have my sympathy.) But at this point, the continuing magnitude of coverage has started to feel like wallowing. I'm not interested in wallowing.

Matt Yglesias on changing the tone

I don’t think people should pretend to like people they dislike or avoid saying what they mean. But I do think people should be careful to avoid a certain kind of tendentious rhetoric. Some of the participants in our political debate are quite stupid, some are corrupt, some are dishonest, and some combine multiple unattractive qualities.

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin. This stuff is mostly unserious, but I also think it’s potentially dangerous. If you really thought prominent American politicians were plotting to fundamentally subvert the American constitutional order tand supplant it with a totalitarian dictatorship, you’d be prepared to countenance some pretty extreme countermeasures.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

The Scripps column

Glenn Beck is right.

Not about everything, mind you, or even most things. But Beck is right to lament how Americans have lost the spirit of unity that filled the nation, oh so briefly, after 9/11.

Remember those days, and remember them with some bittersweet fondness.

They may represent the final moment -- ever -- that Americans came together in the aftermath of tragedy. Nowadays, everybody retreats immediately to their ideological camps and girds for battle, no matter the facts on the ground. Despite President Obama's very nice speech Wednesday night in Tuscon, that's unlikely to change soon.

Why? Because our politics is more about denying legitimacy to the "other" side than it is about solving the problems that face the country.

It's understandable why many liberals thought the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords was the work of a right-wing terrorist: the rhetoric on the right in recent years has been alarmingly militant.

But liberal commentators were wrong to publicly cast blame before we even knew Jared Lee Loughner's identity and motives; a wait-and-see silence would've been appropriate.

It's understandable why conservatives recoiled from associating their rhetoric with any kind "climate of hate" surrounding the shooting: Loughner is clearly mentally ill; Republicans aren't responsible for the vagaries of his brain chemistry. But right-wing commentators were also wrong not to pause and reconsider the appropriateness their side's recent talk of "Second Amendment remedies" in the political realm.

Nobody pauses. Nobody reflects. The only way to start trusting each other again would be to shut up and listen to each other once in awhile. But what are the chances that will happen? Non-existent, it seems. I'm right, you're wrong, and that's all anybody needs to know.

via scrippsnews.com

And that's my take. A bit more pox-on-both-your-houses, probably, than I feel. But man, it's hard to say anything fresh or new or insightful about stuff sometimes. Some weeks, that's pretty discouraging.

Why does Karl Rove have a newspaper column?

I don't begrudge anybody who makes the move from politics and into the realm of journalism. James Fallows and Hendrik Hertzberg both did time as speechwriters for Jimmy Carter, and I'd dare say our national discourse these days would be a bit less smart if they weren't making regular contributions. (A conservative example of this phenomenon is Bill Safire, whose language column for the New York Times was beloved by nerds everywhere.)

But I still don't understand why Karl Rove has a regular newspaper column. 

Don't get me wrong: I don't object to Rove's "journalism" career here because of the quality of his analysis, or because the man can't write. The problem is that Rove is still an active participant in the political realm. And that means readers can't know if they're getting his real analysis of a situation -- something you'd normally expect on the op-ed page of a prestigious newspaper -- or his on-message analysis of a situation that might not be honest, but serves to advance the GOP's interests. 

I got to thinking about this today after the final paragraph in Rove's latest contribution to the Wall Street Journal: 

Mr. Obama's best chance of success 22 months from now rests on reclaiming his image as a reasonable, bipartisan and unifying figure. It won't be easy, given his track record as president. That can't be airbrushed from history. But the selection of Mr. Daley as chief of staff indicates that Mr. Obama is willing to give it a try. It makes sense. After all, what he was doing nearly wrecked his party and has imperiled his presidency.

Now. Rove might be right that Obama abandoned his efforts to be a bipartisan and unifying figure. He might not. All I know is that in the recent mid-term election, Rove led the American Crossroads group that raised tens of millions of dollars to defeat Democratic candidates for Congress. Rove isn't just rooting for the GOP team, in other words: He's still very much trying to advance the ball up the field. 

I guess you could make the case that most op-ed writers are trying to advance one party's fortunes at the expense of another. And that's true. But this seems different to me. Eugene Robinson (say) or Michael Gerson or most other writers you name don't still have skin in the game. The idea is that they may be biased, but they're free to be honest within the bounds of those biases. They don't always have to hew to the party line if their viewpoint takes them somewhere else.

But Rove's "other" job is to get Republicans elected. And we know that in the course of doing that job, his modus operandi has been to take an opponent's strength and turn it into a weakness. Ergo, President Obama -- the national leader who is still regarded as trying the hardest at bipartisan -- has "abandoned" that effort in office. And Rove says this not as somebody who is rooting against Obama, but whose "other" job is to actively defeat him. What are the chances that he'd ever call President Obama a unifying figure, no matter how much it could (hypothetically) be deserved?

And, incidentally, the "about Karl Rove" box on the WSJ page makes no mention of Rove's current activities. 

This stuff happens. Bill Kristol keeps finding newspapers to let him make regular commentary, and he's in pretty much the same situation. But unless you want to know what the GOP message du jour is, I can't imagine how this situation serves readers. If you want to write about politics, write about politics. If you want to play politics, play politics. Karl Rove might benefit from his current arrangement, and so might Republicans. Do readers?

Recalibrating this blog

In a few hours, Scripps Howard should release the latest column from Ben Boychuk and yours truly. We talked about the Tucson shooting, of course: It's the only thing to talk about this week. And I hope my editors at Scripps will forgive me for teasing the column with this teaser summing up my take:

Nobody pauses. Nobody reflects. The only way to start trusting each other again would be to shut up and listen to each other once in awhile.  But what are the chances that’s going to happen? Non-existent, it seems. I’m right, you’re wrong, and that’s all anybody needs to know.

I'm not really happy with my contribution to this week's column. I'm not sure there's 300 words on the topic I could've written about Tucson that would've made me happy. I didn't want to re-hash the case that every liberal has made about militant rhetoric on the right; I didn't want to do one of those false equivalency things, either, where I suggest the problem stems from both sides; and yet I don't want to let my side of the argument off the hook and suggest that liberals offer a high-minded approach to public discourse that conservatives don't -- because, well, I don't believe it. 

But I do believe that paragraph above. I'm not sure if there's actually a way anymore to do vigorous, lively politics -- and politics is how we do democracy --  without retreating into base tribalism. I'm as guilty of that as anybody, from time to time. And I guess I'd like to recalibrate my own contribution to the conversation a bit, to make it less knee-jerky and more thoughtful: To stand for some ideas instead of tearing down what other people offer. 

So I'm going to attempt to retreat from the way I've done blogging lately, and try a different approach. Instead of scattershot snarking, I want to do a few things in this space:

* Curate the most interesting commentary I read, from a variety of sources.

* Interact with longer-form journalism and books.

* Expand the the topics here beyond politics to include some of my other favorite things: Literature, movies, TV, city life, and parenting. A whole life should not be confined to one's ballot-box preferences.

These are all things I've done before. But I'm going to be a little more intentional about them. I suspect it won't do wonders for my blog traffic, but that's ok: This space is a hobby, not a job, so I don't need to worry about that. 

In practice, this means I'm going to stop reading the morning papers on a laptop with the mouse button hovering over the browser's Posterous "blog-now!" button. I'll retreat to my iPad, which allows for sharing quickly, but not blogging efficiently. I'm going to consume information without expecting to produce new information immediately in response.

The end result is that you can expect me to revive my series of blog posts about the Federalist Papers. After last week's argument about the Constitution in the House, I'm more convinced than ever that liberals can -- and should -- make a case for constitutional liberalism that's rooted in (but not at all confined to) the Founders' vision. 

And as I've previously said, 2011 is my year of reading about income inequality and the welfare state. I'm almost complete with my first book in the series, Paul Krugman's somewhat-dated "The Conscience of a Liberal." You can expect my thoughts on that in a few days.

This is what I'm going to attempt. This will still be a liberal place. I don't pretend that I have more than a microscopic influence on the national conversation, but I'd like it to be productive. And for me, that probably means going slower and deeper.

Memo to K-Lo, regarding Sarah Palin and 'blood libel'

Actually, I find it pretty easy to believe that a conservative Christian American could "love" Israel and not know (or understand) very much about the Jewish people. There are lots of conservative Christians who see a Jewish homeland as a good thing purely in terms of its value to Christian eschatology. 

About Illinois' 67 percent tax increase (Or: Math is scary)

This is always the part that gets attention:

In the final hours of its lame duck session, the Illinois legislature (barely) approved a 67 percent percent increase in the state's personal income tax.

This is not:

The hike will bump personal income taxes up from 3 percent to 5 percent.

I won't argue that a bump in the tax rate from 3 to 5 percent isn't significant. But that two-point bump certainly looks a lot less significant and alarming than a 67 percent increase, doesn't it?

For what it's worth: The median household income in Illinois in 2009 was a bit more than $53,000 a year. Assuming the earners in the household get paid every two weeks, that amount comes out to $2,076 biweekly. Right now, lllinois is collecting a bit more than $62 per paycheck. After the tax increase, it'll be $104 a paycheck -- a difference of $42, more or less. That's $84 a month out of take-home pay, and for most families that's nothing to sneeze at. But these, at least, are useful numbers in understanding the magnitude of the tax increase. The nationwide headlines shouting about a 67 percent increase! tell you the scariest-sounding but least-illuminating bit of information about the story.

Haley Barbour's civil rights museum

Perhaps Sarah Palin could take some lessons from another GOP 2012 hopeful on how to respond to a P.R. nightmare. While Palin is in a defensive crouch following Saturday's attempted assassination, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour offers a different model: when Barbour was accused of racism for his praise of segregationist groups, he issued a quick apology. Three weeks later, he's looking to make amends, calling for the construction of a $50 million civil rights museum in his home state. Barbour delivered his final "state of the state" address Tuesday. "The civil rights struggle is an important part of our history, and millions of people are interested in learning more about it," he said.

via slatest.slate.com

Including Haley Barbour!

Weird Google searches that found me

From my blog's traffic logs:

Los Angeles, California arrived from google.com on "Cup O' Joel: John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin" by searching for "philadelphia story" blood libel.

Huh. I'm pretty sure I know how that ended up landing on my blog. But for a minute I was whisked into a parallel universe where Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn were the authors of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." I don't think it would be as witty or charming as the real movie, though.

John Podhoretz on Sarah Palin

So in the sense that the words “blood” and “libel” in sequence are to be taken solely as referring to this anti-Semitic slander, Palin’s appropriation of it was vulgar and insensitive. I guess. The problem is that I doubt Sarah Palin knew this history, because most people don’t know this history, including most of the anti-Palin hysterics screaming about it on Twitter at this very moment. She used it as shorthand for “false accusation that the right bears responsibility for the blood of the innocent.” She shouldn’t have, though she certainly had no intention of giving offense to those sensitive about it, because it would be an act of lunacy to open that can of worms for no reason.

But here’s the thing. Sarah Palin has become a very important person in the United States. Important people have to speak with great care, because their words matter more than the words of other people. If they are careless, if they are sloppy, if they are lazy about finding the right tone and setting it and holding it, they will cease, after a time, to be important people, because without the discipline necessary to modulate their words, those words will lose their power to do anything but offer a momentary thrill — either pleasurable or infuriating. And then they will just pass on into the ether.

If she doesn’t serious herself up, Palin is on the direct path to irrelevancy. She won’t be the second Ronald Reagan; she’ll be the Republican incarnation of Jesse Jackson.

via commentarymagazine.com

Ed Kilgore on 'Second Amendment Theology'

But there is one habit of conservative rhetoric that is relevant to the events in Tucson, and it would be helpful to single it out for condemnation instead of indulging in broad discussions about the “climate of hate.” It’s the suggestion that Americans have an inherent “right of revolution” which entitles them to deploy violence when they are convinced that government officials are trammeling on their liberties, and that we are at a stage of history where such fears are legitimate.

This is the nasty underlying implication of Sharron Angle’s remark last year that “Second Amendment remedies” might be necessary to deal with policies supported by her Senate opponent, Harry Reid. And it’s been the subtext of many years of conservative rhetoric about how the Second Amendment is the crown jewel of the Constitution because it ensures a heavily armed citizenry that can take matters into its own hands if government goes too far. In combination with Tea Party militants’ open assertions that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and marginal increases in the marginal tax rate represent an intolerable tyranny, reminiscent of the British oppression that made the American Revolution necessary, this belief that Americans should be stockpiling weapons in case they have to stop voting against government officials and start shooting them is extremely dangerous.

via tnr.com

This is part of what I was trying to get at with my first post the other day. I don't get my panties in a wad because anybody uses a metaphor, and I *try* not to get upset at an entire movement because fringe nutjobs show up at rallies with provocative signs. (Although I've been guilty of making that generalization: Apologies.) But it does seem to me that there's an ideology on the right that embraces talk of armed revolution in the face of overreaching government -- idle talk, perhaps, but not metaphorical.

That doesn't mean Jared Loughner can be blamed on the right. He can't. Guy was crazy, and crazy does what crazy does.

But like I said Sunday: Some of us on the left take that kind of talk seriously. And when violence actually happens -- even if it turns out to not be related -- we'll be looking pretty closely for tie-ins as a result. I think lots of liberal commenters overstepped in making the tie-in here, but I understand why it happened.

How many bases does America have overseas?

The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent bases! What is the United States doing with more than 560 foreign bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United States really have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?

In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which "accountability" is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there's one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.

via thenation.com

I realize that providing for the common defense is pretty solidly a constitutional duty of American government. But I wonder what my conservative friends who believe in "limited government" think of this. Did the Founders really envision a military establishment so far-reaching that it's difficult to know how many bases our country has overseas?

Will Saletan on Sarah Palin

That's what Palin believes. Each person is solely accountable for his actions. Acts of monstrous criminality "begin and end with the criminals who commit them." It's wrong to hold others of the same nationality, ethnicity, or religion "collectively" responsible for mass murders.

Unless, of course, you're talking about Muslims. In that case, Palin is fine with collective blame. In fact, she's enthusiastic about it.

via slate.com

Me @Macworld: Posterous Review

The era of insta- and micro-blogging has been notable for its proliferation of options—from Twitter to Tumblr to everything in between, there’s no shortage of ways to publish your thoughts online. Posterous stands out in the crowded field because of its simplicity and easy of use. The company’s free Posterous app for Apple’s iOS devices emulates those great qualities.

via macworld.com

It was writing this review that actually persuaded me to move most of my blogging activity to Posterous. Working for Macworld is changing my habits.

Michael Chabon on the 'n-word' and Huck Finn

Great punchline to Michael Chabon's story of how he dealt with the n-word while reading "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" to his children last summer:

"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."

"Because I'm an ass," I said. Only I didn't say "ass."

Jonah Goldberg is right about 'blood libel'

I should have said this a few days ago, when my friend Glenn Reynolds introduced the term to this debate. But I think that the use of this particular term in this context isn’t ideal. Historically, the term is almost invariably used to describe anti-Semitic myths about how Jews use blood — usually from children — in their rituals. I agree entirely with Glenn’s, and now Palin’s, larger point. But I’m not sure either of them intended to redefine the phrase, or that they should have.

via nationalreview.com

Today in Philadelphia police ickiness

Philadelphia Police officer was arrested today on charges of drinking and driving on the job, police said.

Officer William Haviland, 42, a seven-year veteran of the force, was suspended in November for 30 days with the intent to dismiss, said Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

via philly.com

Today in Glenn Beck screen shots

I do wonder how many people quote Martin Luther King while dressed up as a faux facist.

beck.png.png on Aviary.

A pox on both their houses?

My post yesterday on the rhetoric of violence brought some pushback from some of my conservative friends -- as I expected. I don't want to be some lily-livered simp who doesn't have the courage of his own convictions, but I'm not interested in clinging to my convictions despite all relevant evidence, either.

My core argument revolved around this set of propositions:

 

* The Obama Administration stands on the cusp of becoming a tyranny, is a nearly unprecedented threat to the freedom that all Americans cherish.

* And the Tea Party movement sees itself as heir to an earlier generation of Americans who threw off the shackes of tyranny with a violent revolution.

 

And I concluded: "We'll stop believing in your propensity for violence when you stop telling us all about it."

Of course, some responses are more substantive than others. Here's Emaw, from my old Kansas stomping grounds:

This is one of the best rationalizations for your own prejudice I've read yet. Good job!

This one got under my skin the quickest, until I realized that Emaw hadn't bothered to make an argument for why I'm wrong. 

More substantively came this response from namefromthepast, a high school friend of mine whose anonymity I'll respect. He posted this link of anti-Bush death threats, and commented: "Just a little reminder. Confusing how you quite innocently nearly skipped over the moonbat left and their history of violence and threats of violence. " 

And no doubt, those pictures are ugly, stupid stuff. I repudiate it--and I repudiate other lefty hints of violence that a conservative friend privately relayed to me. There are undoubtedly idiots throughout the political spectrum. I make no excuses, and I condemn them fully and wholeheartedly.

But I look at this -- and at Michelle Malkin's very, very long list of liberals who crossed lines, both rhetorical and otherwise -- and I have a couple of thoughts: 

* All of the links in Malkin's post go back to years of posts she's done, documenting "the left's" outrages. Everybody tries to police the lines of acceptable discourse and action, and for conservatives to suggest that liberals are somehow uniquely cynical in this effort is, well, cynical. (There. Nyah-nyah-nyah! You guys do it too! That's how we're playing this, right? That makes it ok, right?)  

* But ok, so I was wrong to say that the rhetoric of violence occurs "exclusively on the right." Clearly, that was an overstatement.

A more accurate way of saying it is that the rhetoric of violence -- language that seems to indicate a desire for action, instead of just colorful use of metaphors -- is embraced more fully by thought leaders, candidates and elected officials on the right. 

Steve Benen:

I realize major media outlets feel contractually obligated to embrace the false equivalency, but folks should know better. Remember the Senate candidate who recommended "Second Amendment remedies"? How about the congressional candidate who fired shots at a silhouette with his opponent's initials on it? Or maybe the congressional candidate who declared, "If I could issue hunting permits, I would officially declare today opening day for liberals. The season would extend through November 2 and have no limits on how many taken as we desperately need to 'thin' the herd"? Or how about the congressional candidate who said he considered the violent overthrow of the United States to government an "option" and added that political violence is "on the table"?

All four of these examples came from 2010 -- and all came from Republican candidates for federal elected office. And this doesn't even get into Republican activists and media personalities.

Salon's Alex Pareene adds similar examples from Red State blogger (and CNN contributor) Erick Erickson and Fox News' Dick Morris, among others. I've tried to limit myself to examples where commentators seem to me to have strayed beyond the bounds of metaphor into concrete calls for or musings about the possibilities of political violence.

Now: I don't know if we just went through an unusual cycle where grassroots-slash-fringey Tea Partiers managed to obtain high-profile candidacies that they wouldn't normally, and thus bring fringe views-slash-rhetoric to the table, or if this really is the elite of the GOP and and prominent allied commenters signalling to the rest of the party what kind of norms are acceptable in discourse. But it's there, and it's happening.

And in my view, it's bad. Do both sides do it? Undoubtedly.

Do both sides' elites do it to the same degree? Not from what I can tell; this really does look to me like it is primarily (though not exclusively, perhaps) a practice of the right.

But I might be wrong. Perhaps it's simply a function of who is in power and who feels disempowered as a result.

For what it's worth, I don't blame the actions of Mr. Loughner on this rhetoric. He's crazy. I still wish a lot of commentators would have (ahem) held their fire before launching this debate. They didn't.  My purpose here is to explain why I find the rhetoric coming from across the aisle so alarming. That's all. Perhaps it is merely rationalizing my own prejudice, but my prejudice in this case isn't against conservatives, but against those who employ the threat or promise of violence as a means of rallying political support or otherwise achieving political ends.

If we come back four years from now, when Sarah Palin is president, and you have Democratic members of Congress and prominent liberals talking about overthrowing the government through violent means, I hope and believe you'll find me castigating them in unequivocal terms. (You might find me reminding you of the current debates, as well; I'm only human.) Suggesting that your political rivals need to be shot is wrong, no matter how cutely or coyly phrased -- and no matter who does it.