Matt Yglesias points us to this post from Erick Erickson of Red State (Disclosure: I had frequent personal interactions with Erickson in the past and in my experience, on a personal level, Erickson was a nice, decent guy. The public Erickson is of course, another matter):

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

(Emphasis supplied.) In that post, Erickson is writing about the Oslo terrorist attack. I for one don't see the terrorist attack as representative of Christianity. And I don't believe we need to look to Christianity to try and understand the Oslo terrorist attack. Similarly, terrorism in the name of Islam is not, in my view, informed by the religion of Islam (I'm not expert in Islam so I certainly could be wrong.) More . . .

Jeff Sachs at Huffpo:

[A]t every crucial opportunity, Obama has failed to stand up for the poor and middle class.
...Obama could have cut hundreds of billions of dollars in spending that has been wasted on America's disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, but here too it's been all bait and switch. Obama is either afraid to stand up to the Pentagon or is part of the same neoconservative outlook as his predecessor. The real cause hardly matters since the outcome is the same: America is more militarily engaged under Obama than even under Bush.

[More...]

I don't care whether the debt ceiling lift is temporary or permanent. I care that I have paid into a system my entire adult life knowing I would get Medicare at 65 and social security at 66. Republicans want to steal the money I've already paid in and put it somewhere else, making me wait another two years for Medicare. And raise my taxes at the same time.

If President Obama backs raising the age of medicare, which won't save the Government money in the long run due to the huge numbers of 65 and 66 year olds who will shift to Medicaid and who will break the backs of small businesses providing health care to elderly workers -- and which will force middle class elderly workers who don't have employer paid health care to pay premiums of ten thousand dollars a year or more for two more years, with huge deductibles and out of pocket costs, he doesn't deserve a second term as Democratic President. Let him run as as Republican or go home to Chicago. He will have sold us out.

Bump and Update: Here are suspect Anders Behring Breivik 's online postings in English. He "rants against multi-culturalism." BBC News has this profile of him. More from The Telegraph here.

Norwegian police describe him as a "right-wing Christian fundamentalist." It's still unclear if he acted alone.

According to police, Breivik has been charged and confessed. The death toll is close to 100. [More...]

Amy Winehouse Is dead. RIP.

Cadel Evans has won the Tour de France.

Open Thread.

Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote a post titled The context of liberal surrender and Barack Obama’s choices:

It was never at all plausible after November 2, 2010 that Obama and the Democrats could get through this year and next without losing on several fronts compared to what they had in the very liberal 111th Congress. And yet liberals seemed to believe that if only Obama negotiated properly he could avoid those losses. It just wasn’t going to happen. So the proper way to see the current negotiations are in the context of watching both sides surrender.

I'm not seeing how agreeing to an all spending cuts deal constitutes surrender by the Republicans. Will it be all they asked for? No. But being effective negotiators, Republicans knew to ask for pie in the sky, and then just settle for pie on the ground. They can get the sky on the next go around.

But the more interesting aspect to Bernstein's analysis is his failure to connect the December deal to extend the Bush tax cuts to the current debt ceiling deal (and the coming budget negotiations.) When the President surrendered on the Bush tax cuts, he lost almost all of his bargaining leverage. (Indeed, the only leverage Democrats have now is that a substantial number of Republicans do not want to vote for a debt ceiling increase under any circumstances, thus Dem votes will be required.) When some of us were explaining this in December, others were arguing The December Deal was a victory. Here is a post where I discuss Yglesias making that claim:

We've gotten the "Grand Bargain" sideshow out of the way, so the question now is what will be the actual debt ceiling deal? Is it possible that the "clean" bill (with respect to spending cuts) McConnell option will be the end result? Absolutely not. The question is, as it has always been since last December, how much in spending cuts will the GOP extract in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. The talks resumed this morning:

Congressional leaders trooped to the White House for a Saturday morning meeting called by the president Friday night to discuss what options existed for moving forward with the negotiations. [. . .] To meet Republican demands for dollar-for-dollar cuts to correspond with any rise in the borrowing authority, Congressional aides said there were discussions about extending the debt ceiling for a period of months tied directly to cuts, with a second installment then subject to the McConnell process. Democrats and Mr. Obama were insistent that the increase be guaranteed to take the Treasury Department through 2012 without another fight.

[More...]

President Obama on the failure of the budget talks:

Obama said he had demanded $1.2 trillion in additional revenues over 10 years, in exchange for spending cuts, including cuts to Medicare and Social Security. He said the revenues had been structured in a way that marginal tax rates would not be increased, and no Republicans would be forced to cast a vote that would violate the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which most Republicans in Congress have signed. Boehner said that the additional $400 billion in revenue would have amounted to a tax increase that would hurt small businesses.

Even though Boehner ended today's talks, he says he will attend tomorrow's White House meeting on the debt ceiling. From ABC: How Negotiations Broke Down.

Affidavits for arrest warrants are not evidence. Their contents may be correct, but they also may contain inaccuracies. Affidavits contain hearsay, speculation and assumptions. They are not subject to the rules of evidence. They are not tested by cross-examination. Their purpose is merely to convince a judge that probable cause exists to arrest someone for a crime.

Criminal trials take place in public. Criminal investigations should not. One sided affidavits have no place in the public domain unless and until they are admitted as evidence at trial.

Unfortunately, the Colorado Supreme Court today, in refusing to review Denver Bronco Perrish Cox's petition to keep the affidavit in support of his arrest warrant on sexual assault charges sealed, has now poisoned his chance at getting a fair and unbiased jury. [More...]

Via CBS News:

President Obama on Friday signed a certification of Congress' repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy banning gay men and women from serving openly in the military, setting the stage for the Clinton-era policy to be formally abolished on September 20, 2011. The policy will not be formally abolished until September 20 because the legislation passed by Congress late last year requires a 60-day waiting period between the certification by Mr. Obama and military leaders and full repeal.

...Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen also certified that the military was prepared for repeal to be implemented.

[T]he point is that if you ask what Mitt Romney would probably be doing if he were in the White House and not trying desperately to convince his party that he shares its madness, it would look a lot like what Obama is doing [on the economy.]

There are, however, two crucial points to understand. First, Obama gets no credit for his moderation, and never will. [. . .] Second, moderate conservatism isn’t working as a policy matter. As I’ve tried to tell everyone from the beginning of the Lesser Depression, a deeply depressed economy in which monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound turns the normal rules of policy upside down. We’re in a world in which conventional prudence is folly, in which playing it safe is extremely risky. And we have, alas, a conventionally prudent, play-it-safe president — the kind of president who might have done fine in the 1990s, but not now.

(Emphasis supplied.) This. To put the point another way, Bill Clinton would likely have been a subpar President in these times. Unless he changed his policy tune. And in the end, politics follows policy success, especially on the economy. Yes, it's the economy, stupid.

Speaking for me only

Mohammed Wali Zazi, father of admitted terrorist Najibullah Zazi, was convicted by a federal jury in Brooklyn today of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of conspiring to obstruct justice by lying to investigators and the grand jury and destroying or hiding evidence to cover up his son's aborted plan to place bombs in the New York subway system.

The case featured the testimony of two other family members who pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the government to stave off stiff prison terms. They detailed the family's failure to acknowledge Zazi as a budding terrorist and its clumsy attempts to protect him once his plot fell apart.

The defense argued the two relatives of Zazi, who testified against him in exchange for leniency for their own participation, were lying. In the jury instructions they submitted to the Court, the defense argued the government did not accuse Mr. Zazi of destroying any physical evidence himself and conceded he was not even present during the alleged destruction. (They said the government’s theory was that Mr. Zazi aided and abetted others' destruction of physical evidence and that he wasn't guilty of aiding and abetting because Mr. Zazi did not share the specific intent of those who physically committed the crime.) [More..]