Mitt Romney supporter Donald Trump (The Donald is hosting a fundraiser for Romney tonight) still a birther (via Daily Kos):

Thank you Mitt Romney for giving me an excuse to ridicule Trump one more time.

Speaking for me only

A twofer for regular TL readers - some foreclosure and marijuana news all in one - NYTimes:

Organized marijuana growers are shifting to the suburbs from rural and commercial areas, helped by a housing crisis that created a glut of affordable, spacious houses and a stream of new residents to previously more stable communities. Houses that sold for $1 million before the crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to produce potent, high-quality marijuana.

The law of unintended consequences.

NYT book review of Caro's new LBJ book:

Southern Democrats were masters at bottling up legislation they hated, particularly bills expanding civil rights for black Americans. Their skills at obstruction were so admired that the newly sworn-in Johnson was firmly counseled by an ally against using the political capital he’d inherited as a result of the assassination on such a hopeless cause.

According to Caro, Johnson responded, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” This is the question every president must ask and answer.

The reviewer is William Jefferson Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States.

I'm going to annoy a few of my fellow lefties and say that we should stop getting bent out of shape when people respond to the Trustees report by saying that Social Security is "going bankrupt" or "running dry" or some similar formulation. There's a hyperlegalistic sense in which this isn't accurate, but honestly, it would be a helluva dramatic event if the trust fund ran out of money and Social Security suddenly had to slash benefits by 25% in 2033 (see chart above). Referring to this as "bankruptcy" isn't all that big a rhetorical stretch, and everyone on both left and right should put away their fainting couches, ditch all the tired excuses, and get to work on a fix that would involve — say it in unison, folks! — a very modest and phased-in cut in benefits combined with a very modest and phased-in increase in taxes.

(Emphasis supplied.) Actually it is more than a "rhetorical stretch." It's a lie. And not for "hyperlegalistic" reasons. Let me explain why I think so on the flip.

Discussing Rachel Maddow's book Drift, Kevin Drum writes:

Maddow decided to write a book about America and the way we use our military. Specifically: why is it so damn easy to go to war these days? [...] The book is, basically, a series of potted histories that explain how we drifted away from our post-Vietnam promise to make sure we never again went to war without the full backing and buy-in of the American public. [...] Maddow's premise is that, just as the founders intended, our aim was to make war hard. Presidents would need Congress on their side. The Abrams Doctrine ensured that reserves would have to be called up. Wars would no longer unfold almost accidentally, as Vietnam did.

Drum posits that George H.W. Bush changed all that. That is not historically accurate in my view. The times getting into war was not easy was after wars that had been very costly and not particularly successful from the US point of view. Think World War I and Vietnam. Otherwise, going to war has been one of the great American pasttimes. I'm all for making going to war hard, but the history does not demonstrate that, except for isolated periods, that was ever really the case in the United States.

Speaking for me only

Serious GOP VP contender Allen West has a list of 80 Communist Party members in the Democratic Caucus.

REP. ALLEN WEST (R-FL): I believe there's about 70, 80 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party [in the House of Representatives].

Hearkening to the good old days:

President Obama's evocation of Social Darwinism in describing the Paul Ryan budget proposal has led to some analysis of whether the use was apt. Paul Krugman's cleverly titled post Origins of Speciousness describes the polemica:

Unseemly:

In the escalating battle between the administration and the judiciary, a federal appeals court apparently is calling the president's bluff -- ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

The order, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, appears to be in direct response to the president's comments yesterday about the Supreme Court's review of the health care law. Mr. Obama all but threw down the gauntlet with the justices, saying he was "confident" the Court would not "take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

In case you were wondering, the President is officially a politician. Now we know that Republican judges are too.

Speaking for me only

Link:

“It’s entirely up to [Hillary Clinton],” Clinton told “Good Morning America” of ABC News. “I believe that she’s being absolutely honest with you when she says she doesn’t think she’ll go back into politics. But if she comes home and we do this foundation stuff for the rest of our lives, I’ll be happy; if she changes her mind and decides to run, I’ll be happy.”

As I have stated, I don't think it's optional from the Dem point of view -- she's our best hope to hold the White House (assuming President Obama wins reelection.)

Speaking for me only

Dick Cheney had a heart transplant today at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va. He's been on the list for 20 months.

Heads-Up: Comments calling for his demise will be deleted. It's bad form and probably bad karma.

Comments critical of his politics and actions as Vice President are fine, if expressed without name-calling.

The 2011 cost of a heart transplant is $1 million. Is 20 months a normal wait time? Here are the current guidelines for allocation of thoracic organs (heart and lungs.)

MoDo:

Hillary Clinton has fought for women’s rights around the world. But who would have dreamed that she would have to fight for them at home? “Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me,” she told an adoring crowd at the Women in the World Summit at Lincoln Center on Saturday. “But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. “Yes,” she continued to applause, “it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”

MoDo muses that the GOP War on Women will lead to a Hillary in 2016 campaign. I already predict that (and believe it will be extremely beneficial to the Dem Party), but if this is the rationale necessary for that, I'm good with that.

Speaking for me only

Ezra with the rote "there is no bully pulpit" stuff. Drum with a bit more thought. Digby nailing it:

Of course presidents can't really "persuade" people of the opposing party in a polarized environment, for all the reasons Ezra lays out in his piece. But I feel as if this whole argument is about doing something that nobody but President Obama, op-ed writers and some of his more fervent followers ever thought was possible in the first place. They're the only ones who believed that the Republicans were going to fall at his feet and work together in bipartisan harmony --- or that his magical powers of persuasion would create a groundswell of support among Independents and rank and file Republicans.

When progressives called for President Obama to make speeches it wasn't with the goal that he lift his poll numbers or get Mitch McConnell to sign on. Indeed, that's the opposite of what they wanted --- the "Grand Bargains" required to get such a deal are worse than nothing at all from their perspective. The reason they wanted him to make speeches was to mobilize his followers to help "persuade" their representatives to pass progressive legislation --- or even just reaffirm his commitment to shared goals and educate the public about what those goals are. The administration abandoned any notions of doing this shortly after the election[. . . .] But Ezra's piece reaffirms that this is the way major change happens in this environment, so you can't really blame the progressives for pushing it. That's what they wanted --- major change. And in a bit of an ironic surprise, Ezra demonstrated that in this case, the progressives were the pragmatic sorts calling for "what works" --- not the president.

See also my 8 million posts on the PPUS and the "Theory of Change."

Speaking for me only

Back in 2006, then Senator Obama decided to hand out advice to Democrats and liberals on "how to talk about religion". It was a textbook example of triangulation repackaged as the "post partisan unity schtick." It didn't work:

President Obama warned against "using religion as a bludgeon in politics," pushing back against critics who have accused him of waging a "war on religion" through recent policy decisions.

[. . .] "When we start using religion as a bludgeon in politics, we start questioning other people's faith, we start using religion to divide, instead of bring the country together, then I think we've got a problem," Obama told Des Moines's local NBC affiliate, Who TV. [. . .] Obama was responding to recent accusations that he is engaged in a "war on religion" through recent actions such as the contraception mandate.

No magic bullet for Obama on dealing with the Radical Right. It makes his 2006 speech all the more ridiculous now:

Don’t believe the accounts of HBO's movie Game Change that say the film humanizes Sarah Palin. The story line is exactly the opposite. Sarah Palin, as we all knew, was a desperate Hail Mary Pass by John McCain, completely unvetted and incompetent for the job of Vice President. The film confirms this. It also portrays her as ignorant beyond our wildest imagination and verging on mental illness, veering between bouts of catatonia, manic behavior and paranoia, coupled with having mini-meltdowns.

By all means watch it. Even though it confirms much of what we already knew, it still produces chills. Had McCain, then 72 years old, won the election, this woman would have been next in line to be President. My review is below [More...]

Kevin Drum considers whether fight from progressives might work:

If this is right, it's bad news for Bob, who's consistently argued against the Foxification of the left and for a tough but fundamentally factual approach to fighting the modern right. But Suzy is suggesting that although the key to success in Virginia was partly better organization, it was mostly about using more incendiary language. Likewise, in the case of Rush, the key to success had nothing to do with his odious point of view. It was all because we could highlight a single word — slut — that enraged people.

I don't know if this is correct. I'm just tossing it out for comment. But politics has always been about emotion, not cool logic, and maybe these two recent examples suggest that liberals are rediscovering that lesson. We'll see.

We'll see? We've SEEN. (To be fair, Kevin is asking whether Dems will remember this.) Fighting Dems and Fighting Progressives -standing up from a crouched posture, has always worked best. Kevin might want to revisit the debate on the "American Taliban".

Speaking for me only