The ravings published by Birther Central, World Net Daily, would not normally be worth even noting, but its craziness may have now reached a level of posing a public mental health emergency. Check out this lede from a “story” for WND by Joe Kovacs:

Medical examiners in Los Angeles are investigating the possible poisoning death of one of their own officials who may have worked on the case of Andrew Breitbart, the conservative firebrand who died March 1, the same day Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced probable cause for forgery in President Obama’s birth certificate.

Whoa! What does Breitbart’s death have to do with Arpaio? Oh, that’s easy:

The night before Breitbart died, WND senior staff reporter Jerome Corsi arranged for Breitbart to interview Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who the very next day held a news conference to announce there was probable cause to believe President Obama’s birth certificate released on April 27, 2011, was a forgery, as well as Obama’s Selective Service Card.

So the idea here is that the someone in or associated with the medical examiner’s office murdered a medical examiner who either covered up or was in a position to reveal the murder of Breitbart to keep him from alerting the world to Arpaio’s revelation of Obama’s “forged” birth certificate. The allegedly murdered medical examiner, BTW, “may” have been involved in the examination of Breitbart’s body, or may not have, but with so many conspiracies underway, why wait for confirmation?

I dunno. I think the logical chain of suspicion here may well lead to the conclusion that Barack Obama leaked damaging information about his past radical connections to Andew Breitbart to distract him from the crucial birth certificate issue. The plot could have been hatched even back when Obama was consorting with radical racialists at Harvard and the ghost of Saul Alinsky in Chicago in order to make himself appear to be an American communist instead of a foreign-born jihadist Muslim, throwing even the intrepid Breitbart off the scent, at least until the fateful interview he planned with Arpaio. Either way, Obama has a lot of blood on his hands, which patriots must avenge.

In a post last week on the dangerous legacy of Chuck Colson, I mentioned that one of his big projects was an effort, conducted in close conjunction with the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, to expand the relationship between Catholic “traditionalists” and conservative evangelicals beyond tactical cooperation in the fight against legalized abortion, feminism and gay rights into a full-blown alliance, up to and including a detente on ancient theological differences.

That led me into a meditation on the anomaly that this trans-confessional conservative alliance seemed to be displacing an earlier convergence between Catholics and mainline Protestants on doctrine and forms of worship—you know, those items that Christians have been fighting over for many centuries, and that gave rise to the Reformation in the first place—along with non-cultural social and political issues like poverty and war. I wrote this up in a column for TNR that some of you might find interesting. Here’s the conclusion:

All these cross-cutting trends and counter-trends in American (and global) Christianity call into question any glib arrangement of denominations, movements, or individuals as conservative or liberal, traditionalist or modernist. Neuhaus and Colson certainly had little doubt that what brought them together as culture-warriors was more important than any of the divergent ways their two Christian traditions have developed doctrinally in two millennia.

And for now, at least, the most powerful leaders among conservative evangelicals seem to agree with Colson. It’s too early to conclude that Neuhaus’s argument has won over the U.S. Catholic hierarchy for good—much less the many millions of Catholic lay people, priests and religious who have not enlisted in the culture wars. But if the recent alarms raised by the Bishops on “religious freedom”—complemented by the Vatican’s crackdown on non-compliant American nuns—are any indication, that’s the direction they seem to be headed. If so, they will stand against the mainline Protestants who increasingly find common ground with them at the altar and in the pews, if not on the cultural and political barricades.

Times are still pretty tough, particularly in the journalism biz, so I’m very pleased to pass along this job posting from the Washington Monthly:

The Washington Monthly is seeking applications for an editor/reporter position that will be available soon. Strong writing and thinking skills, a sense of humor, and a willingness to work long hours at low pay are required. A year or more experience in long-form journalism—either as a writer or editor—highly preferred. Knowledge of politics, government and Washington a plus.

As a Monthly editor, you’ll be following in the footsteps of many fine journalists who have had the same job, including: James Fallows, Nicholas Lemann, Jonathan Alter, Kate Boo, Matt Cooper, Jon Meacham,Taylor Branch, Amy Sullivan, Timothy Noah, James Bennet, Joshua Green, Michelle Cottle, Gregg Easterbrook, David Ignatius, Nick Confessore, Joe Nocera, Steven Waldman, Jason DeParle and many more.

Candidates should send a cover letter, résumé, and writing samples (not necessarily published, but showing fact-gathering and analytic ability) and at least two story ideas appropriate for our publication to: careers@washingtonmonthly.com.

The two distinct but interrelated flaps about the killing of Osama bin Laden that are consuming much oxygen today are: (1) Can the president take credit for an operation planned and executed by military and intelligence personnel? and (2) Is it fair for the Obama campaign to quote Mitt Romney’s 2007 statements suggesing the pursuit of bin Laden was a poor allocation of resources to suggest he would not have pulled the trigger on the operation?

On the first point, the one thing that should be abundantly clear is that Romney and his supporters have no standing to complain about Obama taking credit for anything until such time as they stop holding him responsible for every sparrow that has fallen to the ground from the moment he took the oath of office (or even before then, if you listen to the bizarre claims that employers stopped hiring on Election Day of 2008 because they were fearful of the socialism headed their way). If the November election is indeed to become, as conservatives keep telling us, a national temperature reading on American life in general, then any development that warms the body politic should be fair game for Obama.

On the second point, Romney said something he shouldn’t have about Osama bin Laden in 2007, and as Josh Marshall pointed out today, he was really just aping the Bush administration’s line aimed at tamping down criticism that it hadn’t managed to take out Osama even as it was so abundantly squandering lives and treasure in Iraq. Still, he said it, and no one held a gun to his head to make sure he did. Sure, that’s not the same as knowing that Romney would have cancelled any effort to pursue Osama, much less canceled an operation to kill him. But again: is the Romney campaign going to foreswear attack ads that don’t go out of their way to offer pros and cons to this or that available critique of the incumbent? Of course not. Romney supplied the Obama campaign with the raw material for an attack line; it’s Mitt’s job to defend himself, and not to whine about having to do so.

All in all, Romney may regret carrying on an extended debate on this subject, which just reminds people who was president when the opportunity came to capture or kill America’s Most Wanted Man.

I’m a bit late to this particular party, since I didn’t blog over the weekend. But yes indeed, as Mark Kleiman notes at Ten Miles Square, the WaPo op-ed by DC think tank icons Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein concluding that “Republicans are the problem” with respect to partisan polarization and gridlock in U.S. politics.

It’s no clear if “courage” is the right word to describe the appearance of this op-ed, given the unassailable position of these two gents in the Washington commentariat (though I doubt Ornstein is going to get invited to many American Enterprise Institute social gatherings any time soon). But still, I’m sure every fiber in their beings resisted the conclusion they reached. Aside from considerations of “professional safety” (one of the motives they ascribe to the press in deploring the “balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon”), it’s very easy to elevate occasional evidence of Democratic overreaching or partisanship into a false equivalence posture, and also to confuse cause with effect, and polarization with counter-polarization.

I don’t know if the tipping point for Mann and Ornstein was the empirical evidence for “asymettrical” conservative polarization they cite, the long-standing nature of the asymmetry (which they appear to date to Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution”), or simply the smoking gun of someone like Allen West being treated as a respected figure in the GOP. For someone like Mann, in particular, who is interested in the history of relations between the executive and legislative branches, an alarm bell may have gone off when congressional Republicans radically escalated the use of the filibuster and other procedural obstacles to governing, and the media promptly treated the new dispensation (as the op-ed notes) as un-newsworthy.

In any event, the less-than-optimistic tone of the piece is sobering:

Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Only voters, they suggest, can rein in an “insurgent outlier party” like today’s GOP. And even then, it may take time. Mann and Ornstein do not observe that two straight landslide election defeats immediately preceded the GOP’s most emphatic lurch to the Right. But I’m sure that counter-intuitive development was as surprising to them as it was to, say, Jon Hunstman, who returned from China after a brief absence to run for president and discovered he couldn’t even recognize his own party.

Mann and Ornstein seem unable to recognize anything quite like this situation, either. And I can certainly relate. I don’t really enjoy fulminating every day against most of the champions of one of America’s two great political parties as though they represent not just fellow-citizens with misguided views or a different vision of the national interest, but people inhabitating a fever swamp of extremism, mendacity and venality. But we are where we are, and there’s not much non-Republicans can do about it other than to do our small part to ensure that their delusions don’t become our waking reality.

Very slow news day finally beginning to generate something other than conservatives shrieking about Twitter conspiracies. Here’s some stuff from the chafing dishes:

* Chuck Colson may be dead, but Watergate media coverage still making news.

* At TAP Barry Yeoman cuts through the hype and examines real—and fragile—recovery of Detroit.

* Occupy Wall Street promises a lively May Day.

* Weigel reports that Libertarians will nominate Garry Johnson/Jim Gray ticket at convention this weekend.

* Sara Robinson examines the myth of the self-made man.

And in non-political news:

* College Guide’s Daniel Luzer mulls long-anticipated advent of college football playoffs.

Back after some non-PA busy work.

And speaking of the states, anyone interested in politics at all should read Michael Shear’s rundown in the New York Times about the Obama campaign’s plans for counteracting the effects of new voter ID laws and other elements of the GOP’s ongoing “war on voting.” It’s in theory a Plan B, since many of these laws are being challenged in the courts. But given the tendency of the courts to give states considerable leeway in this area, it’s a Plan B that we might as well expect to be executed.

Here’s a taste of what the Obama ops are dealing with in three battleground states:

In Wisconsin, where a new state law requires those registering voters to be deputized in whichever of the state’s 1,800 municipalities they are assigned to, the campaign sent a team of trainers armed with instructions for complying with the new regulations.

In Florida, the campaign’s voter registration aides traveled across the state to train volunteers on a new requirement that voter registration signatures be handed in to state officials within 48 hours after they are collected.

And in Ohio, Mr. Obama’s staff members have begun reaching out to let voters know about new laws that discourage precinct workers from telling voters where to go if they show up at the wrong precinct.

And these issues are just the tip of the iceberg, with restrictions on early voting opportunities, fights over the voting rights of ex-felons, funding shortages (real or contrived) for election administration all in play. That’s before, of course, we even get to the usual last-minute shenanigans—registration list “purges,” last-minute changes in polling places, voter disinformation and intimidation schemes—Republicans have routinely deployed in recent elections to keep down the vote, particularly in minority precincts.

We keep hearing that the Obama campaign’s ace-in-the-whole this year is its heavy investment in field infrastructure, especially as compared to a late-starting Romney campaign heavily reliant on Super-PAC funding mostly earmarked for attack ads. Looks like they will need every bit of it.

Zachery Goldfarb of WaPo has an important article today on the element of national economic policy that many in the chattering classes happily and consistently ignore: the forced austerity policies of state and local governments. The raw numbers really are pretty shocking:

Today, as Obama seeks another term, the heavy job losses at the state and local level remain a significant economic concern. His response at different moments underscores how the president has sometimes fought hard against the political odds for policies he thinks crucial and at other times relented when the chances of success seemed low.

Since the beginning of his term, state and local governments have shed 611,000 employees — including 196,000 educators — according to government statistics. Unlike the recovery in private-sector employment that Obama and his reelection campaign often cite — with businesses adding 4 million jobs since hiring hit its low point in 2010 — the jobs crisis at the state and local level has continued throughout his term.

And that’s just the negative impact on jobs attributable to direct hiring and firing by state and local governments: not the indirect effect of cutbacks in the services these former employees used to provide, much less cutbacks in the counter-cyclical programs offering financial assistance to people struggling with a poor economy, which, in our system, are largely administered by the states.

Most of Goldfarb’s piece is about the on-again, off-again, focus of the Obama administration on assistance to state and local government to offset or prevent employment reductions, particularly in education. He attributes most of the “off-again” tendencies to opposition from congressional Republicans. That is entirely true, insofar as Republicans these days (even at the non-federal level) habitually refer to federal aid to state and local governments as if it were some form of welfare or “bail-out” rather than an effort to contribute to shared public responsibilities.

But there is a more pervasive tendency in Washington simply to treat lower levels of government as provicincial bailiwicks not much worth talking about unless they are sponsoring presidential primaries or casting electorate votes or maybe reshaping congressional districts. During the lengthy debate over economic stimulus proposals in 2009, you could be relatively well-read and never know that the bulk of “state and local aid” in the Obama proposal was for a Medicaid “super-match” aimed (with only mixed success) at keeping states from slashing benefits or eligibility precisely when the ranks of the un- and under-employed were most likely to lose health insurance. To this day discussions of ObamaCare often omit any but a footnoted reference to the role of an expanded Medicaid program in extending health care to the previously uninsured.

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I’d bet Jonathan Chait is cursing his bad luck at having finished writing his essay on “The Legendary Paul Ryan” before this Jonathan Weisman piece appeared in the New York Times, featuring the following lede:

Representative Paul D. Ryan strolls the halls of Capitol Hill with the anarchist band Rage Against the Machine pounding through his earbuds.

At 6:30 every morning, he leads an adoring cast of young, conservative members of Congress through exercise sessions in front of a televised trainer barking out orders. For fun, Mr. Ryan noodles catfish, catching them barehanded with a fist down their throats.

He may be, as a friend described him, “a hunting-obsessed gym rat,” but Mr. Ryan, 42, of Wisconsin, has become perhaps the most influential policy maker in the Republican Party, its de facto head of economic policy, intent on a fundamental transformation of the federal government.

Wow. Half-Wonk, Half-Jock. Half-Objectivist, Half-Catholic. Half-Punk, Half-Wall Street. Paul Ryan is like a projected fantasy of what every high school Young Republican wants to be when he grows up. No wonder GOPers and reporters alike are writing his name all over their notebooks.

There are lots of reasons to read Jonathan Chait’s thorough demolition of “The Legendary Paul Ryan” at New York. It offers a good, bracing reminder that Ryan is far-and-away the most important GOP politician at the moment, a man to whom Mitt Romney has largely deferred in crafting an agenda for his own administration, if he has one. It explores Ryan’s media celebrity, and particularly his appeal to Very Serious “centrist” deficit hawks. It mocks his Super-Wonk image, and his pose as a brave enemy of wasteful spending wherever it can be found.

But for my money, the most important service Chait provides in this article is to document Ryan’s roots in the sub-wing of the conservative movement famous for not giving a damn about federal budget deficits, the original supply-siders led by Ryan’s own idol Jack Kemp. These were people who were horrified by what they called the “root canal” spending cuts endlessly promoted by traditional conservatives obsessed with “green-eyeshade” budget-balancing. Ryan was prominent among those who carried this tradition into a new millenium:

Ryan has, retroactively, depicted himself as a dissenter from the fiscal profligacy of the Bush administration, and reporters have mostly accepted his account at face value. (“Ryan watched his party’s leadership inflate the deficit by cutting tax rates like Kemp conservatives while spending like Kardashians,” wrote Time last year.) In reality, Ryan was a staunch ally in Bush’s profligacy, dissenting only to urge Bush to jack up the deficit even more.

“We noticed that the green-eyeshade, austerity wing of the party was afraid of class warfare,” Ryan said during Bush’s first term. “They fear increases in the debt, and they were overlooking issues of growth, opportunity, and free markets.” For those uninitiated in the tribal lingo of Beltway conservatives, this may sound like gibberish. But those inside the conservative subculture invest these buzzwords with deep meaning. “Green eyeshade” is a term of abuse appropriated by the supply-siders to describe Republicans who still cared more about deficit control than cutting taxes. “Growth” and “opportunity” mean tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich, and “class warfare” means any criticism thereof. Ryan’s centrist admirers hear his frequent confessions that both parties have failed as an ideological concession. What he means is that Republicans were insufficiently fanatical in their devotion to cutting taxes for the rich….

In 2001, Ryan led a coterie of conservatives who complained that George W. Bush’s $1.2 trillion tax cut was too small, and too focused on the middle class. In 2003, he lobbied Republicans to pass Bush’s deficit-­financed prescription-drug benefit, which bestowed huge profits on the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. In 2005, when Bush campaigned to introduce private accounts into Social Security, Ryan fervently crusaded for the concept. He was the sponsor in the House of a bill to create new private accounts funded entirely by borrowing, with no benefit cuts. Ryan’s plan was so staggeringly profligate, entailing more than $2 trillion in new debt over the first decade alone, that even the Bush administration opposed it as “irresponsible.”

The important thing to grasp here is that for all the talk about Paul Ryan being the “adult in the room” who understands the “tough choices” needed to confront the “debt crisis,” everything we know about him suggests that fiscal probity is at best a third-order motive for his proposals to decimate the social safety net. More important to him is that the spending cuts he supports are necessary to finance still more regressive tax cuts, and furthermore, are positive social measures in and of themselves. Like the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold, a character in Ryan’s favorite book Atlas Shrugged, who sinks aid ships as a moral gesture aimed at the “looting” of the successful, Ryan would object to safety net programs even if the federal budget was in surplus:

“It is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or the health-care plan doesn’t work for this or that policy reason,” Ryan said in 2009. “It is the morality of what is occurring right now, and how it offends the morality of individuals working toward their own free will to produce, to achieve, to succeed, that is under attack, and it is that what I think Ayn Rand would be commenting on.” Ryan’s philosophical opposition to a government that forces the “makers” to subsidize the “takers”—terms he still employs—is foundational; the policy details are secondary.

This is the sort of talk that gets Ryan regularly in trouble (most notably with the Bishops of his own Catholic Church), which is an indication of how strongly he must believe in it. Yet he manages to maintain his fiscal-hawk street cred and his reputation for gravitas despite all the indications that he’d triple the deficit if necessary to cut taxes for the wealthy and remains in the grip of a philosophy that treats Medicaid beneficiaries as thieves who are morally debasing themselves. It’s quite a crowning achievement.

At church yesterday, about five different people came up to me and asked if I had watched the White House Correspondents’ Dinner the night before. Since all of these people had watched some or all of it, I didn’t think it was charitable to answer: “I’d rather watch paint dry,” or “This event is why they say politics is show business for ugly people.”

I do recall, though, that when I lived in Washington, people not only watched this event religiously, but went to a lot of trouble to get themselves invited to attend in person. And yes, there are even “before” and “after” parties, and something of a red carpet, just like in Hollywood. I suppose every industry, even political journalism, needs its little rituals. But these days the actual industry—which is more like a gang of freelance bookies taking bets on a mud-wrestling match—is so remote from the convivial spectacle of the WHCD that it’s like watching Mad Men as performed in a mental institution where everyone thinks it is 1966.

In any event, if, like me, you missed the Big Night in the Emerald City, you can read a brisk L.A. Times account of the night’s best jokes. Walter Shapiro has a nice TNR column on the evolution, or devolution, of the event, which he didn’t bother to attend this year either, calling it the “Nerd Prom.”

Today we have a video featuring those darlings of the English Electric Folk Movement, Steeleye Span, performing the traditional tune “Lark in the Morning” at an Ainsdale Beach festival in 1971. It features hazy camera work and a sleepy or stoned crowd, but also a fine Maddy Prior/Tim Hart vocal duet with Peter Knight on fiddle.

NEW BOOK SHOWS BIN LADEN WAS A WILD SEX MACHINE WHO LOVED TO PLEASE THE LADIES.

This writing in this story has to be experienced to be believed. It is as perfect a specimen of tabloidese as you’re ever likely to read. Sample sentence:

Bin Laden was also a big fan of caffeinated colas, which probably allowed him to keep up his energy as he made sweet love to his many ladies all night.

I realize this stuff is as likely to be part of a disinformation campaign as it is to be fact, but I for one sure hope this part is true:

Bin Laden also reportedly used Just for Men hair dye to keep his greying beard black, presumably to make the ladies happy.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

— John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, (1935)

Dani Rodrik, who’s one of the more thoughtful economists out there, has written an interesting piece about the meaning of self-interest. We often write about self-interest as if it were something innate and self-evident, but it’s not so simple. Rodrik writes:

Interests are not fixed or predetermined. They are themselves shaped by ideas - beliefs about who we are, what we are trying to achieve, and how the world works. Our perceptions of self-interest are always filtered through the lens of ideas.

He argues that self-interest can take many different forms:

Consider a struggling firm that is trying to improve its competitive position. One strategy is to lay off some workers and outsource production to cheaper locations in Asia. Alternatively, the firm can invest in skills training and build a more productive workforce with greater loyalty and hence lower turnover costs. It can compete on price or on quality.

The mere fact that the firm’s owners are self-interested tells us little about which of these strategies will be followed. What ultimately determines the firm’s choice is a whole series of subjective evaluations of the likelihood of different scenarios, alongside a calculation of their costs and benefits.

Rodrik puts his finger on one of my major beefs with the economics profession. Most American economists don’t have anything like Rodrik’s nuanced understanding of self-interest. To them, self-interest equals utility maximization, and utility maximization basically means accumulating as much wealth as possible, and the only way to achieve that on a large scale is through low taxes, a radically diminished public sector, and heavily deregulated markets.

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