Gotta say, the endless profusion of concern-troll “advice” to President Obama from Republicans is beginning to fascinate as well as baffle me. I mean, here’s this man whom they’ve demonized from the day he was elected, relentlessly calling him a crypto-Marxist who hates the private sector and religion, and is seeking to bribe and steal his way to re-election, and also a buffoon who got through life as an affirmative action baby and couldn’t find his own butt with both hands. Yet they somehow appear to believe he is going to (a) take their advice to (b) change everything he’s saying and doing.

The latest concern troll is the often-wrong, never-in-doubt lifetime achievement award winner, William Kristol, who has a long Weekly Standard post telling Obama in detail what to do to win re-election. He identifies five major “problems” Obama is facing. Four of them can be boiled down to: he is not governing and campaigning as a Republican (you know, supporting permanency of the Bush tax cuts, abandoning “class warfare” rhetoric and criticism of Republicans, yadda yadda). The fifth, and I love the way it is formulated, is that Obama has “[t]urned his most leftwing backers into heroin addicts in terms of the demands they are making on him.” In other words, his base is disgruntled (never mind his current 89% job approval rating from self-identified “liberal Democrats,” according to Gallup), and it’s all Obama’s fault.

Kristol offers Obama six things he could do to turn things around. Three involve governing and campaigning more like a Republican. Two require big mea culpa firings (of “senior campaign aides” and of the Vice President). And one is composed of cheerleading for the eurozone, which is presumably what Kristol would expect a President Romney to do.

Maybe the whole idea here is simply to encourage scenarios where Obama either loses or helps move the entire political system to the right—which again, makes no sense if you are simultaneously describing him as hellbent on erecting a dictatorship of the proletariat. Or maybe people like Kristol are pulling an even dumber stunt by offering Obama advice they know he won’t take so that they can then encourage the “objective” parts of the MSM to describe him as blindly following a sure political death spiral. I really don’t know.

But I sure don’t see any Democrats wasting time offering Mitt Romney constant advice to abandon his many promises to conservative activists. If anything, they’d prefer he be more honest about his agenda instead of complaining about “distractions” any time his own plans as president are mentioned, as though it’s unfair to compare the two candidates instead of treating the election as a up-or-down referendum on the performance of the economy under Obama.

Matt Yglesias noted earlier that not only did Steve Jobs admit to using LSD, he actually was quite effusive about it even in his interviews with the Pentagon for a security clearance, saying it was “a positive life-changing experience.”

This isn’t a novel observation, but regardless of what you think of drugs generally or LSD specifically it should be very disturbing that wealthy, high-status people can get away with this sort of thing scot-free. There are lots of superficially funny stories about a young Obama smoking pot with his friends, while in New York City more than fifty thousand people were arrested in 2011 for marijuana possession alone. (Governor Cuomo, to his credit, is seeking to change that.)

When this sort of unpunished lawbreaking is common among the ruling class, it’s indicative of a loss of accountability, and people shouldn’t take it lying down. Someone should be asking Obama if he’d been better off arrested, or if the country would have been better off if Steve Jobs had been arrested or jailed for his LSD use.

Darwin, via

Kevin Drum isn’t happy with the latest talk around the long-running evolution belief survey, and people wringing their hands over the fact that nearly half of American’s espouse a recent creationism view when it comes to humankind:

Come on. This 46% number has barely budged over the past three decades, and I’m willing to bet it was at least as high back in the 50s and early 60s, that supposed golden age of comity and bipartisanship. It simply has nothing to do with whether we can all get along and nothing to do with whether we can construct a civil discourse.

The fact is that belief in evolution has virtually no real-life impact on anything. That’s why 46% of the country can safely choose not to believe it: their lack of belief has precisely zero effect on their lives. Sure, it’s a handy way of saying that they’re God-fearing Christians — a “cultural signifier,” as Andrew puts it — but our lives are jam-packed with cultural signifiers. This is just one of thousands, one whose importance probably barely cracks America’s top 100 list.

And the reason it doesn’t is that even creationists don’t take their own views seriously. How do I know this? Well, creationists like to fight over whether we should teach evolution in high school, but they never go much beyond that. Nobody wants to remove it from university biology departments. Nobody wants to shut down actual medical research that depends on the workings of evolution. In short, almost nobody wants to fight evolution except at the purely symbolic level of high school curricula, the one place where it barely matters in the first place. The dirty truth is that a 10th grade knowledge of evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology.

I think this goes too far. For starters, saying evolution adds only slightly to a 10th grade understanding of biology is to say that there is no 10th grade understanding of biology, at all. Evolution is the single most important concept in biology, the idea that changed it from a random collection of facts to a real scientific discipline. Biology without evolution is akin to physics without math, and denying it is akin to denying heliocentrism.

Furthermore, I say a lack of wide understanding of evolution is hurting the country, most obviously in the form of antibiotic resistance. Industrial feedlots grow their animals stewed in powerful antibiotics to shave their operating costs, which is leading to bacteria evolving past them and resistant infections cropping up in humans. It’s a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, which are tough to overcome in any case, but an understanding of evolution makes the situation immediately and alarmingly obvious, while disbelief can cloud the situation. Witness hack “scientists” at Liberty University, who publish work quibbling with the details of the evidence and thereby muddy the conversation. I’m not saying that’s the only factor, but surely if 80 percent of the country had a strong understanding of evolution, it would be easier to horsewhip the FDA into outlawing antibiotic use in non-sick animals.

More fundamentally, science denial in general is growing like gangbusters on the right, most obviously with respect to climate change. All the denier techniques now in common use among people like Jim DeMint—hysterical accusations, the fog of bogus but science-y sounding data, incessant TV appearances of the few deniers with actual credentials, taking things out of context, character assassination, repetition of debunked talking points, etc.—all these were perfected in the trenches of the evolution-creationism wars. It’s no accident that global warming denial found such fertile ground on the right.

US Constitution, Article I, Section 9: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Back in 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which abolished habeas corpus rights for noncitizens, among other things. This part of the law was overturned in 2008 by the Supreme Court in Boumedine vs. Bush as unconstitutional.

Today, it looks like the Supreme Court gave up on that line of reasoning. Marcy Wheeler reports:

SCOTUS has just declined to take all seven of the pending Gitmo habeas corpus petitions, including Latif and Uthman.

This effectively kills habeas corpus.

The problem here, as Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer puts it, is that the “conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit have interpreted the law in a way that assumes many of the government’s claims are true and don’t have to be proven in court.” Or as the Center for Constitutional Rights puts it:

Today’s decision leaves the fate of detainees in the hands of a hostile D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has erected innumerable, unjustified legal obstacles that have made it practically impossible for a detainee to win a habeas case in the trial courts. The D.C. Circuit, the country’s most conservative court of appeals, has reversed every detainee victory appealed to it by the government, and as consequence, district courts in D.C. have ruled in favor of detainees in only one of the last 12 cases before them.

Over at the American Prospect, Scott Lemieux speculates on how a six-vote coalition (only four votes are needed to ensure a case is heard) might have arisen to deny the cases, and comes to a grim conclusion: “Either way, as of now Boumediene has essentially be reduced to an empty shell, holding out a promise of constitutional protections the federal judiciary has no intention of actually fulfilling.”

Wheeler gives some examples of just what this means:

Consider what SCOTUS just blessed:

• Holding a person indefinitely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time-including a school, a road, and a guest house-where suspect people are.
• Holding a person indefinitely based on an admittedly error-ridden report the government wrote up itself.
• Holding a person indefinitely based on pattern analysis.
• Completely upending the role of District Court judges in the fact-finding process

Duly noted.

Some tidbits from around the web:

1. Very sharp look from Matt Yglesias on the strategy of the coming tax debates. Often the operational tactics are more important than “messaging.” Democrats can be surprisingly thick on this point.

2. What’s it like to get shot in the head? (ht Tyler Cowen)

3. Is regulatory sclerosis impeding innovation?

4. Is China a kleptocracy?

5. ICYMI, check out our review of Chris Hayes’ excellent new book.

6. Daniel Luzer looks at the new panicky reports on students who use amphetamine for studying.

Back in a flash. Did I miss anything?

One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed recently is impeccably-credentialed elites who basically agree with Chris Hayes’ new book (make sure to catch our review) about the institutional crisis we are facing, and their use of what would normally be called “hysterical” or “unserious” language to describe it. For example, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, of Brookings and AEI respectively, who are usually usually paragons of boring, calm DC consensus, wrote an amazingly blunt op-ed in the Post (based on their similarly blunt book):

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

(In case you’re not familiar with those two, try to imagine Mr. Rogers lambasting corruption on Sesame Street.)

The latest example of this kind of language comes from Richard Posner, an appeals court judge and Chicago law professor with a gold-plated CV:

The institutional structure of the United States is under stress. We might be in dangerous economic straits if the dollar were not the principal international reserve currency and the eurozone in deep fiscal trouble. We have a huge public debt, dangerously neglected infrastructure, a greatly overextended system of criminal punishment, a seeming inability to come to grips with grave environmental problems such as global warming, a very costly but inadequate educational system, unsound immigration policies, an embarrassing obesity epidemic, an excessively costly health care system, a possible rise in structural unemployment, fiscal crises in state and local governments, a screwed-up tax system, a dysfunctional patent system, and growing economic inequality that may soon create serious social tensions.

A notable characteristic of failed states is a bone-deep cynicism about officials, politicians, and institutions. No one in the DRC would say something like Mr. Posner, because everyone knows that of course everything is broken and top leaders are corrupt. An underrated buffer against this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is incubating a sense of civil responsibility and public virtue, which is surely part of what motivates people like Posner, Mann, and Ornstein to speak up. It’s time for more elites who see what is happening to do the same.

Probably the most stress-inducing sentence I’ve ever read comes from the Boston Globe, in an interview with Paul Krugman:

BOOKS: What do you read for work?

KRUGMAN: I start each morning with The New York Times, The Financial Times, some financial news sites, and a select list of economic blogs. They have really flourished. The economic disaster has been really good for analysis.

BOOKS: Which of those blogs would you recommend for a general reader?

KRUGMAN: The Economist’s View, a blog that is really an omnibus with a lot of selections worth reading. The Washington Monthly’s blog is a good way to keep your finger on what’s happening.

I imagine that’s like guest writing for a little hip-hop blog and finding out that Jay-Z reads your stuff. Tachycardia time!

But we must be doing something right (and by we I mean the Monthly editors, and Ed Kilgore, and Steve Benen before him, and Kevin Drum before him). Will you kick in a few bucks to help us stick around?

The big news today is the €100 billion bailout that the European Central Bank sent the way of tottering Spanish banks. Matt Yglesias says this is a big step forward:

The key point is that though Spain will still have to abide by its existing austerity-oriented fiscal commitments, there are no new strings attached in terms of supervision of Spanish fiscal policy by Brussels, Frankfurt, or Berlin. That’s contrary to the precedent set in the earlier bailouts of Ireland, Greece, and Portugal and contrary to commitments made previously by Angela Merkel and the leaders of some of the smaller European countries when they created the bailout funds that are being used…

On the other hand, Paul Krugman is a bit more skeptical:

So there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this latest bailout (although a lot depends on the details). What’s striking, however, is that even as European leaders were putting together this rescue, they were signaling strongly that they have no intention of changing the policies that have left almost a quarter of Spain’s workers — and more than half its young people — jobless.

He notes also that the market for Spanish bonds is still moving the wrong direction. Similarly, Duncan Black points out that this bailout will be added to Spain’s national debt (about 10% of GDP), and that for $100 billion you could give hire half of Spain’s unemployed for a year at 34,000 euros. Wolfgang Münchau agrees, saying “The eurozone must recognise that some form of debt relief, or default, will be inevitable.”

Whenever something like this happens, I’m always reminded of this terrifying Steve Randy Waldman post. I can’t quite believe it in full but the world is doing its best to convince me otherwise:

…the preferences of developed, aging polities — first Japan, now the United States and Europe — are obvious to a dispassionate observer. Their overwhelming priority is to protect the purchasing power of incumbent creditors. That’s it. That’s everything. All other considerations are secondary. These preferences are reflected in what the polities do, how they behave. They swoop in with incredible speed and force to bail out the financial sectors in which creditors are invested, trampling over prior norms and laws as necessary. The same preferences are reflected in what the polities omit to do. They do not pursue monetary policy with sufficient force to ensure expenditure growth even at risk of inflation. They do not purse fiscal policy with sufficient force to ensure employment even at risk of inflation. They remain forever vigilant that neither monetary ease nor fiscal profligacy engender inflation. The tepid policy experiments that are occasionally embarked upon they sabotage at the very first hint of inflation. The purchasing power of holders of nominal debt must not be put at risk. That is the overriding preference, in context of which observed behavior is rational.

If that is indeed their preference in the Eurozone, it might be the end of them. Brad Plumer observes today that the bailout calmed the markets…for precisely four hours and 40 minutes.

Speaking of fevers, today’s media news is that Glenn Beck has inked a new five-year deal to continue his syndicated radio show, which continues to rank third behind Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in terms of total estimated listeners. Clearly this supreme crackpot (an archaic but apt term for Beck) and his paymasters see nothing on the horizon that would diminish the demand for his peculiar brand of paranoid hysteria, which involves an unusually intensive effort to rewrite American history to his specifications. Yes, he got booted from Fox News, but his ravings are never far from the fingertips of anyone traversing the highways and biways of our nation.

Ryan Lizza seems to have decided to publish the first big thumb-sucker on Barack Obama’s hypothetical second term, and there’s some interesting (if questionably relevant) material about previous presidential second acts. But for the moment, what I found striking is Obama’s frequent references to the possibility that a 2012 defeat might change the Republican Party from its current direction of hyper-polarization, 1964-style reactionary messianism, and paranoia. The term he uses with Lizza (as elsewhere) is that “the fever may break.”

While the clinical term is entirely appropriate, I do wonder if Obama really believes it. After all, the current “fever” was the direct product of two consecutive landslide Republican defeats in 2006 and 2008. It was, to put it mildly, counter-intuitive for the entire GOP to conclude that its defeats were the result of its movement-conservative 43d president “betraying his conservative principles,’ particularly since his own second-term plunge in popularity closely followed two Bush administration initiatives—the stubborn pursuit of the Iraq War, and his aborted Social Security privatization gambit—that conservatives strongly supported, and another incident (W.’s languid reaction to Katrina) that reflected their “individual responsibility” attitude towards Americans-particularly poor and minority Americans—in misfortune.

So how would Republicans react to, say, a narrow Obama win? Blame it on the RINO Romney? Discover another “voter fraud”-driven “stolen election?” Conclude their congressional leaders were too friendly to the secular-socialist president? The very fact that we can legitimately ask these questions is a pretty good indication it’s not so clear the fever would in fact break.

For every open reactionary who pines for the restoration of the Good Old Days before uppity women and minorities ruined the greatest country the world ever knew, there is a figure who tries to recast the politics and economics of the distant past as the wave of a brave, innovative, future—almost hip. This seems to be Mitch Daniels’ particular thing:

On the heels of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s history-making recall victory, the governor of nearby Indiana with his own record of curtailing union benefits suggested public-sector unions are past their prime and should be abolished.

“I think, really, government works better without them,” Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told “Fox News Sunday,” when asked whether public-worker unions should even exist.

Yeah, all that job security and benefit stuff, certainly pensions, maybe even “retirement,” is so old-think. At the 2011 CPAC conference, at which Daniels was rapturously received despite the deep offense he had caused the Christian Right by proposing a “truce” on social issues while the urgent work of fiscal retrenchment could be consummated, Mitch came right out and said the New Deal and Great Society programs were obsolete and needed to be discarded in favor of something new and less safety-nettish:

If freedom’s best friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow citizens, big change will not come….

We know what the basic elements must be. An affectionate thank you to the major social welfare programs of the last century, but their sunsetting when those currently or soon to be enrolled have passed off the scene.

“Affectionate thank you.” Yeah, Social Security and Medicare were fun while they lasted, kind of like handshake deals and dollar lunch specials and home visits by doctors. But no one could seriously think they’d work in this day and age, right? So shredding the safety net in order to give “job creators” lower tax rates and labor costs and more flexible, nimble business structures conducive to the knowledge-based global economy blah blah is what’s obviously necessary to keep up with never-ending change. And we sure don’t need any sclerotic, industrial-age unions around to resist change, particularly in the public sector, which needs to be the handmaiden of the fast-paced blah blah entrepreneurs who are peeking around corners to adapt our nation to its future global leadership role while the rest of us poor dumb cattle mosey along blindly, dependent on their bold genius, right?

I personally prefer my reactionaries to be in the Jim DeMint mode, just blatantly dripping with resentment of anything and anyone that’s not just like him. But if Republicans win control of Congress and the White House this November and the Ryan Budget is enacted and we do begin to say our affectionate goodbyes to all that egalitarian nonsense of the twentieth century, we’ll hear a lot more from the likes of Mitch Daniels, who’ll comfort us that it’s all a matter of keeping the country strictly up to date.

A bit of new wave anti-authoritarian patriotism for a rainy Monday morning, with Devo performing “Freedom of Choice” in Dallas in 2009.

Yesterday Ryan commented on the oddly anachronistic New York Times op-ed by Steve Almond advancing the tired idea that if liberals would ignore wingnuts they’d go away and we’d rediscover our own positive agenda via civil discussion with reasonble conservatives.

Ryan’s point of emphasis was that ignoring The Crazy had never done any good, while fighting it actually has. I agree, but want to make a different and more fundamental point: we really are getting down to points of disagreement between the nation’s two major political parties and two prevailing political ideologies that can’t be reduced to matters of taste, emphasis, background or calculation. I just wrote scathingly about a column on reproductive rights by Ross Douthat. Unlike, I suspect, some readers, I don’t think Ross is stupid or crazy. I’ve met him, been on a panel with him, and on some limited topics, I can talk with him reasonably with the possibility of his or my own mind changing. But Ross believes pretty strongly that legalized abortion is a moral horror of the highest order. I think returning to the days when abortion was illegal would be a moral horror of the highest order. If he and I were somehow placed in charge of setting abortion policy for America (and I bridle at the very idea of any man being so empowered), we could compromise, I suppose, but the battle between his idea that I’m more or less a “good German” in the service of unmitigaged evil and my idea that he’s confusing the way things used to be with God’s Will would not go away. Eventually, he’d try to deny me any power over this subject, and I’d do the same. It’s what Seward called an “irrepressible conflict,” and like it or not, our politics are presently loaded with such conflicts.

To put it another way: Paul Ryan is not as crude as Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, or as hammer-headed as Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. But he has a moral and social vision of the country’s future that I find deeply and fundamentally offensive. And best as I can tell, the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, whatever he actually believes deep down in his soul, has outsourced the most basic domestic policies of the administration he hopes to lead to Paul Ryan, and to people like Jim DeMint who reminds me in every utterance of everything about my home region I had hoped and prayed we had overcome a long, long time ago. And here’s one more example: yes, I find Sarah Palin’s style of politics maddening, her whole belligerent-martyr shtick and her fact-free treatment of issues pathological and dangerous. But much as it freaks me out that she is capable of breezily making up an outrageous lie like the “death panels” smear about ObamaCare and casually disseminating it via Facebook, it freaks me out even more that it’s become gospel truth to millions and millions of Americans and thousands of Republican politicians, because it accords with their general understanding of what universal health coverage involves.

I spend as much time as anyone deploring The Crazy, but I try to show why it’s relevant to actual politics and actual governing decisions. Sure, it’s fun to make sport of the Cult of Breitbart, but it’s a deadly serious fact that Breitbart is rapidly being mainstreamed by highly respectable conservatives, more every day.

If liberals could truly make wingnuttery go away, I’d be all for it, even though it would make my own job a lot harder. But every time I try to wake up from the weird distorted images of politics presented by what Almond calls “conservative wack jobs” and soberly consider the options facing voters this very November, there they are again in the eyes of Mitt Romney or the voice of Eric Cantor or the budget of Paul Ryan—perhaps less “crazy,” but a poor reflection nonetheless of what I hope to be our country’s values and future.

While we are on the subject of the often devious rhetoric and tactics of our anti-choice friends, Ross Douthat supplies what I suspect will be a real trend-setter in Right-To-Life circles going forward: a column suggesting, subtly but definitely, that state intervention to ban reproductive choice may become necessary to prevent the practice of Nazi-style eugenics by “parents” (i.e., women) once scientific advances make prenatal decisions more sophisticated.

Douthat goes out of his way, naturally, to deny that he is associating women choosing abortions with Nazis (this ancient anti-choice tactic has been notably unsuccessful in persuading people who don’t quite think of first-trimester abortions, much less the use of an IUD, as equivalent to herding millions of men, women and children into ditches to be shot or into extermination camps to be gassed). He instead compares today’s unwittingly genocidal amoralists as equivalent to pre-World War II “liberals” who were enthusiasts for eugenics in order to breed a better human race:

From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about “race suicide” and “human weeds” were common among self-conscious progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their broader dream of human advancement.

This progressive fascination with eugenics largely ended with World War II and the horrors wrought by National Socialism. But while the West has discarded the theory of the eugenics era, the practice urged by Fisher and others — the elimination or pre-emption, through careful reproductive planning, of the weaker members of the human species — has become a more realistic possibility than it ever was in the 1920s and ’30s.

The eugenicists had very general ideas about genetics and heredity, very crude ideas about intelligence, and deeply poisonous ideas about racial hierarchies. They did not have, as we do, access to the genetic blueprints of individuals — including, most important, human beings still developing in utero, whose development can be legally interrupted by the intervention of an abortionist.

So: the “progressive” interest in genetic engineering, bred into the DNA of Planned Parenthood, loaded with racism and other hateful assumptions, was chased into the shadows by association with Nazism—but now it’s time has come! Very cleverly, Douthat takes the recent phony concerns of anti-choicers over abortion as a conspiracy against African-Americans or baby girls, takes them up a few notches, and makes them the object not of some sinister collective conspiracy by God-hating secularists who want to legalize infanticide and euthanasia, but just the horrific consequences of millions of individual choices. None of us would want a society “weeded” of “undesirables,” would we? But that’s where we are headed unless each and every woman is denied by the government of the individual opportunity to build her own corner of the great collective gas chamber:

From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights.

But this is a convenient perspective for our civilization to take. Having left behind pseudoscientific racial theories, it’s easy for us to look back and pass judgment on yesterday’s eugenicists. It’s harder to acknowledge what we have in common with them.

First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn. And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what ends our mastery is turned.

Ah yes, the great human sins of pride and hubris, the very temptations that led Germans to believe they could build a Master Race, now expressed through the arrogance of women believing they have a right to the “mastery” of their bodies. Can no one stop the madness and harness the Beast? Thank God for the good, humble, God-fearing men of the conservative movement who in their chivalry will save Eve from her death-dealing disobedient taste of the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge!