"... from her early squabbles with feminism to her role as a minister with the new-age Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, from her membership in Newt Gingrich's brain trust to her stint as populist activist - all before her greatest act, the Huffington Post."
Huffington deserves every one of those millions she'll be paid by AOL for creating this online sensation. She was once derided as "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus" because of her many well-connected friends, but Huffington has earned her place as one of the extraordinary personalities of our time: an entrepreneur and writer who is always chasing the next big idea, wherever it is on the ideological spectrum.
Good for her. We need some extraordinary personalities for our time.
1. Joe Klein: "The Senate ... did not pass the 'Dream Act,' which is a cold, cold abomination." Not just cold, but cold, cold. It's not just the exaggeration that wins Klein a nomination. It's the witless, unintentional ambiguity. He doesn't mean to say that the act was the abomination.
2. John McCain: "Today's a very sad day. The commandant of the United States Marine Corps says when your life hangs on the line, you don't want anything distracting. . . . I don't want to permit that opportunity to happen and I'll tell you why. You go up to Bethesda Naval Hospital, Marines are up there with no legs, none. You've got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs." And that's it. The speech suddenly ends there, and — as Dana Milbank puts it in the Washington Post — he "turned and, without another word, walked into the cloakroom." (Note the irony that the staunch opponent of homosexuals is the one who enters the cloakroom/closet.) McCain's argument against gay people in the military is that there are Marines who have have lost limbs. Don't you get it? Perhaps now that DADT is dead, a Marine with no legs — none! — will speak up and with quiet dignity inform us that he is gay. What will John McCain say then? "I'm sorry"?
Dana Milbank notes "the unfortunate echo of nullification," but nullification was the idea that individual states could disregard federal law they opposed. The Repeal Amendment would institute an orderly structural safeguard as part of the Constitution, a check on federal power that requires a supermajority vote of the states.
The amendment process, after all, is part of the Constitution. The Framers had no illusions that they were creating perfection, and believed in the sovereignty of the people and in the power of the people to revise the Constitution as needed, through the process they created. The idea that the text of the Constitution should be revised only through judicial reinterpretation is a modern conceit, and one that does no honor to the Framers at all.
Since the Repeal Amendment, proposed by Randy Barnett, can easily be portrayed as an effort to return to something closer to the balance of power provided for in the original Constitution, it is pretty silly to portray yourself as brimming with respect for the Founders when what you really support is the shift of power to the national government that occurred over the long stretch of time, a shift that the courts have allowed to take place.
You know what else is silly? This, from Milbank:
Lest you think this is a hair-brained scheme by one Republican lawmaker, consider that the Repeal Amendment... has won the endorsement of the man who will be the next House majority leader, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.).
Folk etymology is the term for the creation of new words by mistake or misunderstanding or mispronunciation....In today's language, "Hare-brained" is often giddily and irresponsibly misspelled "Hairbrained," perhaps on the notion that the hair is near the brain.
Folk etymology... hmmm. There's also folk constitutional interpretation, isn't there? Or is folk the wrong word when it's journalists purveying the bogus constitutional wisdom?
The first rebuke of Pelosi by her colleagues came Tuesday, when Democratic dissidents forced a six-hour caucus meeting to vent their frustrations. The next blow came Wednesday, when the dissidents forced a secret ballot on whether to postpone a vote on Pelosi - and then won a larger-than-expected 68 votes. That essentially meant a vote of no-confidence in Pelosi by 35 percent of the incoming Democratic caucus.
And in yet another rebuke of the fallen speaker, 43 Democrats voted for her symbolic challenger, moderate Heath Shuler (N.C.) - even though few regarded Shuler as a qualified candidate and only a couple dozen of Shuler's colleagues in the moderate Blue Dog Coalition could vote....
[A]s the closed-door session dragged on, the soon-to-be-minority lawmakers grew restless. Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), taking a break from the proceedings, told reporters that his colleagues were delayed because "they're having trouble spelling 'Murkowski' "...
LOL.
The face of the Democratic Party puts on a brave face:
"They know her will! Most important, they know her heart! And that was what was felt today: the heartfelt feeling of this caucus behind this great leader!"
I love that quote, from Rep. John Larson. Will, I mean HEART. Heart! Heart! Heart! That's so deeply symbolic of everything the House Democrats have been up to these last few years.
When she and her colleagues [on the Council of Economic Advisers] began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."
Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."
Yes, we've noticed that every damned thing that happens is declared "unexpected."
That miscalculation, in turn...
What miscalculation?
... led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.
Unexpectedly and mystifyingly, it was quite a surprise.
No wonder most Americans think the effort failed. But Romer argued, a bit too defensively, against the majority perception. "As the Council of Economic Advisers has documented in a series of reports to Congress, there is widespread agreement that the act is broadly on track," she declared.
The act is broadly on track is a helpful thing to believe if you want to experience every bit of bad news as a surprise.
Further, she argued, "I will never regret trying to put analysis and quantitative estimates behind our policy recommendations."
What?! I guess Romer, writing her speech, didn't predict the embarrassing ways those words would could be read. Surprise! Among the negative interpretations available for those words are: 1. They started with the policy preferences, then rustled up the numbers to support it, and 2. They had to choose what to put first, policy choices or professional analysis, and they chose policy choices.
But the problem is not that Romer did a quantitative analysis; the problem is that the quantitative analysis was wrong.
Well, if you did the quantitative analysis in order to support the policy preference you put first, then it's not... surprising that that your quantitative analysis was second-rate.
The withering and often personal criticism of Milbank and Cillizza exploded Friday afternoon after the liberal Web site Talking Points Memo posted and criticized the latest video. Both men, who frequently appear on television, became high-profile targets, particularly among left-leaning bloggers but also on such outlets as Twitter.
"It's a brutal world out there in the blogosphere," Milbank said. "I'm often surprised by the ferocity out there, but I probably shouldn't be."
Yeah, and you shouldn't be such a pussy either. You don't have the monopoly on public discourse that you would like, so you whine that it is "brutal" and "feroci[ous]." But you were given a huge mainstream media platform for a comedy routine and you did bad comedy. You wanted to be big professionals and big amateurs at the same time. You deserved a takedown and you got it. Man up. It was you not the bloggers who lacked standards.
Pitney comments: "The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a 'dick' in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, 'You're such a dick')."
