×
- No one should be terribly surprised that the Pentagon is tracking and rating (positive, negative and neutral) journalists based on how they report stories. But it turns out that getting a copy of your profile from the Rendon Group, the company who is collecting this data for the Defense Department, is quite a challenge. The Pentagon is now reviewing the policy in light of the revelations.
- Bobby Jindal, who loves taking federal money and spending it in Louisiana, also believes the federal government is incompetent and corrupt. So it's difficult to wrap one's mind around the fact that he's praising the efforts of FEMA and the Obama administration in rebuilding the Gulf Coast four years after Hurricane Katrina. I'd love to have some sort of consistent conservative theory of precisely what the government is great at doing, and which activities are leading to Stalin's purge.
- These "tenther" activists -- citing the Tenth Amendment to argue most of the federal government's activity is unconstitutional -- are now setting their sights on the interstate highway system. I'm going to assume that these people also believe in American greatness and exceptionalism. How then is the United States supposed to be a great nation without some minimum national standard for education, health care, transportation, voting rights and whatever else they want banned and given over to the states to deal with?
- Greg Mankiw weighs in on the nature vs. nurture debate to conclude that rich kids get better SAT scores than their less privileged peers not because of their economic advantages, but because they have genetic superiority. I can only assume Mankiw believes this because he a conservative, and for all the libertarian deification of the individual, real conservatives believe the social order is preordained and mere mortals should not meddle with it. From here it's easy to argue against the government supporting the disadvantaged in society because such efforts are bound to fail to lift up the genetically inferior among us. And if you're a conservative intellectual in the 1960s, you might throw in a reference to the "advanced race" as well.
- Remainders: Obama's policy on energy is still quite popular with the public; immigration reform is still possible, but more difficult without Kennedy; our coming Afghan quagmire; everybody hates Rudy; joking about hunting the president is so funny that you might as well make the crack twice; and meet the "Black Glenn Beck."
--Mori Dinauer
