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- Paul Krugman makes a simple yet fundamentally important observation about ideological perception: "On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle -- smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself." Incidentally, this conviction is augmented by the belief that the motivation for bigger government is to use spending as a means of purchasing political support.
- It's fair to say that Deborah Solomon is a bit condescending to Rand Paul in The New York Times Magazine interview Paul Waldman mentioned earlier. But that doesn't mean Rand Paul's answers aren't incredibly one-dimensional, what with rejecting the seat-belt laws of the "nanny state" and characterizing smoking bans as as an Orwellian affront to your freedom. To be clear, Paul completely rejects the very idea of public health and safety laws, so, I have to ask, why even have a state at all? Why don't we just dissolve the whole thing and rule through our own sheer will? Do we really need the state to enforce contracts if we all have guns? If I exaggerate, it's to make the point that anarchy is the logical endpoint of this line of thought, not freedom.
- I wonder sometimes if certain members of Congress are even aware that it's extraordinarily easy to produce video evidence of a politician caught in a contradiction. To wit, does John McCain honestly believe he can get away with the statement, "I never considered myself a maverick?" Are you kidding me? And what about Jim Bunning, who, after putting a one-man hold on extending unemployment benefits, now blames the Democrats for prolonging misery? I understand Bunning's reasons for holding up the extension. But the only reason the Senate failed was because of the Senate's arcane rules, which Bunning took full advantage of.
- This Mark Halperin column about the 2012 Republican field is predictably devoid of useful political analysis, but I will grant him the point that only two would-be candidates, Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, seem to be laying the groundwork for a presidential run, and even then, they struggle with the problem of national name-recognition. Some evidence for their ambitions can be seen in their decision to skip the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, with Romney out promoting his fantasy foreign-policy book, and Pawlenty addressing the conference via videotape.
- Remainders: As much as I love wildly expensive space exploration, this is probably a better use of NASA's budget for the time being; kill me now: "The dramatic and sudden shift in attitudes toward oral-genital contact can therefore be termed the Clinton-Lewinsky effect"; the Republican approach to financial regulation is not serious; more nonsense on how the "American character" will refuse to let us become "Euro-weenies"; and you don't want to incite those Tea Partiers -- they might bite.
--Mori Dinauer
