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- Via Jamelle Bouie, Rasmussen pits Ron Paul against Obama, which is just kind of silly: "A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided." I don't begrudge Paul his appeal to the more excitable movers of today's Republican base, but does that mean that he'll win primaries? It didn't in 2008, at the charring point of GOP self-immolation, so who outside of Sparta expects him to surmount Mitt Romney's money, Sarah Palin's media presence, and Newt Gingrich's sheer radiance this time around? Maybe the takeaway point is simply that Ron Paul makes a lot more sense to people than the Republicans who actually have a chance.
- Being effectively succinct, Jon Chait gives me an excuse to republish this point: "If you believe the mainstream media is an organ of the progressive movement and the functional liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, then yes, liberals do have epistemic closure. I think that, whatever you think about the liberal bias charge, the mainstream media is far more receptive to news and viewpoints that challenge liberalism than conservative outlets are to news and viewpoints that challenge conservatism." Opposed to this observation is, well, everything that Megan McArdle stands for, including the idea that print editors and university department chairs have been sabotaging conservative careers for the past century or so. There's a point at which maybe the Party of Personal Responsibility(TM) should chill with all of this intellectual self-victimization, no?
- Remember when Tom Coburn called Nancy Pelosi a nice lady and cautioned constituents not to believe Fox News – that no one's going to throw you in jail for dodging health insurance? Bill O'Reilly tried to take Coburn to task last night, claiming no one ever said anything like that. Fox even researched it ... if by research, we mean an intern spent a few minutes on AltaVista, got bored, and took a nap. So, Media Matters looked into the network's coverage itself. Turns out, Fox throws the jail word around all the time when it covers health care, including on O'Reilly's show. Steve Benin muses: "O'Reilly does realize it's not that difficult to search Fox News transcripts, doesn't he?"
- This morning, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy announced it will shift drug policy in a new direction, but it was just kidding, so you can put the spliff away now because it's still evil. More money will go to prevention and treatment instead of tossing everyone in jail with all those people who don't want our communist health care. That's nice, but as David Corn with Mother Jones points out, ONDCP missed a chance to move in sync with the growing legalization movement emanating from California. Is anyone in San Francisco hiring, by the way?
- Remainders: Michelle Rhee just found $77 million; the RNC presents M. Night Shyamalan's Tax Day; Jill Tubman revisits Obama's ethnic identification from the 2008 campaign to the 2010 census; Anna North addresses Internet "trigger warnings" in discussions of rape; Wonder Woman was born to govern over men -- amen.
-- Justin Charity and Rebecca Delaney
