Elsewhere: Scandals, Romney's Iran, Health Care

First up: at Salon, I had a column over the weekend about the unusually intense dead zone we're in now, and why it's a ready-made trap for reporters -- leaning on Brendan Nyhan's research on the press and scandals.

My PP post today was about the long-term electoral effects of health care reform. Short term, as I say over there, I'm not convinced that whatever the Court will do matter much this year.

And at Plum Line, I talked about Mitt Romney's claim that the US could not "survive" a nuclear Iran.

A couple comments about that last one. First, when I blog over at the Post, there's usually a time lag between when I write and when it gets published...usually doesn't matter at all, but in this case between when I wrote it and when it went live there were a bunch of comments about what Romney said. I was able to get a quick update to Greg with a couple of them -- just to link again, Dan Larison, who was harsher than I was,  and Andrew Sullivan, who compared Romney to Cheney -- but there's also a larger point that was raised by them and by Conor Friedersdorf that I should say something about, as long as I'm on the topic. That's the other part of what Romney said, which was about Congressional authorization for military action.

I think I've written about this before, but not recently. Basically, I agree with a lot of what Kevin Drum said today. First, that small-scale presidential actions without Congressional authorization are really not much of a big deal; and second, that the real fault here is with Congress, and not the president. There's more, but I guess I'll save it for a proper post later. Anyway, as Drum said, Congress is perfectly free to pull the plug on any foreign misadventure at any time. Worth noting.