Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Charles Martin Smith, 60. The Toad. Also directed "Welcome to the Hellmouth," for which, as long-time readers might remember, he earned an appearance in my epic Reagan thing (which I do try to link back to every once in a while. I like it).

Well, whether you're in the mood for Reagan or not, surely you want some good stuff:

1. The Wall Street Journal really, really, really, shouldn't run op-eds by "expert" Suzanne Somers. Alex Seitz-Wald explains.

2. I think Andrew Sullivan basically gets it right on surveillance, including Obama's role to date -- although my view would be that all of it exploding on him this year suggests that he should have been more aggressive on it early, despite the likely short-term political fallout. In other words, while I have a fair amount of sympathy for a president who ducks an issue for (electoral) political reasons, I think the answer here is that the best political play was to find a way to take it on.

3. Marc Ambinder is also very good on intelligence, although I'm not really buying his Bill Clinton hook -- the rest of the column though is excellent.

4. The latest 2014 forecast from Alan Abramowitz.

5. An explainer about insurance cancellations, from Sarah Kliff.

6. And Chris Cillizza backs off his earlier comments about redistricting when presented with evidence. Excellent!

Read Stuff, You Should

 Happy Birthday to Barbara Eden, 82.

And good stuff:

1. Larry Bartels on polarization in Europe.

2. The lawsuit against Texas voter restrictions, from Molly Redden.

3. And a set I haven't read yet, but intend to: Marc Ambinder on the NSA story; Conor Friedersdorf's response; and Ambinder's last word.

What Mattered This Week?

I'll go with what looks to be the beginning of an open fight within the GOP about foreign policy and civil liberties -- we had the House vote on the NSA, and then Christie's smackdown of Rand Paul. There's disagreement among Democrats, too, but I don't think it's reached "open fight" stage yet.

Didn't matter this week? Maybe Obama's economic speech, but even more so the reaction to Obama's economic speech.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Stu Tate, 51. His cup of coffee was in 1989, age 27. He had 18 remaining professional innings (in AAA in 1991). Pitching is brutal.

Good stuff:

1. Dan Hopkins on the Latino vote.

2. David Roberts is incredibly sensible about the nuclear (power) debate.

3. Nicole Flatow talks to a retired federal judge about the limitations of the judicial check on intelligence gathering.

4. And, off topic, but: Peter Biskind has tapes of (an aging) Orson Welles in conversation. Good fun.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Ally Sheedy, 51.

Good stuff:

1. Political Bubbles, from McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal.

2. Chris Bowers on civil liberties polling.

3. And Ta-Nehisi Coates on not being stupid.

Catch of the Day

The Catch goes to John Sides for pointing out some interesting research from last year. As John sums it up, Jeffery Mondak and Jon Hurwitz found:

For civil libertarians dismayed at many (most?) Americans’ willingness to accept an expanded “national security state,” the problem may lie not so much with the threat of terrorism, but with a general failure to defend civil liberties.

That's worth knowing; terrorism isn't a special case, but part of a more general lack of commitment to civil liberties.

That's generally a pretty big problem for the small group (and I'm in that group) who really do consider civil liberties a priority. Basically, you can get lip service support, but it's not deep at all, and for many it doesn't take much to get to where the trade-offs are worth it.

What's more, the incentives for politicians are asymmetrical in a way that biases against civil liberties. That is: the downside of an incremental loss of civil liberties isn't ever going to be very large. But the downside, or at least the perceived downside, of insisting on civil liberties at the expense of some competing value is almost always going to be lopsided in favor of the other value.

And unfortunately, I don't think it's a problem that can be solved. About the best we can hope for is either luck of the draw with politicians who just happen to care about these issues, or, more likely, the courts stepping in.

At any rate: nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jason Mewes, 39.

I'm still pretty far behind on everything after travel (and especially after a travel day), but here's some good stuff:

1. Matthew Cooper and Garance Franke-Ruta have some of my favorite advice during a fast-breaking story: slow down a bit; what we know about the NSA story and about Edward Snowden may still change dramatically, so no need to conclude anything yet.

2. How California's top-two primary is evolving, from Seth Masket.

3. And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard that Rich Yeselson on Taft-Hartley and the past and future of unions is this week's must-read.

Sunday Question for Everyone

Sorry, on the run, so I'm going to do just one question today and I suspect it's one that I've asked before. But it's newly relevant now, and so: during the 2016 election, are civil liberties/surveillance issues important in the nomination battles? In one party, the other, or both? Are they important in the general election?

By "important" I'm just talking about what the candidates talk about and what the press talks about. No matter what, these types of issues are extremely unlikely to move votes, but there's more to elections than what moves votes.

What Mattered This Week?

I'm not sure how the NSA revelations mattered, but odds are they did. Alec McGillis has one argument on it all; sounds plausible to me.

For what doesn't matter...there's a bit of a spin war about how ACA will work out. The substance of that matters a lot; the spin, almost none.

So that's what I have. What am I missing? What do you think mattered this week?

What Mattered This Week?

Barack Obama's Gallup approval rating is back to 51% today, which is back up to the upper part of the range it's been in for the last couple of months. I'm ready to say that the feeding frenzy of this week didn't matter.

There's some sign that the AP warrants may turn out to really matter in policy. I'm going to go ahead and guess it will, so I'll say that that one matters. 

Disagree? Have something else? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Catherine Mary Stewart, 54.

And here's some good stuff:

1. The number one justified conservative complaint about the press: how "conservative" and "right-wing" are used interchangably for both folks like Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney, on the one hand, and Hitler, on the other. During the tail end of the Soviet Union, the faction which wanted to keep communism as it was regularly was referred to as, yes, conservative. Philip Klein was annoyed by it on Friday.

2. Emily Bazelon on Miranda.

3. Good journalism: excellent look at House and Senate recruiting, from Shane Goldmacher.

4. If you want to know why gun measures keep losing despite polling that shows their popularity, you definitely want to read David Karol.

5. And I was hoping to get to this on Friday, but I'll just link instead: Travis Waldron is correct about baseball salaries. The proper liberal response to the rise in baseball salaries after 1975 should be, it seems to me, that business can thrive when the workers thrive (while the proper conservative response should be: hey, markets are really powerful and in many circumstances do an excellent job).

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Armin Shimerman, 63. Had to just use the imdb page, since there's no way to choose between Quark and Principal Snyder, is there?

Day-before good stuff:

1. Kevin Drum on Obama vs. Romney on civil liberties.

2. Eric McGhee and Boris Shor: "party trumps constituency."

3. David Beard is collecting voting irregularities.

4. Wonkblog is interviewing voters; here's one example, Sarah Kliff interviewing a Florida man who wants to prevent Obama from ending Medicare.

5. There's a new issue of The Forum just out -- I haven't had a chance to read any of it yet, but several of these pieces look interesting: Bill Mayer on swing voters, Magleby and Nelson on independent "leaners," Lin and Stonecash on House elections, and more.

6. And Tim Murphy collected all the "game changers" of the last year. He concludes that "we're still really bad at predicting the future." But that's not quite it; it's that most events, and especially most campaign events, don't really make a large difference.

Elsewhere: Civil Liberties and Dems;

At Greg's place today, I talked epistemic closure and running against fantasy Obamas. Two things to add: one is that anyone in the GOP should be well-positioned to escape the conservative feedback loop, it should be campaign operatives whose jobs depend (sort of) on knowing how to appeal to swing voters. The second is that I'm not sure how much of a difference any of this makes in campaigns -- it certainly didn't appear to hurt Republicans in 2010, although of course it could have despite their landslide. I think the more serious danger is to governing, not electioneering.

(Why "sort of"? Their jobs actually depend on creating the impression among candidates and within the community of campaign professionals that they know how to appeal to swing voters. Which is probably, but not necessarily, related to actually knowing how to do so).

And at Post Partisan, I questioned whether we'll get a fight over the Civil Liberties plank in the Democratic Party platform this summer. Or, to put it another way: those who care about these issues certainly should make a major effort to retain and improve the plank from the 2008 platform. Yes, I know all about the overall importance of party platforms. But my guess is that most Democrats believe what they said in 2008 and earlier, or at least would be very uncomfortable flipping in public. So what's needed is a way to pin them down, and I'm not sure what else is readily available. 

I'm putting the 2008 plank below the fold.

What Mattered This Week?

Seemed like an eventful week to me in Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan...that's a lot.

The 4th amendment case decided this week, US v. Jones, seemed important to me.

I don't really think there's much left of importance in the nomination fight. Romney moved ahead of Newt in Florida, but that just means (assuming it holds up) that there will be less irrelevant hype after Tuesday. Romney is going to have to pretend it's a contest through Super Tuesday at this point no matter what happens in Florida. Watch to see if Rick Santorum has a late surge into second place, but so far it's not happening. There were also some new unflattering details about Romney's finances and background; not a plus for him, but unlikely to matter much.

What else? What do you think mattered this week?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Double question. First, how about a letter grade for Barack Obama on Iraq. Provisional, of course.

Second, does the way Obama handled Iraq and Libya make you more or less likely to trust him on other foreign  policy actions, whether it's Afghanistan or any future actions?

Establishment and State Leg Prayers

Ever read one of those news stories in which everyone is wrong?

I'm pretty sure I'm going to disagree with the Jewish state legislators in Minnesota who are upset about what they consider to be in-your-face Christian prayers in the state senate. But everyone in the story, as far as I can see (and maybe I'm just cranky today, but still...), is misbehaving.

The story, at least as the AP has it, is that this year's guest chaplains have been violating chamber norms by making explicitly Christian prayers, rather than the non-denominational ones that have been the tradition. Or perhaps not the tradition, as the AP story refers to at least one Jewish legislator who seems to have a long-time grievance. So, first of all: I think that aggressively non-inclusive benedictions in contexts that call for inclusive prayers are violations of etiquette; if Republican leaders in the MN state senate are deliberately recruiting clergy who they expect to do that, then they're guilty of an etiquette violation, too.

Second, the quote from the offending clergyman, some clown named Rev. Dennis Campbell, is a beaut of mangled history and condescending garbage:

"There's nobody that loves the Jews any more than the Christians, so that was not meant as an insult or disrespect," Campbell said. "Rather, it was a show of respect to Jesus Christ — just like our founders showed respect to Jesus Christ and the word of God when they built our Constitution."

Yeah. Of course it's disrespect, but not nearly as disrespectful and insulting as this "nobody loves the Jews any more than" crap. Ugh. And, no, the framers were not particularly interested in Jesus when putting together the Constitution, other than to keep any deity far away from their efforts to found a secular republic.

But I have to disagree with the remedy proposed by the Jewish legislators, too -- not based on etiquette, but on Constitutional grounds. Currently, Minnesota apparently "requests" nondenominational prayers, but state senator Terri Boniff and other Jewish (and Democratic) legislators want to change that to make such prayers "required." I think they're wrong. How is requiring not only a prayer, but a specific type of prayer, not establishing a religion?

Granted, the tradition of opening legislative sessions with a prayer is one of those things that's probably on shaky Constitutional ground to begin with, but that most of us, even most strong first amendment types, are okay with ignoring. And as I said, I think that it's only good manners for prayers in this situation to err on the inclusive side. But that should be the decision of individual clergy, not a requirement of the government (and I should add -- if the state legislative leaders are de facto requiring Christian prayers, that's a Constitutional problem also).

As an established church, "Nondenominationalism" is just as offensive to the first amendment as is any other type of religion.

(Don't know that it's relevant here, but regular readers know that I'm a Red Sea pedestrian myself, for what it's worth).

Palin's Constitution

Regardless of the importance of various small-bore controversies that get inflated by the need to fill cable net and talk show time during slow news months, it's still always a good thing for people to explain core Constitutional principles...or mistaken notions about them:

It's not surprising that Sarah Palin would come out in support of Dr. Laura Schlessinger's interpretation of the First Amendment as not guaranteeing freedom of speech, but rather freedom from criticism. Palin's expressed similar beliefs before, basically that the First Amendment only guarantees her and her political allies freedom of speech, while any criticism of her statements is an unconstitutional infringement on her right to say whatever she wants.

It goes without saying that this is painfully stupid...

That's Adam Serwer taking apart the Sage of Wasilla.  You are reading him, right?