Now, well, just google birther or plug it into your RSS reader.

I hope this thing burns brightest right before it dies.

The Birthers are, by and large, kooks. Most on the right get this. Witness Mr. Kevin Williamson at NRO:

“…[Birthers] engage in intemperate, paranoid, hysterical speculation, and not always from the best of motives. One has to be prudent about one’s associations….You can’t separate birtherism from the birthers, and the folks screaming at Mike Castle down in Delaware don’t sound to me like obvious contributors to a responsible, sensible conservatism….”

(Though here’s Mark Steyn, and Andy McCarthy, also at NRO, in dissent; they stand uncomfortably near the kooks.)

And elected conservatives have been even more vocal in their dismissal.

For the record, here’s a copy of Obama’s birth certificate provided by the State of Hawaii (’it’s a photoshop!’, you’ll cry).

Item number 1: this bit from Barron Young Smith at TNR about ongoing tension between two top Obama diplomats–foxy UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Darfur emmissary General Scott Gration. Gration had said publicly that the slaughter in Darfur amounted to genocide, conflicting with the administration’s official line and apparently pissing off both the Sudanese government and Rice.

Gration didn’t back off his comments when questioned by reporters, but he did say something quite piquant:

“…asked if he had at least spoken to Rice about the disagreement, Gration ventured into strange territory: “This is a definitional issue and,” he said, “First I just want to tell you that I respect Ambassador Rice very much. She is only one of two women in the world that I say, ‘I love you’ to. We have a comprehensive and integrated approach to insure that it will be taken care of.”

Busted!

And item 2: Ezra Klein, here, absolutely eviscerates Megan McArdle for her critique of nationalized health care, here. It was pretty brutal. Something tells me the two of them will not be vacationing together next year!

1) Apparently, Senate Dems are considering a rule change that would provide for secret ballots every two years to determine if Committee Chairs should keep their seats.

The move is basically a direct threat to Max Baucus, the conservative Democrat chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Throughout the debate on health care reform, Baucus has been operating the Committee like the Politburo, conducting unilateral negotiations with select Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats, without bothering to inform his caucus about any of the details–or even any of the broad outlines–of what will apear in his version of the legislation. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), who is technically in charge of the Finance Committee’s health care work, says even he has been frozen out of Baucus’s secret meetings.

2) On the other side of the Capitol, House Dems are apparently angry over a deal struck between Henry Waxman and the Blue Dog Coalition, a deal that would trim $100 billion off the price tag of the health care bill, mostly at the expense of the “public option”. From Ezra Klein:

“House liberals are afraid of the dynamic in which good bills face Blue Dog opposition in the final mile and are aggressively watered down. Senate liberals are afraid of the same. And throwing this final compromise with the Blue Dogs into doubt is a show of strength. After all, House liberals feel they’ve already compromised plenty: Coming down from single-payer is a compromise. Cordoning the public plan off on the Health Insurance Exchange is a compromise. The whole bill is one big compromise, and every subsequent iteration is a compromise stacked atop a compromise placed upon a compromise. At some point, the compromises have to stop. Or, better yet, they have to go in the other direction.”

3) At TNR, Ed Kilgore responds to a media narrative suggesting that, largely as a result of health care, President Obama’s approval ratings (among Democrats!) are “slipping across the board.” Not so, says Kilgore.

Hat tip to Donklephant

“It was disturbing to learn the other day just how close the last administration came to violating laws barring the military from engaging in law enforcement when President George W. Bush considered sending troops into a Buffalo suburb in 2002 to arrest terrorism suspects. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily a problem of the past. More needs to be done to ensure that the military is not illegally deployed in this country.”

Very well, NYT editorial board, Martial Law doesn’t sound especially appealing. So go ahead and tell us why this isn’t necessarily a problem of the past.

“The American Civil Liberties Union has been sounding the alarm about the proliferation of “fusion centers,” in which federal, state and local law enforcement cooperate on anti-terrorism work. According to the A.C.L.U., the lines have blurred, and the centers have involved military personnel in domestic law enforcement. Congress should investigate.”

And:

“Civil libertarians are also raising questions about a program known as the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and High-Yield Explosives Consequence Management Response Force. The Army says its aim is to have active-duty troops ready to back up local law enforcement in catastrophic situations, like an attack with a nuclear weapon. That could be legal, but the workings of these units are murky. Again, Congress should ensure that the military is not moving into prohibited areas.”

I have libertarian sympathies, but does this not typify the definition of civil libertarianism as the haunting fear that somewhere, someone might be prosecuting a criminal?

I mean, seriously, the NYT has decided to move this far to the left on the liberty/security trade-off? It was a lack of coordination between federal, state, and local law enforcement that caused our last attack (one of the hijackers was pulled over in Maryland the day before, gave his real I.D. to the cop, and was ticketed and let go even though his name appeared on NSA and watch lists).

And I’m not even sure what the board is really suggesting here, besides, “keep an eye on the military”, because the editorial is hopelessly vague, and dare I say, lazy.

It reads like the product of an hour long meeting with ACLU lawyers, with little in the way of follow-up research.

Consider, most of the argument for alarm is farmed out to the ACLU, and the qualifier phrases “could be”, “not necessarily”, “murky”, “seems”, and “generally” all appear in important propositions in the argument. By far the worst is:

Hardly incisive.

And, call me a Bush-sympathizer if you must, but why nothing is made of the fact that George Bush considered using military personnel and then made the right call ? Moreover, he made the right call by essentially vetoing Cheney, whose influence in the Bush administration was supposed to have been all-encompassing.
Oh, and somebody should ask the New York Times if Congress should investigate the use of the military as part of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

I don’t want the marine corps loose on the streets of New York either, but a lot of this worry is vestigial federalism. There is little legal problem with calling in the National Guard in crises, because those units are made up of weekend warriors and run by the states, not the feds. But their M-16s work just as well.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Four senators pushed for a bill Wednesday to ban texting while driving, a day after a study found that drivers who text while on the road are much more likely to have an accident than undistracted drivers.

A law that went into effect January 1 in California makes it illegal to send text messages while driving.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-New York; Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey; Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana; and Kay Hagan, D-North Carolina, unveiled the ALERT Act, which would ban truck and car drivers and operators of mass transit from texting while driving.

The proposed legislation would prohibit any driver from sending text or e-mail messages while driving a vehicle, said an earlier news release from the senators.

If the bill passes, the Department of Transportation would set the minimum standards for compliance.

States that do not enact text-banning laws within two years of the bill’s passage could lose 25 percent of their federal highway funds, Schumer said in a news conference announcing the legislation. The noncompliant states could recuperate that money once they meet the text-banning standards, Schumer said.

CTIA, a cellular phone industry group, said that it supports legislation that addresses text messaging while driving.

Full story here

“A solid majority of Americans don’t want to see Sarah Palin ever become president, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Two-thirds, 67%, said they don’t ever want the former Alaska governor to be president, compared with the 21% who said they would.

While it should come as no surprise that 87% of Democrats said they don’t ever want Palin as commander-in-chief, some 43% of Republicans said the same thing—as well as 65% of independents.

Even 46% of self-identified conservatives said they do not want Palin as president, as well as 44% of those who voted for Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain in 2008.

At 44%, white evangelicals are the largest subgroup supporting Palin as president one day.”

“As a boy, Matt Damon was Zinn’s neighbor and provided the voice for the CD recording of that book.”

For my two cents, Howard Zinn is worth reading, but only as part of a balanced breakfast. Think of him as a less creepy and paranoid Noam Chomsky.

From Alex Koppelman at Salon:

“Under the terms of the deal, the full House will not vote on a reform bill until after it returns from a five-week recess that begins at the end of this week. In exchange, the Energy and Commerce Committee can begin debating and marking up the bill as early as Wednesday afternoon.

The committee’s work on the bill has been delayed for more than a week due to resistance from Blue Dogs, who oppose some of the more liberal aspects of the Democratic healthcare plan.”

There are lots of good reasons to delay this bill, but how much you wanna bet that the foremost thing in the minds of the Blue Dogs (all of whom are from swing districts) is to avoid having to go back to those districts and explain why they voted for a bill, about which the only thing most people understand is the trillion-dollar pricetag?