ANOTHER CHANGE IN THE BREEZE

Anthony Cordesman is a foreign policy "wise man" so it was nice to learn that he can state some obvious truths about the U.S. - Israel relationship:

“The depth of America’s moral commitment does not justify or excuse actions by an Israeli government that unnecessarily make Israel a strategic liability when it should remain an asset,” Mr. Cordesman wrote, in commentary for the centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he is the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in strategy. “It is time Israel realized that it has obligations to the United States, as well as the United States to Israel, and that it become far more careful about the extent to which it tests the limits of U.S. patience and exploits the support of American Jews.”

This makes me a little, but just a little, more optimistic that the U.S. may finally be gathering the nerve to impose a peace settlement upon Israel and the Palestinians.

I'VE HEARD THIS MANY, MANY TIMES

But just today I was struck by a promo Mark Levin does for his show in which he states "there is no role" for the Supreme Court in the Constitution. Perhaps he thinks it was put there to satisfy the ABA?

AN EXAMPLE OF SIMPLE JUSTICE

Arizona Councilman/Radio Host Fired For Racist Anti-Mural Campaign

A little bit of justice? Maybe. A news website and tourism agency in Prescott, Arizona, announced in the dead of night that Prescott city councilman and local-wingnut KYCA talk-show idiot Steve Blair has been fired from his radio show because he’s bringing national shame to Prescott because he campaigned to have the faces of little school children removed from a K-5 mural because some of the kids were black and brown.

Background here.

SORRY FOR THE POSTING GAP

I came down with a "stomach flu" and haven't been able to do much of anything until now.

SOMEONE TELL LOU DOBBS, STAT!

AP Impact: US-Mexico border isn't so dangerous
Jun 3 04:48 AM US/Eastern
By MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writer

The top four big cities in America with the lowest rates of violent crime are all in border states: San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin, according to a new FBI report.

But FBI crime reports for 2009 says violent crime in Arizona declined. And violent crimes in southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita—they've dropped by more than 30 percent in the last two decades. Of America's 25 largest cities, San Diego—with one out of four residents an immigrant—has the lowest number of violent crimes per capita.

"CREEP" ISN'T THE RIGHT WORD

I think "small town bitch" fits Sally Quinn much better. From Gawker:

Maintaining the Establishment-and her role at the top of it-wasn't easy work. First Families came and went in the White House, and often didn't realize, in Sally's view, how Washington worked, a phenomenon she griped about in many of her articles during those years. "You come in from another community and you don't know anything about the people," she says, explaining why the Establishment is so critical to governance. "So you don't know what perspectives they bring to something and what the relationships are and … who's feuding and why…. And all of that is extremely important information for people in the White House to know."

ANOTHER NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

Not too long ago, wingers claimed that the Federal government COULDN'T create jobs and now they are whining that mostly government jobs were created last month.

AYFKM?

(h/t Atrios)

I'm not quite there yet but if any more crap like this pops up, I WILL be embarrassed to admit that I'm from Arizona.

Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students’ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White

An Arizona elementary school mural featuring the faces of kids who attend the school has been the subject of constant daytime drive-by racist screaming, from adults, as well as a radio talk-show campaign (by an actual city councilman, who has an AM talk-radio show) to remove the black student’s face, and now the school principal has ordered the faces of the Latino and Black students to be changed to Caucasian skin.

From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity ….

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”

A COMMON WINGNUT CLAIM, DEBUNKED AGAIN

Media wingnuts frequently claim that the news they are reporting isn't being covered in the mainstream media and just about as frequently, they are wrong. Glenn Beck is the latest to use this tired meme and Jon Stewart nailed him.

'Daily Show' calls out Beck for Gaza claim
THE NEWSROOM
Yahoo News
1 hr 47 mins ago

Glenn Beck may need to turn the dial away from Fox News now and again.

For the past few days, the conservative television and radio host has claimed that the mainstream media won't air a video that the Israeli Defense Forces released to the press (and on YouTube) from Monday's deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla.

"That video — you're hard-pressed to see it here in America from media outlets besides Fox," Beck said Wednesday. "Nobody seems willing to show that, leading to the question: Why?"

And on Thursday night's "Daily Show," Comedy Central host Jon Stewart refuted Beck's remarks, showing clips from many networks — CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNBC and Univision — that aired the IDF video this week.The record suggested, Stewart joked, that Beck "lives in a cloistered world of paranoid delusion that is impervious to a priori evidence that contradicts his worldview."

ZAITCHIK IS NO CHAFETS

Chafets fellated Fats Limbaugh but Zaitchik isn't whitewashing Glenn Beck. David Wiegel interviewed Zaitchik for the WaPo and here are a few of the juicier tidbits:

Does he really believe God is speaking to and through him? I don’t know. But in one of his books, he describes Heaven as a place where everybody “can make as much money as they want,” and he does believe that God basically wrote the Constitution in 1787.

Beck has a long history of attacking other people’s kids. In the past, he’s even attacked fetuses. In Phoenix in the mid-1980s, he once called the wife of a rival deejay and mocked her live on the air about her recent miscarriage. In Tampa, he repeatedly called the second-marriage children of Michael Schiavo (husband of Terri) “bastard children.” The tic is just one of the many recurring manifestations of Beck’s molten mean-streak, which runs a mile deep and often explodes like a volcano.

I mean, this is a guy who thinks the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment is an urban legend.

I wish the left was better at resisting some of the bait he dangles on a daily basis, and focus on the bigger picture, like the agenda of [David and Charles] Koch-funded groups like Americans for Prosperity, which feeds Beck most of his scripts. That, and the content of the religious pseudo-histories he keeps telling people to read.

Aside from providing an introduction to Skousen, Mormonism is a perfect religious fit for Beck in a lot of ways, from the wealth-worshiping corporatism of the LDS Church, to the teary social ritual known as “bearing testimony,” to the schmaltzy sentimentalism found in so much Mormon film and literature. But those are each long stories in themselves.

Consider his Aug. 28 “Restoring Honor” rally. ... It’s a replay of his listener-supported “Rallies for America” tour in 2003, which exploded his profile while he was racking up affiliates and building his national brand. His fans just don’t get the fact that, as one of Beck’s former producers told me, “It’s always about Glenn.”

FOLLOW-UP TO THE DARTHMOUTH HEALTH CARE STUDY

I've blogged about this before and the NY Times has a nice article discussing the criticisms of the study. One that sticks out is the failure to take cost of living differences into consideration.

KRUGMAN DEMOLISHES ANOTHER WINGNUT MEME

This is the meme that the Feds forced banks to make mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them. Talk radio gasbags still spew this crap and it seems to be common knowledge in certain groups, like Chicago School economists. Krugman includes four convincing graphs. (h/t Atrios)

IS ST. WARREN ABOUT TO LOSE HIS HALO?

UPDATE: Reuters reports that other aren't to impressed with Uncle Warren. (h/t Atrios)

Warren Buffett is an investing superstar in America but this report from McClatchy gives us a couple of reasons to doubt he really is that good.

First, Buffett is known as a fundamentals investor, one who concentrates on amassing solid information about a company before he makes a decision to invest. That reputation is cast into some doubt:

He also said he had no idea how Moody's rated bonds.

"I've never been in Moody's. I don't even know where they're located," Buffett said.

Second, there is evidence that he lied to Congress:

"No," Buffett said, responding to a question from panel chairman Phil Angelides about a McClatchy report earlier this year that two senior Moody's officials had warned Buffett about complex bonds backed by junk U.S. mortgages. ... However, a former Moody's executive who told McClatchy earlier this year that he'd shared documentary evidence about his contact with Buffett with panel investigators, stands by his assertion, which McClatchy verified independently.

"I reached out to him, and I've got the e-mail sent to him and the commission has it as well," the former senior executive said Wednesday.

PREACHING TO THE CHOIR

The radio gasbags have been talking about Sestak, the Gulf oil spill and the Blagojevich trial to reinforce points about Pres. Obama they have so far failed to establish in popular opinion, such as the point that the President is incompetent. I've listened to a number of callers over the past couple of weeks and I got the sense that almost all of them would believe anything negative about Pres. Obama.

WHERE DID THE MONEY COME FROM?

Since I first learned of it, I always thought Newsmax was just another low-rent wingnut site but according to this Yahoo News article, I'm terribly mistaken:

Newsmax Media bidding to buy Newsweek
2 hrs 4 mins ago
Michael Calderone is the media writer for Yahoo! News.

Despite lean years for magazines, Newsmax has bucked industry trends and posted revenue last year of around $35 million, according to the Financial Times.

THIS IS TOO PESSIMISTIC

but I am biased to believe that Reason can overcome The Irrational:

Admit it, investors are sheep, fools, predictably stupid losers

So what's the only thing you need to know about behavioral economics? Begin with the fact that you are predictably irrational. Your brain is not only irrational, your behavior is easily predicted. You can be manipulated without ever knowing it. Wall Street knows your brain is your worst enemy, that 88% of your behavior is driven by the subconscious, biases you cannot change. The fact is, Wall Street does not want intelligent investors who think.

The last sentence also applies to many politicians, right-wing talk radio and FAUX News.

UPDATE: 65% of Americans can't name even one Supreme Court Justice

RADIO TIDBITS

Brian Kilmeade now has his own show and Bill "Falafel" O'Reilly was one of his first guests. BOR thinks there should be more people like Glenn Beck in the news media because Beck is a "regular guy."

FORMER JUSTICE SOUTER CHANNELS ISAIAH BERLIN

(h/t Andrew Cohen at Politics Daily)

David Souter's commencement speech at Harvard reminded me of Isaiah Berlin's notion of both a plurality of values AND conflict between those values:

The reasons that constitutional judging is not a mere combination of fair reading and simple facts extend way beyond the recognition that constitutions have to have a lot of general language in order to be useful over long stretches of time. Another reason is that the Constitution contains values that may well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony.

It’s going to show that the Constitution is no simple contract, not because it uses a certain amount of open-ended language that a contract draftsman would try to avoid, but because its language grants and guarantees many good things, and good things that compete with each other and can never all be realized, all together, all at once.

The explicit terms of the Constitution, in other words, can create a conflict of approved values, and the explicit terms of the Constitution do not resolve that conflict when it arises.

INTERESTING WORD CHOICE

Charles Murry, co-author of the infamous The Bell Curve, writes a review in the Claremont Review of Books of two new biographies of Ayn Rand and concludes with this paragraph:

Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I'm about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.

The wingnuts often accuse liberals of aiming for a utopia which can never exist.

PRES. OBAMA DIDN'T BACK DOWN

The U.S. usually vetoes or at best abstains from UN Security Council decisions that don't please the neo-cons and the "Israel Firsters." Not this time:

“The Security Council deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force during the Israeli military operation in international waters against the convoy sailing to Gaza. The Council, in this context, condemns those acts which resulted in the loss of at least 10 civilians and many wounded, and expresses its condolences to their families.

“The Security Council requests the immediate release of the ships as well as the civilians held by Israel. The Council urges Israel to permit full consular access, to allow the countries concerned to retrieve their deceased and wounded immediately, and to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance from the convoy to its destination.

“The Security Council takes note of the statement of the United Nations Secretary–General on the need to have a full investigation into the matter and it calls for a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards.

“The Security Council stresses that the situation in Gaza is not sustainable. The Council re-emphasizes the importance of the full implementation of resolutions 1850 (2008) and 1860 (2009). In that context, it reiterates its grave concern at the humanitarian situation in Gaza and stresses the need for sustained and regular flow of goods and people to Gaza as well as unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.

“The Security Council underscores that the only viable solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an agreement negotiated between the parties and re-emphasizes that only a two-State solution, with an independent and viable Palestinian State living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbours, could bring peace to the region.

“The Security Council expresses support for the proximity talks and voices concern that this incident took place while the proximity talks are under way and urges the parties to act with restraint, avoiding any unilateral and provocative actions, and all international partners to promote an atmosphere of cooperation between the parties and throughout the region.”

THE "ISRAEL FIRST" CROWD ACTS PREDICTABLY

Fats Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin (according to Hannity) have all defended Israel's murder on the high seas and Hannity even thinks most Americans agree with him.