Wednesday edition.
Eugene Robinson :
Let's be clear: The high-stakes standoff in Wisconsin has nothing to do with balancing the state's budget.
It is about money, though - but only in the sense that money translates into political power. At this point, it's clear for all to see that Gov. Scott Walker's true aim is to bust the public employee unions, thus permanently reshaping the political landscape in the Republican Party's favor. ..
I thought Republicans were supposed to believe that a contract is a contract, sacred and inviolate. Guess not.
But never mind all that. The reality is that workers in many industries are having to choose between givebacks and massive layoffs. Public employees should not be uniquely sheltered from the ill winds buffeting the U.S. economy.
The Wisconsin unions have recognized this fact. Union leaders have announced that they are prepared to accept Walker's proposal on health and pension contributions. In other words, money is no longer an issue.
Walker won, right? He got what he wanted, didn't he?
Actually, no. Bringing health and pension benefits in line with reality was never the point.
Ed Kilgore :
Many Beltway insiders seem to have convinced themselves that abortion doesn’t matter anymore. Just look at the press clippings from CPAC, where Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wowed his D.C. cheerleaders with a speech doubling down on his earlier call for a “truce” over culture-war issues like abortion. Chris Christie came into town a few days later, and excited a lot of the same people with a speech focused almost exclusively on the idea that entitlement-spending cuts are the nation’s top priority. Big-time conservative strategists like Michael Barone have opined that a truce over abortion policy—as reflected in a structure of legalized abortion with “reasonable” state restrictions—is already in place. And we are told incessantly that the driving force in Republican politics, the Tea Party movement, is basically libertarian in its orientation and wildly uninterested in cultural issues.
How out of touch could they be? It’s rare to see the Washington zeitgeist so disconnected from the reality of what conservative activists and their representatives are doing and saying on the ground in Iowa, in state capitals across the country, and next door in the House of Representatives. Far from being a sideshow, the Right-to-Life movement’s priorities have been front-and-center for conservatives across the country.
Hillary Rosner blogging at PLoS:
Science journalism needs a mix of really well-done daily deadline reporting and longer, thought-out, exhaustively reported narrative stories. The two are completely different beasts occupying different niches, and we should make every effort to protect them both, by ensuring that there’s habitat to sustain them. That’s one reason I’m so enthusiastic about The Atavist, a new publishing company that’s producing exceptional long-form journalism—longer than a standard magazine article but much shorter than a book—on an ebook model. Browsing Amazon yesterday, I noticed that Evan Ratliff’s Lifted, one of the first two offerings they published, is number four on the nonfiction bestseller list. Not the ebook list: the whole list. That’s pretty astonishing for a new format. And gives me some hope that perhaps, unlike the poor razorback sucker, narrative journalism will make it off the endangered list someday soon.
Hotline On Call/National Journal on WI polls:
The Democratic polls carry with it the obvious caveats about partisan polling. But the question order of those two surveys appears more sound than the Rasmussen poll. Following standard questions about the respondent's voter registration and 2012 vote-likelihood, the more recent of the two surveys asks a de rigueur approve/disapprove question about Walker (41% approve, 51% disapprove). The older survey asks a standard right track (40%) wrong track (48%) question about the state before the Walker approve (44%) disapprove (50%) question.
Charlie Cook :
What type of Republican candidate would do best against President Obama in 2012? Charlie Cook has some ideas. Even with the right candidate -- short of another Ronald Reagan -- the incumbent Democrat could still have an edge. Watch to find out why.
He wins at 8% unemployment, has a tough time at 9%, and it's interesting in-between.
Tom Jensen/PPP :
Obama's current position is not bad- but it's a lot more similar to where he was during the last half of 2010 than it is to his great polling month of January.
Ezra Klein :
Mark Bittman:
One “positive” often raised about McDonald’s is that it sells calories cheap. But since many of these calories are in forms detrimental rather than beneficial to our health and to the environment, they’re actually quite expensive — the costs aren’t seen at the cash register but in the form of high health care bills and environmental degradation.
Added: David E. Hoffman has a thoughtful piece in Foreign Policy:
The New Virology
From Stuxnet to biobombs, the future of war by other means.
So, the conundrum is clear: As Danzig put it a decade ago, "With nonexplosive weapons it may be difficult to tell if an incident is an act of war, the deed of a small terrorist group, a simple crime, or a natural occurrence."
I like thoughtful pieces. Different than the average pundit read.