If you're an ambitious young governor looking for that national spotlight as you practice saying the words "exploratory committee" what's your best bet for media attention?
E. J. Dionne can tell you what won't work: acting responsibly.
Almost no one in the national media is noticing governors who say the reasonable thing: that state budget deficits, caused largely by drops in revenue in the economic downturn, can’t be solved by cuts or tax increases alone.
There is nothing courageous about an ideological governor hacking away at programs that partisans of his philosophy, including campaign contributors, want eliminated.
That’s staying in your comfort zone.
At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, John Gurda says Scott Walker is the Carrie Nation of a tea party full of neo-prohibitionists
In its moral fervor, its contempt for compromise, its demographic base and even its strategies, today's new right is the philosophical first cousin of prohibitionism.
Consider a few of the parallels. The prohibitionists went after "Demon Rum," while the tea party attacks Demon Government. The Anti-Saloon League preached that barrooms were destroying America's moral fiber, while the new right declares that onerous taxation and excessive regulation are doing precisely the same thing. Carrie Nation smashed whiskey barrels, while today's conservatives want to smash the welfare state. Addiction to spending, they might argue, is ultimately as destructive as addiction to alcohol.
...
As this icy ideology takes legislative form, Walker has positioned himself as Wisconsin's ideologue-in-chief. Here, you sense, is a man who has not been wrong one day in his life, a true believer so sure of what's right for him that he just knows it's right for all the rest of us as well. He governs with a reptilian calm, unmoved by protest and unblinking in the bright light of national scrutiny. For a guy who won his job with barely 52% of the vote, Walker exhibits a chutzpah bordering on hubris, but no matter. In his monochromatic view of the world, no action is reckless if it's right.
This is a thoughtful and well done editorial, so click that link and read the whole thing or I'll smash a barrel of tea.
If you think that union-busting is the only bit of ideology hiding in Scott Walker's budget, take a second look. In a letter to the editor,Dr. LaRynda D. Thoen says that Walker is after other rights in the name of cost savings.
On Wednesday I learned about Gov. Scott Walker's budget recommendation to eliminate family planning services for men receiving Medicaid. Friday I was further infuriated to read that Walker also plans to reverse a state law requiring insurance companies to include prescription contraception for women as health care. ... Hidden in Walker's budget, under the guise of cost savings and efficiency, is a deeper agenda to erode the hard-won reproductive freedoms of women and men.
With countries around the world erupting with internal calls for democracy, Thomas Friedman wonders why we're spending $100 billion a year propping up dictatorships. Sure, we expected them to act as proxies in taking on the Taliban, but...
That contest, though, never really materialized because the regimes we counted on to promote it found violent Muslim extremism a convenient foil, so they allowed it to persist. Moreover, these corrupt, crony capitalist Arab regimes were hardly the ideal carriers for an alternative to bin Ladenism. To the contrary, it was their abusive behavior and vicious suffocation of any kind of independent moderate centrist parties that fueled the extremism even more.
Short answer: $100 billion a year that could be much better spent.
For all those who say that the Middle East has been held back because Islam isn't well suited to democracy or capitalism, Nicholas Kristof suggests a different culprit -- not Islam itself, but conservative legal and business practices that failed to keep up with changing times.
Even George Will can't help but notice. All the Republican presidential candidates are more than a little odd, and not in a quirky endearing way. For instance, asked about Obama's birth certificate...
Huckabee should have replied, "I've seen paranoia, goodbye." Instead, he said: "I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya. . . ."
The thing is George... you're just
now noticing that all your candidates are space cadets?
Chris Cillizza hands this week's Worst Week in Washington to Darrell Issa. Issa had his "ah ha!" expression ready, expecting that he be turning up thirty or fifty Obama scandals a week. Only most of the scandals seem to be emerging from Issa's office.
If your dancing would make Elaine Benes wince, maybe you're suffering from beat deafness. Science News has the story of a guy who has his own funky rhythm.
Mathieu flails in a time zone of his own when bouncing up and down to a melody, unlike people who don’t dance particularly well but generally move in sync with a musical beat, according to a team led by psychologists Jessica Phillips-Silver and Isabelle Peretz, both of the University of Montreal. What’s more, Mathieu usually fails to recognize when someone else dances out of sync to a tune.
Geez, I'm already face-blind and tone-deaf. I probably have this one too. Sigh. Just don't ask me to dance.