Link blag

Glenn Greenwald: Jim Webb's courage...

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that.

John Scswenkler: Leaders needed...

In this context, the unpopular stances Greenwald has in mind concern the drug war, sentencing guidelines, prison conditions, and the horrid condition of a country where blacks are sentenced to prison on drug charges at over five times the rate of whites despite not using drugs any more frequently, but it’s not hard to think of others that fit the bill: [great list]

TMV: The Silent Cries of Racism...

Can someone help me out here? Where is this growing throng of people calling criticizers of President Obama the dreaded R-word: racists? Can someone point this out to me? Because actress Angie Harmon feels she must present her “I’m not a racist if I criticize President Obama” card

NRO: First-person Socialism...

I think our president needs to invest more in the use of the third-person "government," since his speeches more and more center on the narcissistic "I" and "me." Even the car-takeover speech was "I-ed" to death.

Politico: Detroit plan has GOP all over the map...

President Barack Obama may or may not be able to save the U.S. auto industry, but his dramatic restricting plan is already having some effect: It’s sent the highly disciplined GOP message machine careening out of control.

Marc Ambinder: What 'Hightly Disciplined GOP Message Machine'?...

This isn't a knock at Politico..er...POLITICO, but since when has the GOP benefited from a "highly disciplined ... message machine?" When Congress debated the stimulus package, the party was united, but everything pretty much fell apart after that. Come to think of it, with the exception of the stimulus unity, the GOP message machine has been off-kilter since before the 2006 elections. I keep reading stories about how "Republican strategists" are on the verge of coming up with sparkling new strategies, but they never seem to materialize. The haggling over the wisdom of putting out an alternative budget is a symptom, and not a cause, of a party that lacks a leader and lacks even the patina of common cause among its various factions.

Dallas Morning News: The truth about health care 'truths'...

The high cost of health care "causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds," we're told repeatedly by Barack Obama's administration. The president mentioned these exact words twice in recent weeks, before Congress and at the opening of his health care summit.

It's completely false, drawing on four-year-old bankruptcy stats and a discredited paper co-written by an advocate of socialized medicine suggesting that half of bankruptcies are due to health expenses....

TheNextRight: The Right's Current Transformational Moment...

One of the biggest reasons for the Right's decline in the Bush era is that we had long since completed most of the items on our to-do list. Low marginal tax rates? Check. The Soviet Union gone? Check. Welfare reform? Check.

This empty cupboard of ideas had led to progressively more minimalist Republican governing agendas and campaign platforms. If John McCain proposed any big, game-changing policy shifts in the last election, I must have missed them. It's true that Obama's ideas were not new either -- but he was able to sell them as "change" because they had been not tried in toto since the Johnson Administration, and people had forgotten how badly they had crashed on the rocks their last time out. Obama's central thesis -- that government ownership and central planning can outpace returns in the private market -- is actually very, very old. His playbook is that of FDR in 1933, Attlee in 1946, and Mitterand in 1981.