Category: Politics

Mark Felt, age 91, says he was Deep Throat:

SANTA ROSA, Calif. – A former FBI official claims he was “Deep Throat,” the long-anonymous source who leaked secrets about President Nixon’s Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, his family said Tuesday.

I’ve got no reason to doubt him, but I’d like to hear it from Woodward.

Here’s the Vanity Fair story.

UPDATE: OK, Woodward has confirmed Felt was DT. He’d been coy about it because he’s got a book to sell. Given J. Edgar’s use of FBI information to keep politicians in line throughout his career, the leaking of info by the FBI’s number 2 isn’t so weird, is it?

the Vdare Blog offers a simple and cogent explanation for recent Republican victories:

The key reason why some states vote Republican, I’ve found, can be summed up in the three-word phrase:

Affordable Family Formation.

In parts of the country where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you’ll generally find more Republicans.

You’ll find less in regions where it’s expensive.

It’s a stereotype that a mortgage, marriage, and babies tend to make people more conservative.

But it’s a true stereotype.

It makes more sense than the Air America theory: false consciousness instilled by the right-wing New York Times.

There’s been a lot of whining about the filibuster deal on conservative web sites and blogs. Folks, you need to get over it. Politics is all about compromise and that’s exactly what this is. You get Owens, Pryor, and Brown, and the other side gets to spike a couple of people nobody’s heard of. The real filibuster fight gets put off until there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, and John McCain gets some points at the expense of Dr. Frist.

Practice saying “President John McCain.” Do you like the sound of that better than “President Hillary Clinton?”

I thought you would. Now buck up and take it like a man.

Comments from Democrats on the Keith Thompson essay lead me to believe that they see themselves as more virtuous than Republicans. Isn’t it odd that the political process, which is first and foremost a discussion of policy alternatives to meet common ends, would degenerate into an opportunity for assertions of personal moral virtue?

I don’t think there’s a great difference in moral values between Democrats and Republicans, because we all believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where we disagree is over the tactics and policies that make these desirable ends available to the greatest number of people. Democrats (and others on the left) want to soak successful individuals and corporations and transfer their wealth to the less successful. They want to impose heavy regulations on business based on a “precautionary principle” that makes it hard to accumulate capital. They want quotas or preferences to create the illusion of equality of talent and motivation where it may not actually exist. They’re more concerned about the size of the gap between rich and poor than they are with the objective state of the poor.

Republicans see these policies as punishing virtuous behavior and rewarding indolence, ignorance, and jealousy.

So who has the moral high ground?

Found this childish and pathetic display on Six Meat Buffet from Huffington’s Toast.

Let me be clear that I don’t endorse this sort of thing. No way. I don’t think it’s funny, either. And you shouldn’t look at it too closely. You could get ill.

Click for larger image.

Marc Cooper is all excited about the new mayor of LA:

The landslide election of a Spanish-speaking liberal Latino to preside over America’s second largest city carries huge political symbolism especially at a time when the national immigration debate is simmering.

There’s just a couple of problems with this. For one, Antonio Villaraigosa doesn’t speak Spanish. He can say a few words, but George W. Bush’s Spanish is way better than his, so Cooper should be overfuckingjoyed that we have our first Spanish-speaking president.

Second, Villaraigosa is so clueless he has to be somebody’s puppet. As Assembly speaker he once had to ask John Burton in a committee hearing how to contact the Governor to discuss a bill. He left Sacramento knowing no more than before he arrived.

LA is essentially a non-governable entity, but under Antonio’s rule it will become even less governed than before. It’s a sad day for LA.

We’ve all heard that teachers are underpaid. This turns out to be a myth, especially in affluent areas like the Long Island suburbs:

One in 12 teachers in Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties now earns more than $100,000, and the ranks are growing fast, according to an analysis of state data by The New York Times. On Long Island from 2001 to 2003 (the most recent figures available), the number grew fivefold, to 2,800, including 498 elementary school teachers, 29 physical education teachers and 83 kindergarten teachers.

But don’t expect this myth to go away any sooner than the myth that America’s middle class white women are oppressed. Some myths are too politically valuable to correct.

Are the Democrats in such big trouble (losing 7 of the last 10 presidential elections) because of poor organization or bad policies? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga thinks it’s all just a matter of organizing:

Moulitsas, known as the king of the Daily Kos website, sought to dig himself out of a hole today by attacking the Hill newspaper for misrepresenting his remarks: “I was not ‘dismissive’ of existing progressive think tanks. They have their role and are key components….However, what I said is that all the policy papers in the world won’t do us any good unless we can figure out ways to actually win elections. Republicans have a machinery in place focusing on using technology and other tools to win elections in addition to their policy think tanks, we don’t.”

The Hill misrepresented nothing. Actually, “all the policy papers in the world” is exactly what a party in the wilderness needs. If Democrats want to change the country’s direction, they better know where they want to go and why their answers are superior. Kos’s enthusiasm for mechanistic solutions to the Democratic party’s soul-sickness is yet another example of present-day leftist philistinism and provincialism.

This is really sad for the country. The emphasis on mechanism is a reflection of a defensive posture toward the idea gap, which the Dems are clearly losing. Traditional social security and welfare + foreign policy isolationism and gay marriage doesn’t equal 50.1%.