ryanpowers.net

I’m not sure what to think of this whole Van Jones situation. Clearly he ought to have read that 9/11 petition more closely. I, however, agree with my former überboss John Podesta that Jones set a standard for himself that his detractors would never set for themselves. Among other things in his statement on Jones’s resignation, Podesta points out:

Clearly, Van was the subject of a right-wing smear campaign shrouded in hypocrisy. Van’s chief tormentor Glenn Beck, who spent weeks engaged in vicious name-calling, retains his perch at Fox News after calling the president a racist who has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.” [In resigning,] Van has set a standard that Beck would never impose upon himself.

My fear now is that Beck, et al will smell blood. If they can create — from nothing — a similar state of affairs to that which existed for very fact-based reasons in Bush’s second term, the right-wing will succeed in crippling the Obama agenda. Who’s next on their hit list?

Seriously though, if there is one thing that John Bolton taught me, it is not to embolden thy enemies with appeasement. Get ready for a bigger, stronger, faster Beck.

Keith Olbermann debuted some new eye glasses tonight. This is of particular interest to me because I’m looking to replace my current set of old man frames (which I happen to share with, among others, my father and Sen. Harry Reid). Olby last Friday vs. tonight:

So I hear it’s final: Dr. Paul Farmer will not run USAID, after all. … I’m not exactly sure what went wrong, but I think the vetters had reservations about things he had said, and he developed reservations about whether he could do more good inside government or outside. I still think the proper response is to throw the vetters overboard — if a saint like Farmer can’t get through, who can? — but in the meantime we need an administrator for USAID.

Conservatives like Stewart because he’s providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks. “Shepard Smith did the same discussion [on torture],” says May. “He kept yelling me at me: ‘This is where I get off the bus! Not in my name!’ He wasn’t arguing with me. It was just assertions and anger. That’s not what Jon deals in.”

This is also why I think MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow succeeds where Keith Olbermann fails. Maddow wants to engage with those who disagree with her. (via Big Contrarian)

Brendan Nyhan argues that there’s evidence of whackos on both sides of the political spectrum. I’m not sure that this is a perfect comparison, but take it for what it is worth:

When asked how likely this was, 16% of Americans said it was very likely and 20% said it was somewhat likely that people in the Bush administration “assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

There is an undeniable symmetry to the misperceptions, which skew in the expected partisan directions in both cases. The total proportion of incorrect or don’t know responses among Republicans on Obama’s citizenship (58%) is virtually identical to the proportion of comparable responses among Democrats on a 9/11 conspiracy (54%).

Media Matters responded to a similar, but different claim last week.

Also laments the “merry-go-round” nature of Paul Farmer’s recently-rumored “appointment”:

Nearly nine months into the Obama Administration we have absolutely no solid indication either that the White House intends to name a director for USAID, or that the agency will be given the sort of budget and political clout that health and development advocates insist are essential to making U.S. foreign assistance work. It’s shocking. The merry-go-round we’ve been on regarding Paul Farmer’s “appointment” has been disheartening.

One reason, I think that it is so shocking that we still don’t have a director for USAID is that a significant amount of the agency’s stated mission is supporting economic growth. During such a significant global recession, it would seem that the administration would want USAID to be as effective as possible. No one expects IMF style interventions, but development assistance is of extreme importance to many countries and the Obama administration seems to be looking the other way.

Ackerman highlights a recent interview The Game did with a New Zealand publication:

In a recent Foreign Policy article, George Washington University Professor Marc Lynch, likened the feud to the battle of global hegemony — with Jay Z in the role of the United States, and The Game as the “erratic wildcard”: Iran and North Korea.

The Game asks for an explanation of why that’s not a favourable comparison, before likening Lynch to Greenland — isolated from the top writers in the world — and Jay Z to Iceland “coz he’s gone cold”.

Natalie Ondiak makes the case of USAID reform:

As it now stands, USAID cannot be an equal leg on the stool. It is not a cabinet-level agency and it has well documented personnel and capacity deficiencies. It is unclear what the relationship between USAID and the State Department will be. But if the State Department retains budget authority and the USAID administrator reports to the Secretary of State, the agency will be a stepchild at best.

He writes, “[A]s we all know, it’s easier to be counterintuitive and wrong than counterintuitive and right.