Out of Town Takes

I'm out of town all day Friday, so just to ensure I don't completely fall behind the times ...

» CBS News: Tony Snow vs Harry Smith
Quoteth Tony Snow: "The legislative branch has no oversight responsibility over the White House." I'm curious to know if other so-called "constitutional experts" (despite their track record) share that assessment.

Even funnier is this Snow gem: "And what we don't want is kind of a Perry Mason scene where people are hot-dogging and grandstanding and trying to score political points." This said during an interview in which Snow relentlessly tried to paint Smith as a "partisan rather than a reporter" and engaged in what Dan Froomkin refers to as a "full-body eye-roll." Such is the state of intellectual honesty and consistency among today's Republican Party, I guess.

» BlueBayou: What's in a headline? Quite a lot... (John Whiteside)
Nice find by Whiteside. Just another datapoint disproving the fallacy of the supposed "liberal media" despite the revised talking point of a certain other regarding "editorial skew."

» BOR: One Bad Egg (Matt Glazer)
I guess this represents a new policy for the website that rolled out the "Rick Perry is Gay" rumors once upon a time:

Facts make good stories. Rumors and conjecture hurt people and reputations.

» WaMonthly: No Time to Go Wobbly, Barack (Michael Hirsh)
Hirsh's lead-in with Samantha Power as the draw is a stroke of genius. His point regarding the neoliberal tendency to reinvent the wheel is even better ... at least on a substantive level. I'm on record as being a fan of Power and I've even been of the opinion that Tony Lake was far better than his detractors flooded the conservative rags with about his track record.

But what their pairing might say about Obama as a foreign policy "expert" is somehow dissatisfying. About all that's missing is Gary Hart and Michael Lind from the lineup card. At the end of the day, whatever is (re)built will look remarkably similar to the current international institutions (UN, NATO, etc ...). The imperfections that might be ironed out by reinventing the wheel might just as easily be ironed out by committing to some sensible reforms of the agencies as they exist. In other words, instead of the decision set being: a) throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and b) keep baby, keep bathwater ... how about making it as follows: let the baby grow up.

Hirsh's thesis is pretty spot-on:

In other words, it may be that what is most broken today is not the international system, but American stewardship of it. And that, at this pivotal moment for the nation and its place in the world, what’s needed is not an entirely new vision but, rather, something simpler: a bit of faith. Faith that with time, committed diplomacy, and—perhaps most important—some basic good judgment about the use of American force, the essential framework of international relations that got us through the cold war—and that almost any president other than Bush would also have applied to the war on terror—can be repaired.

That rather accurately reflects the current administrations' most glaring failure as well as the surest road to ensuring American hegemony in foreign policy.

» TNR: WAR COSTS MONEY (James Kirchick)
Joltin' Joe ...

During the Second World War, our government raised taxes and we spent as much as 30 percent of our Gross Domestic Product to defeat fascism and Nazism. During the war in Korea, we raised taxes and spent fourteen percent of GDP on our military...Today, in the midst of a war against a brutal enemy in a dangerous world, we have cut taxes and are spending less than five percent of GDP to support our military...It is not an acceptable answer to push the sacrifice of this war against terrorism onto our children and grandchildren through deficit spending, as we have been doing. And it is not an acceptable answer to pay the costs of this war by squeezing important domestic programs, as we have been doing.

The over/under for number Republican bloggers who advocate Joe joining their ranks just got a lot lower. That even includes the Cult of Tom.

» Schmidt: Reed story 'overblown'
Back to Tony Snow for a moment ... maybe it's stuff like this that led him to believe that oversight and Congress don't go together. Give the voters credit for at least deciding that oversight and Republicans don't go together.

Rep. Jean Schmidt wrote in her weekly column on her Web site Monday that media reports about living conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, one of the nation's main facilities for treating veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, were "overblown."

Schmidt, a Miami Township Republican, said she recently visited the Washington, D.C., hospital to investigate a Feb. 18 Washington Post story that detailed neglect and dilapidated living conditions.

"While I found the situation at Walter Reed to be overblown by both politicians and the media, I hope that future accounts will bring more light to the real issues," she wrote.

Clearly, her eye was off the ball.

» Eschaton: Just Another Day in Baghdad
Looking at that poll trend, I think I've got an idea for the president: announce that you're going to allow gay marriage for Iraqis. It's one of the few things I think he can do to raise his approval ratings.

» New items on the reading list/MP3 player ....

• Good to Great (Jim Collins) ... it's about time I got around to reading this
  
• Managing in the Next Society (Peter Drucker) ... or, as I call it: sociology for business students
  
• Words that Work (Frank Luntz) ... I loathe Luntz, but the dayjob makes this one a requisite
  
• Applebee's America (Ron Fournier) ... more my taste for work-related reading
  
• Changing the Face of Hunger (Amb. Tony Hall) ... I'm just way too late in getting this book
  
• The Air We Breathe (Louie Giglio) ... quick reading that does the soul some good
  
• One Zero [Acoustic] (Derek Webb) ... remixed tunes by a great artist.

I have definitely got to get cracking with the reading schedule.