George McGovern has passed away.

By all accounts, he was a good and decent man.

May he rest in peace after living a full life, filled with accomplishments and service.

Arlen Specter has passed away. He was 82. A pretty important figure, from the "magic bullet" theory, to blocking Bork, to making sure Clarence Thomas was confirmed, to switching to the Democratic Party at the end of his career, Specter was always in the middle of contention.

When he was running for the Democratic nomination n 2010 against Joe Sestak, I got a chance to speak to him extensively. I'll write in more depth about him later, but for now, here are some links - On Kagan and Supporting the Public Option through the reconciliation process.

This takes "brass" as they say:

“If President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden,” Cheney told the Daily Caller on Monday night[.]

Oh really? This from a guy who ignored the intelligence briefings on the imminent 9/11 attacks?

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. [...] But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders [...] were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein[. ...] In response, the C.I.A. prepared an analysis that all but pleaded with the White House to accept that the danger from Bin Laden was real. [...] Yet, the White House failed to take significant action.

Dick Cheney, one of the most disgraceful and despicable men ever to hold government office.

Matt Yglesiais writes:

Broadening the tax base to finance big cuts in tax rates is the heart of Mitt Romney’s economic plan. Obama made the elimination of deductions the centerpiece of his plan to raise more revenue from the corporate income tax, and Senate Democrats are counting on broad tax reform as a key element in Democratic budget policy if Obama wins in 2012. But in specific terms, Washington remains hooked on the allure of tax breaks. ... [E]ven if major tax reform somehow does occur, the lesson of the Olympic Tax Elimination Act is that Congress is likely to undermine reform at world-record speed.

Uh, duh? Regular readers know that I have argued that elimination of tax loopholes rarely survive the "reform." There is always a good reason to give a "tax break," especially for "job creators." Maybe liberal wonks will understand this now. We can not cut tax rates, period.

Apparently, The Donald heard me:

Donald Trump said Monday that the GOP wants him to have a role at the Republican National Convention. “I know they want me to,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” when asked if he planned on speaking at the convention in Tampa. “I’ll see what happens.”

I know I want him to.

Joe Lieberman does not have to attend any political conventions though the Americans Elect would no doubt welcome him.

This bothers me though:

“Joe Lieberman is a victim of polarization. He’s another person cast aside by people who aren’t interested in centrist views,” said Professor Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, who has worked as a scholar in residence in the Senate.

Wait, what? Maybe people rejected Lieberman's views, as opposed to "centrist" views, whatever that means. Does that offend Professor Baker? Apparently so.

Ed Kilgore on Thomas Edsall's ridiculous comparison between negative campaigning and voter suppression:

Even if you buy Edsall’s assumption that the Obama campaign’s anti-Romney ads are designed to convince non-college educated white voters who won’t support the incumbent to give Romney a pass as well, it is fundamentally wrong to treat such efforts as equivalent to utilizing the power of government to bar voters from the polls altogether. Voters hypothetically convinced by the Obama ads to “stay home” in the presidential contest are perfectly free to skip that ballot line and vote their preferences for other offices, just as they are perfectly free to ignore both presidential campaigns’ attack ads and make a “hard choice” between two candidates they aren’t crazy about. Lumping negative ads together with voter disenfrancisement under the rubric of “vote suppression” legitimizes the latter as a campaign tactic rather than what it actually is: an assault on the exercise of fundamental democratic rights.

What Ed said.

The Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

[More...]

DougJ asks:

If a Republican Congress had [passed] the [ACA] bill, and a Republican president had signed it, how would the vote have gone, in your opinion? I’d especially like to hear from the lawyers.

There would have been no case and no vote. The constitutional argument was manufactured by Randy Barnett and only became respectable because GOP pols signed on to it.

Next question.

Via Hullabaloo, George Will's forthright embrace of judicial activism:

Although Hamilton called the judiciary the “least dangerous” branch because it has “neither force nor will, but merely judgment,” it is dangerous to liberty when it is unreasonably restrained. One hopes Romney recognizes that judicial deference to elected representatives can be dereliction of judicial duty.

As David Atkins notes, this is not a change in reality, but the open embrace of judicial activism by conservatives is new.

In response to the Justice Department's warning letter to the government of Florida noting that Florida's voter purge initiative violates Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires Justice Department pre-clearance of state actions which have a disparate impact on the voting rights of minorities and a federal law prohibiting purging of voter rolls within 90 days of an election, Florida vows to fight for its voter purge:

Ken Detzner, Florida’s secretary of state, accused the federal government of sullying the integrity of the election process by trying to thwart Florida’s efforts to remove voters who are not American citizens.

What Detzner does not acknowledge is that the Florida purge removes lawful voters from the rolls, and most of those voters are minorities.

Individual rights? What about the most fundamental of them - the right to vote? Somehow I doubt that too many "individual gun rights" advocates are much concerned about Florida's attempt to thwart the most fundamental right - the right to vote.

Speaking for me only

The drumbeat for Ben Bernanke to save us is getting louder from Democratic pundits. Brad Plumer at Ezra's place:

So can anything break the economy out of its current doldrums? If natural forces aren’t going to produce a fast recovery, Smith argues, then the Federal Reserve has to step in: “The Fed has to say that it will tolerate more inflation or will be more heavily focused on unemployment. This way folks engaging in long term projects will know that even if the economy picks up they can still expect to experience low financing costs.”

It can't hurt I suppose, but really, didn't we all agree that in a zero lower bound environment, aren't the Fed's tools of limited utility? Isn't government spending to boost aggregate demand the only real tool that works here? Karl Smith, who owns up to a missed call on the economy recovering (he thought a strong recovery was forming in the winter) writes: