There's no free lunch. (Except for conservatives.)

The Tea Partiers are furious about out-of-control government spending. And the G.O.P. is happy to ride the protesters' coattails, even if the TP's are equally disgusted with real and perceived wasteful spending by both parties in government.

What you don't hear from either Tea Parties or the G.O.P. is what they would cut by way of government spending, because getting specific about cuts would anger the wider general public. Among the reasons the G.O.P. indulges in time-wasting exercises in which it purportedly shows how the books can be balanced without painful cuts in government programs is that even conservative voters do not want substantive cuts in public services.

The chart tells the story:

John Sides at Salon has the background on the chart, the methodology and meaning for "conflicted conservatives."

And at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum describes the conservatives' untenable position:

The lesson from this? It turns out that conservative politicians really do represent their base pretty well. They like to yammer endlessly about cutting spending, but when push comes to shove, there's not much they really think we're spending too much on. It's all just venting.

While it's a mistake to exaggerate the Tea Partiers' influence as a sustainable movement - their discontents are so wide-ranging and often contradictory as to make a coherent movement difficult if not impossible - it's wrong also to dismiss the grievances they highlight.

1. The banks, Detroit, and reckless home buyers got bailed out - in effect, rewarded for bad behavior. A common plaint among Tea Baggers is "Where's my bailout?" What they mean by that is, "I played by the rules. And these folks who didn't are getting money from Uncle Sam - my money." That's a valid complaint in a nation that puts fairness high on its list of shared values.

2. The Tea Baggers are alone in commanding the media stage. Where are the progressives to confront them or stage their own protests, on behalf of Americans about to lose their shelter and the many who already have, those who've declared personal bankruptcy (more than 1,800 a day) because of medical bills they can't pay; and to argue that impoverishing university grads carrying $100,000 in debt the moment they don their mortar board is no way to ensure America's competitive success in the "knowledge economy" of the 21st century? Is there a sign in the town square that says "Tea Baggers Only"?

3. Obama and Dem leaders on the Hill - and for that matter, every federal Dem lawmaker - have done a miserable job explaining their bailouts of the American economy (the stimulus, which already has saved or created upward of 2 million jobs, but is decried as extravagance by conservatives). Or why keeping people in their homes rather than allowing them to be foreclosed upon props up home values throughout a neighborhood - including those owned by Tea Baggers. On the real and present danger of the current private-insurance status quo to people claiming be perfectly happy with that status quo (in contrast with those lacking insurance, and those who are under-insured), because an insurer like Anthem/Wellpoint will hit you with back-to-back double-digit premium hikes in California (a 39% hike this year, just announced).

I commend Tea Baggers for inconveniencing themselves in exercising their First Amendment rights, showing up in all kinds of weather to make their point. (Though I could do without the placards that depict Obama as Hitler.) And I despair that they are occupying a void left to them by stay-at-home progressives.

You have to fight for progress, as the Revolutionaries did, when only one-third of colonists backed them, one-third were adamantly opposed to breaking ties with Britain (and exiled themselves to Canada as "United Empire Loyalists"), and one-third were in the middle, waiting to be convinced. This is the way of all progress - you have to fight for it. So far only the voices of reaction have been heard from. Progressives have lobbed a few grenades - at each other, over reforms they deem insufficiently robust. 

Note: Americans routinely exaggerate how much the U.S. spends on foreign aid, imagining the federal outlay to be about 20% of total federal spending. They naturally think that enormous savings are to be reaped by cutting foreign-aid outlays. But U.S. foreign assistance actually accounts for only a tiny fraction of federal spending and a scant 0.2% of America's GDP. Bush often referred to America as the world's most generous nation. Much of America's "foreign aid" is actually military assistance to favored, strategic allies. If by what we mean as foreign aid is strictly humanitarian assistance - as most Americans understand the term to mean - the Norwegians lead, at 1.2% of GDP, followed by Sweden, at 1.1%. Canada's foreign aid spending is an abysmal 0.28% of GDP. This despite the world's wealthiest nations, including the U.S. and Canada, having pledged years ago to achieve a unanimously agreed-upon target of 1.0% of GDP in foreign-aid spending by 2000. Only those two Scandinavian nations have achieved the mutually agreed goal.

 

 

 

Higher, faster, stronger, yadda, yadda.

Some Olympix notes:

Vancouver takes gold when it comes to public displays of inebriation. (Time)

The city of Vancouver, and the ski village of Whistler, are terrific hosts for these Olympic Games. In Vancouver, the air is clean, the public transit is scarily efficient, and the harbors, with the snow-capped mountains in the backdrop, are picturesque. Whistler, two hours to the north and home of the skiing, sliding, and Nordic events, is a winter wonderland. But let's face it: if public intoxication was an Olympic sport, Vancouver and Whistler would own the podium.

Russian regrets after a 7-3 quarter-finals loss to Canada's men's Olympic team. 

Shames of the Olympiad: For Russia, the magic finally is gone. (Time)

After the much-vaunted Russian hockey team was embarrassed in a 7-3 loss to Canada in the quarterfinals of the Vancouver Olympics, head coach Vyacheslav Bykov predicted the reaction the team would receive back home. "Let's put up guillotines and scaffolds up on Red Square. We have 35 people in the squad — let's finish them all off," he told reporters. Unlike his team's shooting on Wednesday night, he was spot on. "If you were asleep, you were lucky," cried the headline of the Sport Express daily on Friday. The state news agency RIA Novosti put it more succinctly: "Nightmare in Vancouver." 

Well, there's always the next Summer Games, in London in 2012. Pick your favorite logo designs from the past 20 or so Games collected and presented by arts site ISO50:

 

How seriously to take the Facebook backlash.

The NYT, reporting last fall on an exodus of Facebook fans, found no shortage of "experts" declaring the social-networking site to be past its prime. And that was before the new trend of "unfriending," editing out former Facebook sharers of secrets and BBQ rituals.

But that culling of the herd seemed to me a natural progression, indeed a sign of commitment on the part of Facebook loyalists who, like the rest of us, take the trouble to similarly edit our e-mail and other address books. If Facebookers were quitting, why bother disposing of "unfriends" from those early days when the initial befriending was not especially disciplined? (And how could it be, when you didn't know how an online friend would behave?)

In light of the premature reports of Facebook's imminent demise, a prescient Guardian analysis from last fall of the "Facebook fade" by Phoebe Connelly seems worth reviewing, to distinguish Facebook's real from its passing problems:

Quitting an online space because it no longer has cache isn't new...Friendster, LiveJournal, GeoCities – the list of used-to-be-popular places is endless. Before Facebook became uncool, it was MySpace – launched a year before its rival – that commentators were rushing to declare "over"...

But regardless of what cool actually means, the big brother and corporate control concerns are real ones. When corporations own online spaces, users do not always have a say in the ways their online socialising is used. Facebook faced the same uproar as Yahoo when it similarly announced a change to its terms of service this past February [2009], giving it greater control over user-content (it quickly reversed the changes).

The profit being made by these corporations is dependent on user participation – the updating of status messages, the tagging of photos, and the writing on walls. And while those polled by Heffernan are largely concerned about the privacy issues of having their social interactions indexed and archived, the less-noticed threat is that by housing our memories and data in the cloud, we risk loss just as much as we do when we toss the negatives and stick our photos in a box.

This week's Gmail outage – when users lost access to their email for nearly two hours – was yet another reminder that entrusting your data to the internet is no guarantee that you, or anyone else, will always be able to access it.

 

 

 

Whaaa...you have to know stuff to be president?

In a Thursday appearance on "Good Morning America," Bill O'Reilly said of a certain former Alaska governor who is a frequent guest on his "O'Reilly Factor" that:

Sarah Palin needs to go to college. Political college, world affairs college, and she is. She's hired a bunch of advisers and they're giving her a whole bunch of tracks to learn, because it is a sophisticated deal.

I dunno about sophisticated. Seems like every time Obama reveals his relative sophistication he gets slapped down as "professorial" (and worse, among rednecks) and drops a half-point in public-approval polling.

While you were out...

Science reported that cellphone users can be tracked with 93% accuracy. (Nobel Intent)

We'd like to think of ourselves as dynamic, unpredictable individuals, but according to new research, that's not the case at all. In a study published in last week's Science, researchers looked at customer location data culled from cellular service providers. By looking at how customers moved around, the authors of the study found that it may be possible to predict human movement patterns and location up to 93 percent of the time. These findings may be useful in multiple fields, including city planning, mobile communication resource management, and anticipating the spread of viruses.

In light of Tiger Woods, Aiko Toyoda, et al, Time's Belinda Luscombe asked, Why do men keep apologizing?

Used to be that seeing a man apologize was a little like catching a glimpse of a Bengal tiger in its natural habitat: rare, thrilling, attainable only for truly patient souls. Now it's more like seeing a mountain lion on a busy highway. People wince, wonder how he managed to get himself in this situation and hope it will be over soon.

A British study found that self-described liberals might, sort of, be smarter than conservatives. (Time)

Are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so. The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse 'evolutionarily novel' values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Defense hardliner Max Boot argued that Dems should run on their national-security record, which is admirable, no what Cheney thinks of it. (Atlantic)

The White House knows that the Republican narrative isn't accurate. President Obama's policies are certainly informed by civil rights, but they are also the most effective. Gen. David Petraeusis among the many military officials to agree that torture doesn't provide good intelligence and is a net loss for the U.S. civilian trials are far more effectiveat securing convictions than military tribunals. Yet the White House political team sees such policies as radioactive, at times actively opposingthem. Instead of dooming its party to electoral losses, the White House must get out in front of the coming national security debate. The message to sell is that President Obama's policies make Americans safer. In addition to being more politically viable than high-minded rhetoric about civil rights, this also happens to be, by every indication, true. If Democrats can sell their national security as making Americans safer, they'll not only have won an immediate victory, they'll have turned one of the party's greatest weaknesses into what could be among its greatest strengths.

 

 

Joshua Green drew our attention to the management secrets of the Grateful Dead. (Atlantic)

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethno­musicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.

LiveScience explained why "sleeping on it" really does help in problem-solving.

The researchers suggest that unconscious thought, contrary to the way many of us think about it, is an active, goal-directed thought process. The primary difference is that in unconscious thought, the usual biases that are a part of our conscious thinking are absent. In unconscious thought, we weigh the importance of the components that make up our decision more equally, leaving our preconceptions at the door of consciousness.

 

Inner-city Detroit, looking east. The glass-encased silos of the Renaissance Center in the distance are world headquarters of General Motors Co. 

The WSJ reported that Detroit is embracing its shrinking status rather than resisting the inevitable, a model for other declining Rust Belt towns in need of reinventing themselves.

'We've got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods' to sustain and preserve, [Detroit Mayor Dave Bing] said at a recent public appearance, adding: "That's something that's possible here in Detroit." Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn't touted big development plans or talked of a 'renaissance'. Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again...'This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,' said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. "[Bing] deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this." Soon after being elected to a full term in November, Mr. Bing began cutting back on city services such as buses and laying off hundreds of municipal workers. The mayor is now making plans to shutter or consolidate city departments and tear down 10,000 vacant buildings. And Mr. Bing is supporting efforts to shrink the capacity of the city's school system by half.

Boston celebrity chef Gus Rancatore cheerily confessed to stealing ice-cream recipes. (Atlantic)

Friends often ask me, "Where do you get ideas for new ice cream flavors?" and the answer is usually that we steal them...I was looking for anything that would stand up well to being frozen in cream. Most cereals turn to mush but Grape-Nuts are indestructible, and after I started making the flavor I learned that I had rediscovered the Grape-Nuts pudding that is so popular in northern New England and Eastern Canada, and the Grape-Nuts ice cream Jamaicans miss so much after moving to Boston...All of our South Asian flavors came about because of suggestions from customers. Years ago a professor from Harvard set us off on this path by suggesting Saffron and Khulfee ice creams...Italian flavors like Nocciola and Gianduia were the inevitable result of traveling to Italy. We're still trying to make a Rice flavor as good as I once had at Vivoli's in Florence. Cathedrals and gelati represent the high points of Italian culture. [Emphasis added.] A friend came back from Japan with green tea Kit Kat bars so we began freezing and chopping up Kit Kat bars and we began paying attention to Kit Kat variations in Japan. This led to Malted Kit Kat ice cream and White Chocolate with Lemon. The green tea Kit Kat was explained as a snack given to students during exams because of a pun that translated as "study study." 

In its dessert favorites, Atlantic food writer Jennifer Ward Barber discovered "the soul of Canada."

Just what is Canadian cuisine, anyway? A hodgepodge of specialties, it turns out. Like the Nanaimo Bar...I'd eaten Nanaimo Bars—a three-layered sweet consisting of a cookie base, custard middle, and chocolate ganache topping—my whole life...but I didn't discover the dessert's origins until I moved to West Africa, where I lived and worked on a hospital ship docked in Benin. For our monthly community night that December, all 300 crew members got into groups and performed short skits about how we celebrated the holidays in our various countries. The South Africans surfed. The Brits recited a hilarious, irreverent poem. Us Canadians donned toques and sang "Let It Snow"—and one of the women served her homemade Nanaimo Bars....I passed through the town of Nanaimo five years after returning from Benin...The square I bought revealed all the decadence I had remembered: the firm chocolate topping broke when I bit into it, giving way to that familiar, almost cloying yellow custard and chewy, coconut-graham base studded with nuts.

 

Nanaimo Bars, pride of Vancouver Island - and Canada.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hamlet, the Facebook news feed edition.

By Sarah Schmelling, author of Ophelia Joined the Group Maidens Who Don't Float: Classic Lit Signs on to Facebook (2009), via McSweeneys.net, where the work appears in its entirety.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something's rotten around here.

Polonius says Hamlet's crazy ... crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

Hamlet added England to the Places I've Been application.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don't Float.

Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone.

The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

Horatio says well that was tragic.

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We'll take it from here.

Denmark is now Norwegian.

Cures for creative block. (And all-round procrastination.)

Design site ISO50 asked 25 artists worldwide to share their methods for overcoming creative block. Four samples:

Generally speaking, I seem to get a block quite often (as I’m guessing most creatives do?). I’ve found the only way to get through it, is to just keep working and getting ideas down no matter how insignificant they may seem. Hitting a brick wall and trying to get over it can be the hardest and most frustrating thing in the world! Most of my inspiration comes from lyrics / books etc… so reading and listening to music seems to work quite well for me – the words will spark something for me to build on and give me a small thought to explore and see where it takes me.

–Si Scott is a British graphic designer and illustrator.

When I have a creative block, I do a few different things:

• Take long showers. Somehow I can think little differently while I’m in the shower. It washes away my old thoughts and I feel renewed.
• Clean my surroundings. I cannot think clearly when there’s a mess around me.
• If it still doesn’t work, I go for a bike ride and I try not to think about the project at all.

Somehow things always work out in the end.

- Ji Lee is the creative director of Google Creative Labs.

The first and best thing to do for me is to stop trying to force it and step away for a bit. The importance of taking a break can’t be stressed enough. Then usually I find a lot of inspiration in bookstores. It’s really one of my favorite pastimes and one of the best ways I relax. A stack of books & magazines and some coffee. Sometimes I’ll bring my computer but most of the time its a good chance to get away from a screen and flip through pages and just read, look, and absorb a lot of great stuff. Art books & magazines, music, culture, design, sports, tattoos…the things I enjoy the most. I load up on that stuff and that almost always helps me through. build on and give me a small thought to explore and see where it takes me.

-Chuck Anderson is a designer/artist based in Michigan.

I often find myself in a creative rut of some sort...When I find myself in these situations I notice that the more I push myself to get results the more I tend to come up short. Regardless, I have several weapons in my rut fighting arsenal; walks, conversations, drawing, reading, records, magazines, vintage shopping, window shopping, digging in old sketchbooks, staring off into space, yoga, TV, red wine, scotch, weed, etc, etc, etc. I definitely try to avoid trolling the web in search of inspiration. It seems too easy and it has become too commonplace in my opinion.

At the end of the day, most of what I feel are my strongest ideas just hit me when I least expect it…When I’m bed, the shower, on the subway, or a meeting or something. When I am not focused on the quest for ideas. It’s like all the energy I release looking for them causes a cloud to build around me that has to clear before then can get to me.

–Christopher David Ryan of Atmostheory, a design studio in Maine.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan.

 

 

 

Chait vs. Sullivan: The case for rants.

The current dogfight between New Republic's Jonathan Chait and veteran political blogger Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic (and former editor of New Republic, as luck would have it), is worth a boo for the ostenible topic at hand - the assessment that each has of Middle East geopolitics.

I find it even more worthwhile as a debate between highly evolved intellects, regardless of the topic. I'm interested in the tools they use - logic, genuine compliments, backhanded compliments, sophistry, both cool and impassioned rhetoric. These two combatants are pretty close to emptying the toolbox.

The current entertaining spectacle brings to mind a similar fight between Sullivan and Eric Alterman early in the previous decade. That was an extended take-no-prisoners war of words between a then pro-Iraq-war Sullivan (now a relapsed progressive who considers the Iraq misadventure the height of folly) and an anti-war Alterman whose greatest gift in his young career has been his detailed exposure of the dangerous banality and intellectual laziness of the MSM "punditocracy," a term I believe Eric coined, in two important books, Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (1999), and What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (2003).  

For me, the assertions made by Chait and Sullivan that the other party doesn't understand Mideast political sensibilities is a sideshow. (No one does, or soon will - so much of it is underpinned by pride, anger and irrationality.) What does interest me is the weapons of choice in this as in any debate, when each debater is at the top of his or her considerable form.

Chait has struck a patronizing tone in this current argument, and Sullivan one of personal hurt and remorse if it should be that he has misrepresented any expert whose works he has cited in his writing on the Mideast over the years. (Having been exactly wrong on Iraq, Sullivan has learned first-hand the virtues of humility. Which for me, at least, gives his arguments that much more authority.)

I use this post to highlight just one of the debate weapons, the pointing out of inconsistency and possibly hypocrisy. It was a mistake for Chait to find Sullivan lacking in restrained commentary in their current set-to. Sullivan, a blogger non-stop since 1990, has a keen memory. He promptly unearthed this gem of unrestrained commentary written by one Jonathan Chait in New Republic back on March 15, 2004, under the headline "The Case For Bush Hatred: Mad About You":

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism--"I inherited half my father's friends and all his enemies"--conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Chait ends this essay candidly describing it as a "rant." Occasions sometimes call for rants, and this was one such, about which Chait need offer no apology. Bush had just committed the biggest American foreign-policy blunder in modern history. But accusing Andy of having a weakness for rants without disclosing one's own indulgence in that most satisfying of exercises obviously backfired.

If you take Duyba whole, we're compelled to acknowledge the unprecedented $5 billion in African HIV/AIDS relief that Bush got through a reluctant G.O.P.-controlled Congress; a No Child Left Behind initiative which, if underfunded and simplistic in many particulars, was an overdue intervention to arrest declining U.S. educational standards (and found its Senate champion in Edward M. Kennedy); a Katrina disaster in which the then-Democrat governor of Louisana and Democratic mayor of New Orleans were actually more culpable than Bush, for all the agreed-upon federal failings; and a remarkably seamless transition between Bush and Obama that was insisted upon by Bush, and initiated by Dubya even before Election Day in 2008.

Still, Bush was a terrible president, on balance, and pussyfooting around that, as the MSM did (and still do), has not served the Republic well. And so the lesson: Sometimes, nothing less than a rant will do. And if an engaged and enraged Sullivan has expressed himself in that rhetorical form - as he occasionally does now in fighting the good fight to bring Bush-era war criminals to justice - more power to him. Sullivan is not to be mistaken for a one-note ranter; if such were the case he wouldn't merit your attention, as I believe he does.

So does the estimable Chait. But Chait too often is the voice of irony, a hallmark of the New Yorker in its supposed golden era under editor William Shawn. At least one brave soul during that time aptly described the New Yorker's softly-softly ironic tone as the voice of "people who care, but not enough to do anything about it." On some issues, the stakes are too high to indulge in irony.

America currently has a president with an acute appreciation of irony. Progressives, especially, would appreciate at least one full-bodied rant from Obama before 2012.

 

 

 

One for all...

Common sense on healthcare reform from NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen:

The Tea Party movement is angry about waste, bail-outs for the rich and spiraling debt. They detest big government. But if waste and debt are really what’s bothering them, how about the waste in the more than 1,800 daily health-care related personal bankruptcies, the 25 to 30 percent of some corporate insurers’ costs going on administration (versus 6 percent for Medicare), the sky-rocketing health premiums that are undermining U.S. corporations (and so taking jobs), the endless paperwork of private reimbursement procedures, and the needless deaths?

Americans don’t want a European nanny state — fine! But, as a lawyer friend, Manuel Wally, put it to me, “When it comes to health it makes sense to involve government, which is accountable to the people, rather than corporations, which are accountable to shareholders.”

All the fear-mongering talk of “nationalizing” 17% of the economy is nonsense. Government, through Medicare and Medicaid, is already administering almost half of American health care and doing so with less waste than the private sector. Per capita Medicare costs for common benefits grew 4.9 percent between 1998 and 2008, against 7.1 percent for private insurers. Why not offer Medicare as a choice — a choice — to everyone? Aren’t Republicans about choice?

 

Ooo, I love it when you talk stupid to me.

 
Health care summit Thursday at Blair House, the guest house for visiting heads of state directly opposite the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Facing camera, left to right: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader John Boehner.

WaPo's Dana Milbank, latest offender, chides Obama as professorial for speaking in complete sentences at the healthcare summit. Guess that makes me an elitist too. And John Podhoretz complains that Obama was "startlingly condescending at moments."  

But as New Republic's Jonathan Chait says, "How can that be avoided when you're trying to have a high-level discussion with people who reply either on debunked claims at best and talk radio-level slogans at worst?

(Note to Podhoretz: Beware adverbs, the most dangerous grammatical form. Or were you behind the door when they were handing out Elements of Style? A good rule of thumb: Say "startlingly" aloud. Doesn't roll off the tongue? Then don't write it.)