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Is this what's keeping Palin from announcing her candidacy?

It's those emails.

The governor has come and gone, another has assumed the office and then has been elected in his own right, and activist Andree McLeod, four journalists and an author are still waiting for the state to release the public record of Sarah Palin's e-mails.

Imagine what it would be like if she were a candidate.  She'd have to produce them soonest.  There have been -- count 'em! -- 16 stalls.  16 delays in handing over emails the public has the right to see. 16 including two pending.  That puts revelation day at May 31, 2011.

One of the journalists, David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, has written that he had hoped to have at least some of the e-mails in time for the November 2008 election. Now he's wondering whether they'll be available before the 2012 presidential election.

McLeod asked the state for every e-mail written by or received by Palin on her state e-mail account and all e-mails in any private account maintained by Palin and her husband that related to state business. ...McClatchy

Andree McLeod and David Corn aren't alone in wanting access to those emails.

The requests were made by several news organizations, including NBC News, MSNBC.com,  The Associated Press, Mother Jones, Pro Publica and the Juneau Empire, in 2008 after Sen. John McCain picked her as his vice-presidential candidate.

State regulations allow the attorney general to approve a delay if information released in public records would hurt the office of the governor, and three different attorneys general have received requests from the office to delay the release of the emails since Palin was in office.

Is there any American left who claims an IQ above 80 and  who thinks Palin would be the best president to represent the interests of the country?  Or any interests other than her own?

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Kind of looks like Palin is yesterday's dog's dinner.  Or am I mixing that up with running for dog catcher?

Perhaps the most discouraging new number as it relates to Palin's presidential ambitions was a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, which showed that 49 percent of Republicans said that they were now "very" or "somewhat likely" to support a Palin presidential bid.

At first glance, 49 percent may appear to be a promising slice of the GOP electorate, but it is down dramatically from the 67 percent of Republicans who said that they were likely to support a Palin run when they were asked in a previous CNN poll conducted in December of 2008. ...Real Clear Politics

This should upset some Wayners and wankers out there:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continued her reign as Americans' most admired woman, besting former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the annual Gallup poll. ...The Hill

And this devastating piece from the New Statesman:

Does familiarity breed contempt? In the case of Sarah Palin it appears so. A new poll by the US firm Public Policy Polling has found that Palin's unpopularity extends even to her home state of Alaska. In the Last Frontier just 33 per cent of voters have a favourable opinion of her, compared to 58 per cent with a negative view. The only place where voters take a dimmer view of Palin is Massachusetts, the most liberal state in the Union.

As Public Policy Polling notes, what makes the Alaskan numbers particularly bad is that Palin is significantly more unpopular among Republicans here than she is elsewhere.

Serious lies about Afghanistan?

Citing evidence that Taliban insurgents have expanded their reach across Afghanistan, aid groups and security analysts in the country are challenging as misleading the Obama administration's recent claim that insurgents now control less territory than they did a year ago.

"Absolutely, without any reservation, it is our opinion that the situation is a lot more insecure this year than it was last year," said Nic Lee, the director of the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, an independent organization that analyzes security dangers for aid groups.

"We don't see COIN has had any impact on the five-year trajectory," he said, referring to the counterinsurgency strategy that U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, has championed. ...

... Insurgent attacks have jumped at least 66 percent this year, according to the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office. ...McClatchy

The UN agrees that things have gotten more dangerous, not less.

It gets worse.  How about this for double trouble:  "Last month, the Pentagon concluded that Afghan insurgents' "capabilities and operational reach have been qualitatively and geographically expanding." Asked whether that assessment conflicts with the White House assertion that the Taliban control less territory, a military spokesman said that both could be true."

See?  It's not lying when anything and everything can be "true."

The only real deficit cause

Jonathan Bernstein, writing at the Plum Line in WaPo, nails it -- the reason why it's almost impossible to reduce the deficit.

Q: Why are deficits problems for the political system, anyway?

A: Politicians respond to incentives.  Short run, the direct effects of lower taxes and higher government spending are noticeable, and voters like both things.  Thus there's an incentive for governments organized around responding to political incentives to run deficits.

Just try and get around that and you're one politician who isn't going to survive the next election cycle.  Do tea partyers get it?  Not so far.

The only way to not have a deficit is not start a deficit, if you see what I mean.  And yes, Bernstein (channeling Matt Yglesias) addresses that "obvious" solution.

Q: Shouldn't we deal with long-term deficits well in advance, so that painful short-term adjustments aren't necessary?

A: As Yglesias says, such "preemptive" deals are highly unlikely, because they impose immediate costs on politicians (who will be blamed for unpopular spending cuts or tax increases, even if they don't take effect yet) with not only no tangible short-term benefits, but no short-term benefits at all.  Moreover, deals aren't written in stone; pols who make preemptive deals may find that they lose their jobs and that their replacements blow up the deficit again.  In my view, that means that politicians would be foolish to make such deals absent other, more pressing reasons (see: the bond markets, above), but I suppose not everyone would agree.  In some situations, it might be a good gamble for a party with a temporary majority to try to "lock" in their long-term preferences even knowing nothing can ever be really locked in.

Does that mean democracy is impossible, hopeless?  Check it out.

Finding others to blame, warrior-style

Wait a minute!  Are we becoming a society in which, the farther you travel up the professional and economic ladders, the more unscrupulous you're likely to be? 

Looks that way.  Certain we now have plenty of evidence that's true of the military.  The Washington Post scrutinizes the reports on the battle of Wanat in Afghanistan in mid-2008.

An initial draft of the Wanat history, which was obtained by The Washington Post and other media outlets in the summer of 2009, placed the preponderance of blame for the losses on the higher-level battalion and brigade commanders who oversaw the mission, saying they failed to provide the proper resources to the unit in Wanat.

The final history, released in recent weeks, drops many of the earlier conclusions and instead focuses on failures of lower-level commanders.

I think we saw the same kind of irresponsibility at high levels in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, in Falluja.   As for Wanat, David Petraeus tried to do the right thing.

The findings in the early draft history of the battle and pressure from lawmakers, including Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), prompted Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. Central Command, to order an investigation into Wanat.

The initial investigation, conducted by a three-star Marine Corps general and completed in the spring, found that the company and battalion commanders were "derelict in their duty" to provide proper oversight and resources to the soldiers fighting at Wanat.

Petraeus reviewed the findings and concluded that based on Army doctrine, the brigade commander, who was the senior U.S. officer in the area, also failed in his job. He recommended that all three officers be issued letters of reprimand, which would essentially end their careers.

After the officers appealed their reprimands, a senior Army general in the United States reversed the decision to punish the officers, formerly members of the the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Simple as that and just as (apparently) dishonorable.  The father of one of the dead platoon leaders at Wanat has made a reasonable protest, one which should be joined by top brass and civilian leadership as well as all Americans.

David Brostrom, the father of the dead platoon leader at Wanat, said he will meet next month with senior Army officials and Army historians at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in an effort to get them to further revise the Wanat history. He doesn't expect the Army to change the record, which is considered final.

"For me, this has never been about trying to get officers fired," Brostrom said. "It is about trying to get the Army to admit and learn from its mistakes."

Learn?  Admit?  Not popular concepts in America these days.  Respect for education and accountability are low on the list of most New Year's resolutions, I betcha.

Oh, Joe!

The right's latest sore loserman continues to lose ungraciously.

Joe Miller said late Sunday that he would no longer try to prevent the certification of the Alaska Senate race, but he did not concede and he did not congratulate the unofficial winner, Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Unofficial results show Ms. Murkowski winning the race by more than 10,000 votes, and she is expected to be sworn in for her new term on Jan. 5. But a stay in federal court, in response to a lawsuit by Mr. Miller, has prevented state election officials from certifying her as the winner.

The state and Ms. Murkowski have repeatedly expressed concerns that Mr. Miller’s legal challenges could leave Alaska with just one senator when Congress reconvenes in January. ...NYT

Doesn't the guy know how much he's embarrassing himself? 

Obama makes liberals mad

But that says more about contemporary liberals than it does about Obama.  Come on.  Face it.  We were full of great notions about the beautiful Barack during his campaign but many of us didn't pay all that much attention to what he was saying and -- even more important -- to what he'd been writing about for years.

James Kloppenberg paid attention.  He's paid very, very close attention not just to Obama's books but about everything the future candidate wrote during his years at Harvard Law.  An easy-going guy, Obama got fed up the other day and suggested that we cool it.

President Obama:  ...This notion that somehow we are going to compromise too much reminds me of the debate we had during health care.  This is the public option debate all over again!  So I pass a signature piece of legislation where we finally get health care for all Americans, something that Democrats had been fighting for a hundred years.  But because there was a provision in there that they didn't get -- that would have affected maybe a couple of million people -- and even though we got health insurance for thirty million people and the potential for lower premiums for a hundred million people, that somehow that was a sign of weakness.  And compromise.  If that's the standard by which are measure success or core principles, then let's face it -- we will never get anything done.  People will have the satisfaction of having a purist's conviction and no victories for the American people.  And we'll be able to feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are and how tough we are.  And in the meantime the American people are still seeing themselves not able to get health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.  Or not being able to pay their bills because their unemployment insurance ran out.  That can't be the measure of how we think about our public service.

James Kloppenberg, who knows how Obama's head works, was interviewed last week about his new book on Obama, "Reading Obama," in which he gives the background of the new president's principles, his pragmatism, and the actions which have annoyed his "purist" fellow Democrats. There's no question about the indignant purism of the contemporary left.  It's very similar to the louder and more ignorant purism of the right!  Not altogether unlike the tea partyers, we like to "feel good about ourselves and sanctimonious about how pure our intentions are ...," as the president said.

Here's Kloppenberg talking with Marty Moss Coane at "Radio Times."

MMC:  Jim Kloppenberg, that was the sentence that really riled up a lot of liberals in the Democratic party.

JK:  Exactly.  I think there are indeed purists out there, people with whom I share particular principles -- I think of myself as a person on the left -- but I think we have to realize that Barack Obama has been, from the beginning, someone who sees a path forward more through compromise and moderation than through strident proclamation of his own principles.  He is someone who, throughout his life, has been a mediator.  He's been someone who was able to bring people together who thought they had nothing in common.  It seems to me as though he's very  much trying to do that as president of the US.  He's up against a very well-funded opposition on the right and also people on the left who are, at times, almost equally impatient with him because he is moving in a direction that is out-of-tune with the prevailing rhythms of American politics these days.  Most of what we hear is stridently partisan.  When someone speaks about the need to break down that partisanship, it tends to rile the people at both ends of the spectrum.  But I think in addition to being mediator by nature, he also understands that opinion polls indicate that most Americans are with him.  There may be 15 or 20% at each end of the political spectrum, but the vast majority of Americans on most issues -- even the most hot-button issues of the culture wars -- tend to cluster more toward the middle.  I think what the president is trying to do is to shift the center of political debate toward more moderation, toward more civility, and toward a greater concern with his core principle of equity.  I think we've see that pretty consistently during the first two years of his presidency.

MMC:  You wrote recently in Newsweek -- and this was looking at Obama's critics on the left and on the right -- "He doesn't not share their self-righteous certainty."  Ouch.

JK:  Exactly.  That's where I think the legacy of philosophical pragmatism comes in.  If you view yourself as someone who is less than certain on many issues but willing to experiment with alternatives, then you are likelier to be willing to compromise than if you are someone who believes you have privileged access to The Truth.  What's striking to me, what interested me the first time I read "Dream of My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope" is that Obama is, himself, a skeptic.  He's a Christian -- I believe that's fairly clear.  He is a believe in the truth of Christianity.  But he's the inheritor of a tradition of Christian skepticism that goes all the way back to the early church.  This is a distinguished tradition.  It hasn't received very much attention in America in recent years.  But I think it is possible both to have particular and very deeply held convictions as he does and to be doubtful about how exactly you translate those convictions into political policy.

I don't think Kloppenberg puts a foot wrong here, though his equanimity may also annoy fellow Democrats.  It shouldn't.  And it doesn't, really:  Obama gets very high ratings from most Dems even as we knock him.

More of the discussion with James Kloppenberg and Salon's Steve Kornacki here.