Complete withdrawal is the only Iraq plan we can accept from a Democratic candidate. Luckily it looks like Obama is on the right side of this.

I agree with more eloquent Sifu Tweety. Electability is a bullshit way to pick a candidate for president. Especially when we judge electability based on how half-assed a candidate is on the issues. If we are going to trust the system of primaries we must vote for the candidates we want to win, not the candidate we think middle america independents will want. Everyone looks to McGovern as evidence for what happens when you pick a candidate with your heart, not your head. But it is not 1972 anymore. Vote your conscience in the primaries and I suspect we will end up with a good candidate. A truly “too liberal” candidate just won’t win the primaries. I agree with Dennis Kucinich on the issues, but I guaruntee he won’t win the primary, even if every democrat votes for their favorite candidate, with no political calculus involved.

This is a tragic story. Our Immigration enforcement system is seriously fucked up. This has nothing to do with national security, but rather a system that tolerates substantial error because it doesn’t care about the parties unfairly affected by arbitrary and sloppy enforcement. I seriously don’t understand what policy goals are advanced by tolerating an administrative agency that is as incompetent as DHS. This IS NOT just a partisan issue. Check out this opinion from the Conservative pragmatist Richard Posner.

Tolerating these kinds of errors as innocuous is basically equivalent to admitting that the administration is allowed to do indirectly what they can’t do directly (keep people out of the country who they don’t want in (for whatever reason) even when the law will not tolerate their deportation). Enforcement matters. And the more we tolerate this kind of bullshit, the more the Administration is emboldened to try to get away with whatever the fuck they want.

There needs to immigration reform, but a solution can’t focus solely on false negatives. And it’s hard not to ascribe the worst motives (desire to preserve a certain kind of identity) to people who only care about false negatives and ignore the false positives that our system quietly endorses.

Ten years of Obama coverage, courtesy of the Chicago Reader.

The latest and most bizarre criticism of Obama:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=79996

Apparently, political positions remain consistent over time and we can neatly divorce all positions from their historical context and assume that a democrat today is no different from 1950s dixiecrat or 1860s secessionist.