Twitter roundup

Here are the latest items from my Twitter feed (follow it!):
-Headline: "Obama concedes he hasn't brought country together." In other news, the sun came up today.
-Are the advantages of prediction markets being oversold?
-Michael Kinsley on the Reid quote as meta-gaffe: "It is entirely the creation of the process of publicizing it."
-Ezra Klein notes how pundits and opinion editors lack even a basic understanding of most policy issues. Sad but true.
-TPM's Justin Elliott traces the spread of the apparent myth that Flight 253 bomber had a one-way ticket.
-Sarah Palin reportedly believed Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
-Birther conspiracy theories are so outlandish that Glenn Beck thinks they're nuts. Meanwhile, Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) has jumped on the bandwagon.
-Super-cool economics field experiments.

Comments

[David]

I agree with Michael Kinsley that Reid's comment was not racist. However, I'll be impressed with Kinsley's sincerity when he defends a conservative who makes a comparable statement.

Rush Limbaugh just made a comment about Obamam and the Dems making political hay out of the Haiti disaster. Limbaugh's statement was so comparable to Reid's that Politico described it as a riff on Reid's remark. Let's see if Kinsley (or Brendan) defends Rush Limbaugh.

Although his current statement wasn't racist IMHO, Reid's baseless critism of Clarence Thomas's writings was indeed racist. Jan Crawford of CBS writes:

We all know Thomas’s compelling life story: growing in the harrowing days of Jim Crow in the segregated South, struggling to break free from poverty and racism, becoming the first black child to integrate all-white schools, graduating with honors from the seminary and Holy Cross before Yale Law School. Thomas succeeded on his unquestioned intellect and his determination and hard work.

Thomas is one of the Court’s most original and compelling thinkers, and his opinions are praised by scholars on the Left and the Right as important contributions. You may not agree with a single word Clarence Thomas says, and it may drive you crazy that he took Thurgood Marshall’s seat on the Supreme Court, but you can’t call him stupid or deny he’s an important intellectual force.

Unless you’re Harry Reid.

In an interview with the late Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press, Reid called Thomas “an embarrassment to the Supreme Court” whose “opinions are poorly written,” and said he hadn’t “done a good job” as a justice. But Antonin Scalia? Well, Reid said, he’s a different story. Scalia, Reid told Tim, “is one smart guy.”

[daniel rotter]

Reid didn't mention Thomas's race in his (supposedly) "baseless" criticisms of Thomas's writings. And Obama and the Democrats haven't made "political hay" out of the Haiti earthquake, contrary to Limbaugh and David.

[jd]

Regarding racism and Reid's comment: A lot has been made about a double standard on issues of race between democrats and republicans. It is true that democrats seem to get a bit more of the benefit of the doubt in these instances, but what republicans seem to be unwilling to face up to is the fact that there is an understandable reason for that double standard. The democrats certainly have a lot to answer for regarding their failure to act against racism over the course of the last few decades. However, ever since the 1960s - the passage of civil rights legislation under LBJ and Nixon's pursuit of the so-called Southern Strategy, the republicans spent most of the second half of the 20th century on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. Their refusal to openly face up to that legacy, I think, is at least partly responsible for the greater scrutiny applied to them on issues of race.