Signs of Ezra Klein's lack of real-world work experience.

Writing about the Obamacare website, he says: "More than 400 of the 600 fixes on the administration's 'punchcard' of repairs have been made."

A punch card...



... is not the same thing as a punch list.

Putin "cares about power and he cares about keeping Bashar al-Assad in power."

"Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean — on which sits Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. This axis frontally challenges the pro-American Sunni Arab Middle East (Jordan, Yemen, the Gulf Arabs, even the North African states), already terrified at the imminent emergence of a nuclear Iran."

That's Krauthammer's matter-of-fact invitation to Americans take the old Sunni-Shiite division to heart as the continuation of the old-but-less-old Cold War. The column is called "The fruits of epic incompetence," blaming Obama and Kerry for giving Putin the opening:

Assad, far from receiving punishment of any kind, goes from monster to peace partner. Putin bestrides the world stage, playing dealmaker. He’s welcomed by America as a constructive partner....

And Obama gets to slink away from a Syrian debacle of his own making.

Elsewhere in The Washington Post, Ezra Klein puts the pro-Obama gloss on same facts:

A lot of people have wondered why Russia and Syria seem to be working to throw the Obama administration a lifeline. But the answer is clear: Assad only cares about his chemical weapons insofar as they help keep him in power. Sacrificing them to end the threat the U.S. poses to his regime is more than worth it to him.

"They think they know where the targets are, they think they know how to hit it with enough force but not too much force, they think they know how the Russian and the Iranians will react."

"We cannot determine all this. On some level, we’re assuming the reaction from Russia and Iraq and Syria will be zero: We’ll carry out this attacks, and there’ll be no response. This is a bit of a sensitive subject, but the administration has been honest that they have no smoking gun that the attack was ordered by Assad. The evidence of his involvement is circumstantial. We’re two years into a civil war that he’s winning. The Russians and Iranians have told him not to use chemical weapons. Hezbollah has told him not to use chemical weapons because their fighters are at risk. So he’s winning, there’s scant and circumstantial evidence that he ordered the attack. Why are we gaming out his incentives when we don’t know he ordered it?"

Says Alan Grayson, a Democratic congressman from Florida, in an interview with Ezra Klein (who's been doing some excellent interviews lately).

"Google Reader dies today. Here’s why I’m not replacing it."

Says Ezra Klein:

There’s nothing wrong with RSS feeds, or with Twitter. But they both bias my information diet in the same ways: Toward quick reads rather than long ones, toward writers and outlets I know rather than ones I don’t, toward blogs rather than other kinds of articles, and toward information I curated rather than information that someone else curated.

Those biases are dangerous for me. After all, my job is to keep coming up with new and interesting things things to report and write about. The more I read the same things over and over, and the more I read the same things that other writers read, the worse I’ll be at my job.

Thanks for the confession.

"The First Amendment doesn't belong to courts. Either it lives inside all of us or it dies."

"Is our culture so degraded that educated civil servants don't know enough about free speech to slap an idea like this down at its inception?"

Writes Garrett Epps at the conclusion of his piece titled "Why Is It So Hard to Keep the IRS Out of Politics? Government officials need a refresher course in the First Amendment 'anti-retaliation' principle."

Instapundit linked, saying: "Two observations: (1) Obama was joking about auditing his enemies in 2009; and (2) Go to a flat tax or a national sales tax and this problem largely disappears."

On point #1, Instapundit doesn't mean Obama was only joking (and therefore he shouldn't be taken seriously or thought to be connected to the actual targeting of enemies). Instapundit means that Obama thought so little of the important principle at stake that a joke could be made of it.

On point #2: Yes! As I said when this story first broke (responding to Ezra Klein who'd argued that what we need most is harsher — but equal — enforcement of tax law):

The unequal, politically skewed enforcement of a law is a far more serious problem than the level of harshness of a neutrally enforced law. We can disagree about what the tax laws should be and how strictly or harshly they should be enforced, but everyone knows it is fundamentally wrong to vary the degree of enforcement, selecting victims by their politics. If government cannot be trusted to avoid that fundamental wrong, it cannot be trusted with any power at all. It would be better to wipe the tax code clean and rebuild it without any complicated corners where government officials — great or small — have a place to do their dirty work.

Let's do it! Let's set things up so we are not dependent on the good faith of government officials. Flat tax or national sales tax.

ADDED: Rereading this, I see that I need to distance myself from Epps. Even though I agree we need broad and deep cultural understanding of freedom of speech and that the courts alone cannot preserve it, I don't accept that freedom of speech will die unless "all of us" keep the faith. We have a legal system with constitutional rights because of the danger that the political majority will — in some times and in some circumstances — lose track of these values.

And quite aside from what the people in general think, the individuals who get their hands on power will always be tempted to put their immediate desires ahead of other concerns. No "refresher course" on the First Amendment will overcome that tendency. We need to use law to confine them. Of course, Epps is right that First Amendment law, enforced by courts isn't going to control them enough, but inculcated First Amendment principles are not enough either.

We should do what we can to redesign the structures of power so the inevitable degradation of commitment to freedom will not have such a damaging effect. When it comes to taxes, we do have an obvious legal solution at the statutory level: replace the tax code — with all its hiding places for abuse — with the flat tax or national sales tax.

"The problem wasn’t that the IRS was skeptical of tea party groups registering as 501(c)4s."

"It’s that it hasn’t been skeptical of Organizing for America, Crossroads GPS, Priorities USA and Heritage Action Fund registering as 501(c)4s. The IRS should be treating all these groups equally and appropriately — which would mean much more harshly."

Says Ezra Klein, who's afraid that now the IRS will go wimpy on everything.

I'm not enough of a policy wonk to have any opinion about how harshly 501(c)4s should be scrutinized, but I do have a strong opinion about the relative seriousness of the 2 problems Klein identifies and distinguishes, and I'm sure he's wrong.

The unequal, politically skewed enforcement of a law is a far more serious problem than the level of harshness of a neutrally enforced law. We can disagree about what the tax laws should be and how strictly or harshly they should be enforced, but everyone knows it is fundamentally wrong to vary the degree of enforcement, selecting victims by their politics. If government cannot be trusted to avoid that fundamental wrong, it cannot be trusted with any power at all. It would be better to wipe the tax code clean and rebuild it without any complicated corners where government officials — great or small — have a place to do their dirty work.

ADDED: Instapundit writes:

Remember, Obama joked about auditing his enemies in 2009. At the time, I warned about the damage to the “trust and voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends,” but Obama didn’t get much pushback elsewhere. Now, however, people need to be fired, and most likely prosecuted, to drive home the appropriate lesson. And Obama himself needs to be taken to task. The Post editorial is just a start.

Here's that Washington Post editorial.

"Ever wished you could hear the Wonkbloggers just…talking?"

Mmmm. 

No.

I wish I could unhear you just... talking?

Quit talking like that!

What the hell is going on in our culture?

"[T]he pantheon of hungry young men who have moved to Washington and shape-shifted, whether consciously or not..."

"... into something that’s more palatable to the city’s establishment. The blogger who, in 2008, tweeted, 'fuck tim russert. fuck him with a spiky acid-tipped dick,' now styles himself as the evenhanded, empirically driven adult in a room of squabbling, stubborn children. Even his critique of Washington, grounded in data and charts and graphs, is establishment to the core: This place, he says, is not like it used to be."

From "Ezra Klein: The Wise Boy/A tale of striving and success in modern-day Washington," by Julia Ioffe (in the redesigned New Republic). I'm not sure what to make of this long, long piece about Klein, but this is a funny picture to publish:



That's just a photoshoot misfire that ought to have been deleted instantly. To select it to illustrate the article is practically to announce: This is a hit piece.

I pointed out that, in spite of his loathing of being subjected to the journalistic gaze, he had agreed to be profiled not only by me, but also by New York magazine—simultaneously. The “people above me” he said, “seem to think it’s a good idea.” It would bring in readership, and Klein felt it would be “hypocritical” not to cooperate with the press when he, the press, was constantly asking people to cooperate with him. It was almost too meta to bear. “You’re sitting there taking notes and recording while I’m sitting here taking notes and recording,” he said. “It’s a peculiar situation!”...

Klein later told me that he found our exchange “slightly threatening.”

“Don’t take it personally,” one of Klein’s friends explained. “He didn’t get this far being casual about his image management.”

Oh, good lord, this thing has me sympathizing with Ezra Klein! Ridiculous.

By the way, a pantheon is "a temple dedicated to all the gods." (OED.) The figurative meaning is: "The group of people or things most revered by an individual, nation, profession, etc.; a group of people particularly respected, famous, or otherwise significant in some capacity; a set of things having acknowledged value or importance." It doesn't make sense to talk about "the pantheon of hungry young men." Either they hungry or they are in the pantheon. The ambitious young strivers are not the gods.

(Are there hungry gods?)

"Does A Speaker Survive This?"/"Will Boehner’s speakership survive until Plan C?"

Talking Points Memo/Ezra Klein.

Meme watch. Coming in from the left.

ADDED: Here's the presentation of the same material, from the right, at National Review:

The speaker looked defeated, unhappy, and exhausted after hours of wrangling. He didn’t want to fight. There was no name-calling. As a devout Roman Catholic, Boehner wanted to pray. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” he told the crowd, according to attendees.

There were audible gasps of surprise, especially from freshman lawmakers who didn’t see the meltdown coming. Boehner’s friends were shocked, and voiced their disappointment so the speaker’s foes could hear. “My buddies and I said the same thing to each other,” a Boehner ally told me later. “We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and just groaned. This is a disaster.”