Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to David Lovering, 52. I'm more of a Kim Deal fan than I am a Pixies fan, I suppose. Still, good band. Good drummer.

Right to the good stuff:

Henry Farrell on Iran sanctions and negotiations.

Steve Kornacki goes back to 1992 to talk Cuomo/Clinton -- a five part series.

And a fine rant from Alyssa Rosenberg.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tim Armstrong, 47.

Plenty of good stuff for a holiday week:

1. Four pieces -- Greg Koger, Barbara Sinclair, Aaron Belkin, and Richard Arenberg -- on the post-nuclear Senate.

2. Another one, from David Mayhew.

3. And another from Sarah Binder. I suppose she's right that the Senate will never quite "become the House" -- something I'm guilty of saying. However, I do think the risk (or, if you like it, the promise) of it coming close enough is sufficient that it's only a misdemeanor, not a felony, to use it as a shorthand.

4. Mark Goldberg on the Iran deal.

5. Fred Kaplan on the Iran deal.

6. Why is JFK so popular? I don't disagree with the three numbered reasons Matthew Dickinson gives us, but as I've said before I suspect the unnumbered one following those -- the active efforts by the Kennedy family and allies to produce that popularity -- is really the key (as it is with Reagan).

7. Kevin Drum makes the key point that the entire health care industry, basically, is already committed to ACA (because they had to be), which means that it ain't gonna disappear. Which matches the point that I've been making: repeal of ACA is long dead because the status quo ante no longer exists; whatever happens will be building on ACA, not starting over.

What Mattered This Week?

A few obvious ones, but I'll go with the Iran story. We don't have the outcome yet, but surely it matters either way.

"Doesn't matter" is too strong, but VA-AG is certainly a combination of elements that give something far more attention than it deserves. I think it was Dave Hopkins who made the more general point on Tuesday that we tend to pay disproportionate attention to these off-year elections, and he's of course exactly right. Add to that an exciting, close election, and there you go.

What do you have? What do you think mattered this week?

What Mattered This Week?

Yeah, yeah, the budget wars, but I'm going with US/Iran.

What didn't matter is fairly easy: while other things he did may have been important, the Cruz fauxlibuster was pure, 100% meaningless hype.

What do you have? What do you think mattered this week?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Seth Green, 39. Mostly, as you might guess, because of Oz -- but I'm definitely a big Radio Days fan, too. And he was in Can't Buy Me Love, one of the greatest movies ever set in Arizona (okay, it's a short list. Even shorter if you limit it to modern, real-life Arizona. Psycho, if you count that. There are others. And, yes, there are lawns in Tucson for Lawn Boy to mow).

Some good stuff:

1. Jonathan Chait on the same topic I was on yesterday, sane Republicans. He does call them moderates, though.

2. Stan Collender on all the budget deadlines coming up, and how they may interact.

3. Dan Drezner's autogenerated Iran post.

4. The Democrats defend social science funding; John Sides has it.

5. And a great one from Marin Cogan on (mis)identifying Members of Congress.

Sunday Question for Liberals

If Barack Obama is re-elected, what do you expect him to do in Afghanistan? In Iran?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

If Mitt Romney wins, what do you expect him to do in Afganistan? In Iran?

Elsewhere: Scandals, Romney's Iran, Health Care

First up: at Salon, I had a column over the weekend about the unusually intense dead zone we're in now, and why it's a ready-made trap for reporters -- leaning on Brendan Nyhan's research on the press and scandals.

My PP post today was about the long-term electoral effects of health care reform. Short term, as I say over there, I'm not convinced that whatever the Court will do matter much this year.

And at Plum Line, I talked about Mitt Romney's claim that the US could not "survive" a nuclear Iran.

A couple comments about that last one. First, when I blog over at the Post, there's usually a time lag between when I write and when it gets published...usually doesn't matter at all, but in this case between when I wrote it and when it went live there were a bunch of comments about what Romney said. I was able to get a quick update to Greg with a couple of them -- just to link again, Dan Larison, who was harsher than I was,  and Andrew Sullivan, who compared Romney to Cheney -- but there's also a larger point that was raised by them and by Conor Friedersdorf that I should say something about, as long as I'm on the topic. That's the other part of what Romney said, which was about Congressional authorization for military action.

I think I've written about this before, but not recently. Basically, I agree with a lot of what Kevin Drum said today. First, that small-scale presidential actions without Congressional authorization are really not much of a big deal; and second, that the real fault here is with Congress, and not the president. There's more, but I guess I'll save it for a proper post later. Anyway, as Drum said, Congress is perfectly free to pull the plug on any foreign misadventure at any time. Worth noting.

Yeah, This Isn't Going To Work

Jeffrey Goldberg makes a reasonable point concerning Republican presidential candidates who believe that Iran is a weakness for Barack Obama -- that Obama has been "tougher" on Iran than George W. Bush was. Fair enough. On the other hand, I'm not sure that it matters in a campaign context; if swing voters believe that Obama has failed on Iran and care about it, they'll surely hold him responsible even if they can be convinced that Bush was worse (and the biggest advantage Obama has in that comparison, it seems to me, is skipped over by Goldberg: that Bush invaded Iran's hostile neighbor, evicted the anti-Iran government, and replaced it with a government which promises to be at least mildly friendly to Tehran, and more likely a firm ally. But I digress). But that's not the bottom line, which is that the group of swing voters who care about Iran is, absent military action, almost certainly tiny. So I'm not sure any of this makes any electoral difference.

I wanted to write about it anyway because Goldberg quoted Rick Santorum's claim that "If Barack Obama has taught us anything, it’s that experience matters." Helpful hint to Republicans: you really, really, really, are not going to be able to convince anyone that they should support you over Barack Obama on the basis of experience.

(OK, to be fair, it's not entirely clear from the context whether Santorum is claiming that his experience makes him a better choice than Obama or whether he's just claiming it makes him a better potential president than the other Republican candidates).

Getting back to something that's closer to a serious point and away from the fun cheap shot...no, really, there's no evidence that people vote on the basis of vague foreign policy threats. And purely based on my subjective reading of the various polls out there, I'd guess that a new military adventure anywhere, and especially in that part of the world, is a lousy selling point during WH 2012.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

By my count, at least four GOP candidates, including Mitt Romney, advocated war against Iran if that was the only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear. Assuming that the various other things that they advocated prove futile (no, Prince Herman, it doesn't really seem likely that the US can achieve energy independence before Iran gets the bomb, nor is it clear exactly how that would stop a nuclear campaign, anyway)...do you expect war with Iran if the Republicans win the White House in 2012?