Yikes! Sarah Palin is slated to appear on "Oprah" next month to promote her new book, Going Rogue. It almost feels like an absolution for Palin, after Oprah's endorsement of Obama and her very public snub of Palin during the campaign. Of course Oprah has long held sway over politicians. Click through this slideshow to see other pols who have sat down with the daytime talk queen.

The good news is that Sarah Palin does seem to know what the word "irony" means. The bad news (via David Weigel) is that she unable to apply its logic to her political philosophy:

“With the passage of time,” former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes today, “President Bush’s decision to champion a new counterinsurgency strategy, including sending 30,000 additional troops to Iraq when most Americans were bone-weary of the war, will be seen as one of the most impressive and important acts of political courage in our lifetime.” Wehner may turn out to be right.

One casino has betting odds of various figures winning the 2012 presidential election. Hillary Clinton seems strangely high at 10-1 -- that line might be bait for those who still attribute supernatural powers to the Clintons. Sarah Palin is also 10-1, which I find plausible but uncomfortably high for a potentially cataclysmic event.

Dick Cheney is very low, at 150-1, below Ron Paul (50-1), John Edwards (65-1) and even the Constitutionally ineligible Arnold Schwarzenegger (100-1.)

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

This post may not hold a lot of interest to readers who aren't Ross Douthat, but what the heck, it's only the internet:

Ross Douthat has a generally decent reply to something I wrote a few days ago, pointing out the ways that highbrow and lowbrow conservative attacks have effectively worked in tandem:

Since I am back from having a tooth pulled, a second column on dentistry seems in order.

My last column noted a terrific story by NPR reporter Sarah Varney about how hundreds of thousands of poor and disabled Californians have lost dental coverage through California Medicaid. Tens of thousands of these men and women have intellectual disabilities.

Every now and then a piece of writing captures the mood of the moment and the essence of an ideology so completely that it warrants special attention. This is certainly the case with “An Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” an essay (and cover story) by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the March 8 issue of National Review. Lowry and Ponnuru’s thesis—that President Obama is an enemy of “American exceptionalism”—is hardly original. It is so widely held and so frequently asserted on the right, in fact, that it can almost be described as conservative conventional wisdom. Still, NR’s treatment of the subject stands out. Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments. It’s hard to imagine this key conservative claim receiving a more cogent and rhetorically effective defense. Which is precisely what makes the essay’s shortcomings so striking. While its authors clearly mean it to stand as a manifesto for a resurgent conservative moment, the essay far more resembles a lullaby—a comforting compilation of consoling pieties set to a soothingly familiar melody. The perfect soundtrack to a peaceful snooze.

--The Republican health care plan hurts the sick and rewards the healthy

--Rush Limbaugh threatens Mitt Romney

--A deal on financial regulation may be coming together

"Verum Serum" has a post accusing yours truly of hypocrisy. I'm going to go through the argument because it reveals a common vein of misinformation that tends to circulate on among conservatives.

On Friday, I pointed out that the American public thinks upper-income earners pay too little in taxes. Why is this hypocritical? Verum Serum explains:

I should not speak ill of the dead, but what of the dead who spoke ill of the dead? Many years ago an acquaintance of mine applied for a position at the Museum of the City of New York, over which Louis Auchincloss presided. The search committee met in the writer’s apartment on Park Avenue. When the candidate was asked to describe what he would do to improve the institution, he replied that too many people were not represented in its galleries, and noted in particular the inadequacy of the museum’s portrayal of African Americans.

But Mrs. Clinton is the designated canary who brings the bad news. Or, rather, the good news... at least to the mullahs. She has now told everyone who will listen that the U.S. has no plans for a military strike against Iran. And, given the 
president's deeply ideological commitment to peaceful engagement with Tehran, there is no reason to doubt her.

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people "earn" as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might "level the playing field," as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property--and let's face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn't always work out so well--how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Since it is a matter of sheer luck whether one is born into a rich family and then, as a birth-right, is entitled to first-class housing, top-flight health insurance, excellent schools, and, if need be, the best attorneys money can buy, or whether one is born into a poor or middle-class family and not be assured of getting any of these amenities, why not give rational order to what has been a wildly haphazard and obviously unjust state of affairs? A public program implementing the big baby lottery would at last make official what has in truth been the unspoken ethos of our government policy for decades and is in accord with the casino way of life--the stock market, the housing market, the state lotteries--to which so many Americans are wholeheartedly committed.

One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration's agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.

One mini-saga of the past decade in American politics has been the flirtation—with talk of a deeper partnership—between progressives and libertarians. These two groups were driven together, in the main, by common hostility to huge chunks of the Bush administration's agenda: endless, pointless wars; assaults on civil liberties; cynical vote-buying with federal dollars; and statist panders to the Christian right.

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

I have before me two tomes. The longer one is a somewhat rushed and tedious product whose guiding ideological vision and fuzzy presentation of crucial details repelled independent voters the last time it was put to an electoral test. The second document is somewhat more succinct and engaging but remains open to criticism for its embarrassingly padded margins and large print that makes it seem so much longer than it actually is. I'll leave you to guess which one is Sarah Palin's memoir and which is the Senate health reform bill.

If you listen to Republicans, they oppose that Senate bill because it is a Rube Goldberg contraption that is just too complicated, too opaque, and fills too many pages. Yesterday, Lamar Alexander gave full voice to this objection speaking with Ezra Klein: "One thing is you can’t be sure what’s in the Senate bill because it's 2,100 pages long. You just know there are surprises in it." He may have good reasons to oppose the Senate bill, but I'm pretty sure that its length and complexity are not his real beef. Congress routinely passes cinder-block-sized tomes that could provide valuable armor plating for tanks headed to Iraq.

Politicians who say that they oppose a bill because it's too long and complicated are generally fibbing. The only mystery becomes: What are they really thinking? In like fashion, a politician who says that she opposes something because it amounts to large-scale social engineering is more likely to believe what she is saying, but she is still telling an untruth. No doubt about it; health reform is ambitious social engineering. So was welfare reform. So were Reagan and Bush (43) tax cuts. So was No Child Left Behind. So was knocking down high-rise public housing here in Chicago. Privatizing Social Security and converting Medicare to vouchers (two favorite Republican ideas) are huge and messy social engineering projects, too.

I suppose it's local news. So the report is in the Boston Globe.

His literary agent is hot-shot Washington attorney Robert Barnett, among whose clients are President Obama and ex-president Bill Clinton.

Marc Ambinder:

"If the primaries were this year, I suspect she'd be nominated," a senior adviser to one of Sarah Palin's potential rivals confides.

Sunday, February 7, 3:28 p.m. Among the convention’s several last-minute saves—opening the conference to media, replacing one speaker who fell ill and another who dropped last minute—was bringing on Andrew Breitbart.

It’s been nearly a year since I wrote a post titled “What Realignments Look Like.” In it I reflected on how disorienting it was to see the Democrats take the White House, increase their margins in the Congress, and confidently pursue a progressive policy agenda. Having politically come of age during Reagan’s presidency, when the Republican critique of liberalism seemed to permeate the political consciousness of the nation, such a thing seemed unthinkable.

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it's not fluid at all--that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.

Here's one thing about the Tea Party movement everyone can agree on: It's confusing. With decentralization as a core value, the Tea Party phenomenon can seem like a baffling collection of individuals and organizations, often divided against each other. But with its first national convention now underway in Nashville, and as Tea Party groups gear up for campaigns around the country, it's time we met the movement's main players. Herewith, a handy guide.

KEY DATES IN THE MOVEMENT

Another Chait classic is this 1999 gem, written just about a year before the public--er, the Supreme Court--delivered us President George W. Bush. Turns out Sarah Palin wasn't the first one to epically fail a journalist's "pop-quiz." After Bush was unable to name various heads of state in an interview, Jon argues why in the 2000 election, it was smart to be dumb: