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Jimmy Carter’s intervention in the winguts v. Obama controversy has raised the expected amount of dust–and I suppose the standard reaction is that “it’s a good thing we’re having this conversation,” but I’m not so sure that it is. Since I was one of the early racism-shouters here on Swampland, and on the Chris Matthews show last Sunday, …

Kate Pickert has a clear explanation on Time.com here.

Fred Kaplan, as usual, is excellent on the subject of Admiral Mullen’s confirmation hearings. I’ll have more on what went wrong with the military’s Aghan campaign this summer in my print column tomorrow.

Download a PDF of the CBO Budget score here.

UPDATE: So what does it say? The Baucus plan, as laid out in a preliminary report, would reduce the deficit by $49 billion in the first ten years. Over the subsequent decade (2019-2029), which is harder to predict, CBO estimated the reduction as about .5 percent of the Gross Domestic …

The release of the Baucus plan raises all sorts of policy questions, but it also raises a significant political issue that I keep forgetting to address here: Why on earth is the implementation of universal health insurance delayed until 2013?

Like illegal immigration, the issue of abortion in health reform has been a hotly contested one. The Baucus proposal released Wednesday does mark a departure from the House Democratic bill in one key area, while remaining vague about other areas of concern for the pro-life and pro-choice communities.

The biggest difference is the fact …

One of the wonderful things about blogging is, you ask a question and you get an answer. Yesterday, I asked if anyone could come up with the quote from W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South that I once employed to describe Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. Commenter Sinyet came through and the quote still shimmers, exquisitely:

As expected, the plan released Wednesday morning by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus takes a harder line on illegal immigration than the Democratic House bill in two ways.

The first big difference comes in the new citizenship verification requirements, which were not specified in the House bill. The eligibility check under …

This bit from Anderson Cooper’s program last night is about all you need to know about the honesty and integrity of the teabaggers, birthers, deathers and assorted fungi marinating in paler precincts of our country.

Ahmed Rashid, the brilliant Pakistani journalist, has an excellent essay on the latest in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the latest New York Review of Books. There are a multitude of valuable insights–especially the attention Rashid pays to the Balochistan rebellion, potentially a greater threat to Pakistan’s continued existence than the Taliban.