A few odds and ends from the week just past.

In case there was any question about the granularity of the honor Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin want to restore, yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial while they besmirched the memory of Martin Luther King Jr on the anniversary of his great speech about his great dream — look no farther than two of Glenn Beck’s [...]

How the recession is leading to a resurgence in political dumbassery.

While I’m pleased to see Michael wants to welcome Jane Hamsher and other progressives to the Sierra Club under his watch, I’m waiting for Michael to do what any good host does before he throws a housewarming party: clean the house.

Last night, Israel’s leaders and commandos forgot the past Leon Uris drew upon for his fictionalized celebration of their nation’s creation. The IDF’s witless, merciless repetition of their nation’s pre-history ensured predictably tragic consequences for the humanitarian flotilla attempting to penetrate Israel’s deadly Gaza blockade. As of this writing, the IDF are reported to have killed up to twenty and wounded scores more civilians aboard the unarmed flotilla. In this lethal campaign of attacks on unarmed vessels in international waters, Israel’s leaders and armed forces aped the the British Navy’s successful prevention of the Exodus’ attempt to break the British blockade of Palestine in 1947.

Thomas Ferguson is a professor of politics and economics at University of Massachusetts at Boston. The author of the “Investment Theory of Party Competition,” he believes that business elites, not voters, are the dominant force in political systems. Together with Joi Chen, he has released an analysis of the Brown/Coakley election, and concludes that the Brown vote correlates strongly with the decline in housing values.

I’ve put the blame on the “veal pen” in the past, who largely abandoned their Wall Street critiques when the bankers told Obama they didn’t want their bonuses criticized any more. Without the normal liberal validators driving the economic argument from the left, the media is left with little to cover and the danger has always been that all of that discontent would accrue to the right — which is exactly what happened. But credit where credit is due, Fox’s constant “Obama is a socialist” drumbeat has played a huge part in the ridiculously inadequate economic conversation that has driven pissed off old people with declining mortgage values to the right.

When we pointed out that this is in fact what the bill does, Ezra dismissed it as “helping activists kill the bill” rather than “actually informing anyone about what is in the bill.” According to Ezra, “the restriction here is not on the right to choose, but on whether primary insurance covers abortion.” Therefore, since the goal of the bill is not restricting a woman’s right to choose, the fact that it does so anyway is just a coincidence and therefore not a valid reason to object to the bill’s passage.

David Brooks looks around and wonders why we no longer respect our elites like back in the good old days when they were all rich connected white guys.

The Sunlight Foundation has a superb report of the way in which Bill Tauzin, whom Obama attacked during his campaign for his slimy deal-making, pushed through a deal with the Obama White House that limited savings from the pharmaceutical companies in the health care bill to $80 billion.

Apparently everyone in the White House learned the wrong lesson from the Massachusetts election. It’s not that the country loves Republicans, it’s that they hate DC insider deal making. You can’t claim that you’ll “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” one night and then give them exclusive access you consciously try to hide from the press the next day, and expect that people will find it credible.