Matt Yglesias

Lutefisk

Karl Rove is being inducted into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame:

Former White House political adviser Karl Rove says he has an appreciation for all things Norse.

Except lutefisk.

Rove says any food that has lye in it “takes an acquired taste.” Rove is to be inducted into the Scandinavian-American Hall of Fame in Minot on Wednesday, despite criticism from state Democrats.

Fair enough on the lutefisk but it can’t be worse than hakárl. The real question is what other Nordic things are we supposed to believe Rove does like. Is he a big Jens Lekman fan? He enjoys high taxes and generous social welfare provision?

The House That Rove Built

Washington Post’s “reliable source” blog reports that Karl Rove wants to sell a house:

Five bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, brick-and-stone exterior, built 1968. Real estate photos show sunny kitchen, big entertaining spaces, pleasant yard, lots of bookshelves, one wall-mounted deer head.

I suppose it’s an interesting sign of the times in the United States that Rove believes a house he paid $799,000 for in 2001 ought to fetch $1.585 million in 2009. Here’s the Case-Shiller index for the Washington, DC metro area:

The price increase Rove is looking for is larger than the average one across the metro area. Of course some people’s houses should experience a higher-than-average price increase if, for example, the neighborhood in which it’s located has become objectively more desirable. When I first moved to town I rented a basement apartment in a nice townhouse on Harvard Street between 13th and 14th. That’s a much better place to live in 2009 than it was in 2003, and even in 2003 it was a much better place to live than it was back in 1998 when the owner originally bought it. But I don’t really think you could make that kind of claim for Kent where the Rove house is. That’s a nice upscale neighborhood, but it’s always been a nice upscale neighborhood.

Rove: Economy Will Get Better Soon

During the Bush years, the tendency was for people of a progressive bent to have a gloomy take on the state of the economy while those on the right were more likely to produce works like Jerry Bower’s opus The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy (answer: by completely destroying it!). Back on January 7, I wondered if this meant we were in store for optimism inversion in which the right would start painting things as gloomy while the left emphasized the positive.

Thus far, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead, as part of their argument against the president’s recovery plan, conservatives are minimizing the extent of problems. Thus things like this remark from Karl Rove flagged by Brian Beutler:

[I]f Republicans predict economic doom, they will overplay their hand. The Democratic stimulus will slow recovery, but not stop it. Recessions don’t last forever and, if history is a guide, sometime late this year or early next the economy will rebound on its own.

The politics of this aren’t so difficult to figure out, but it’s an interesting change—or rather, lack of change—in the valence of gloom and doom.

Conservatives Rediscover Passion for Limits on Executive Power

Karl Rove, “The Architect” of the collapse of the conservative political coalition and the rise of a Republican president so inept that he’s presided over two failed wars a global economic meltdown the worst terrorist attack in American history and the destruction of a major American city, warns us of trouble ahead:

There are also plans to use the Obama campaign’s email list to lobby for Mr. Obama’s policies. The Chicago Tribune, reporting comments from Obama spokesman Steve Hildebrand, summed up the plan this way: the email list could be used “to challenge Democratic lawmakers if they don’t hew to the Obama agenda.”

Just one problem. It’s illegal. There are statutory prohibitions on the White House from using tax dollars to directly lobby Congress by unleashing emails, calls and visits. That’s up to outside groups to do.

Rove is confused here. The list belongs to Obama for America. The proposal would be for that organization to continue to exist in some form, still controlling the list and still maintaining a relationship with Obama’s supporter. That separate organization would be engaged in whatever activities are being contemplated.

But it’s worth basking a bit in this persnickety concern for legal niceties. After all, Rove and George W. Bush have propounded the view that if Obama wants to bring pressure on Democratic lawmaker there’s nothing stopping him from ordering surveillance of the phone calls and emails made by members, their staffs, and their families in order to gain information with which to blackmail them. That sort of thing happened regularly, typically with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rather than a president as such being the main instigator, before 1970s-era surveillance reforms that Bush believes can just be ignored. Similarly, Obama could have family members of congressmen kidnapped and shipped off to secret facilities where they’ll be threatened with torture. Or the member themselves could be held without trial indefinitely in offshore military facilities. There’s a lot more to worry about than hanky-panky with email lists. Welcome to the brave new world.