...blah blah blah!

At least TCM is having a Fred Astaire marathon.

"[Obama] reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games. But he hasn't completed a single game and I'd like to see him finish one," - Henry Kissinger.

Ritually curse Microsoft, then spit over my shoulder.

David Frum:

"Here’s something I’ll never understand. Why is it that those of us who are willing to do what it takes to beat Democrats are called “Republicans in name only” or worse? Meanwhile those conservatives willing to accept years of Democratic government rather than adjust any point congratulate themselves on their commitment and dedication. Seems backwards, no? For the moment, of course, it’s the latter group who outnumber the former. But that will change. As sure as anything in politics, that will change, for the reason once brutally explained by Benjamin Franklin: “Experience is a hard teacher, but fools will have no other.”"

Daniel Larison

"What McCain misses in his article is that liberal journalists actually take great delight in the Palin phenomenon. Yes, of course, they don’t want to see her in power, but I think they do want to see her prosper and thrive as the face of the Republican Party. An American right led by or identified with Palin is one that they can very easily ridicule and discredit, and at the same time they can be confident that a Palinized GOP poses no threat to anything they value. Palin is not going to bring the party out of the minority, and were she to lead the party it would more or less guarantee continued Democratic ascendancy for many years to come. Her content-free pseudo-populism ensures that the legitimate political concerns of her constituency remain irrelevant to real policy debates. Media outlets also thrive on controversy and conflict, both real and manufactured, and Palin continues to give them plenty of opportunities for both."

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/

The Special Inspector General's Report on the A.I.G. Bailout has been released. When AIG was collapsing, the Fed demanded concessions. AIG refused. The Feds caved. Geithner did not believe the Fed had enough leverage to get a deal as the threat of default and an AIG bankruptcy had already been rendered powerless by the initial $85 billion loan to AIG in September, "an intervention that the counterparties (AIG) understood to mean that the U.S. government would not permit an AIG failure."

Geithner FAIL

...note that the Tea Partiers aren't really listening...

Over on David Frum's website, where moderate Conservatives roam:

"Today’s Pakistan is at war with itself, torn between competing ideas of what it means to be Pakistani. Created almost accidentally as a homeland for India’s Muslims on the premise that, in Pakistan, no Muslim would be killed for being Muslim, it has become a country in which Muslims are today being killed for not being “good Muslims.”"

First in a series, from someone whose been there.

http://www.frumforum.com/pakistan-in-crisis

He's done more, in his mania to "expose" her, to kill any interest in her as a subject I might have possibly have; the "true believers" don't care about facts, and even if all his allegations and theories and "gotcha" moments are true and factual, his fanaticism makes me "turn off the volume", and people like Charlie assume that he's making things up in his crusade (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

Personally, I find her very useful as a lightning rod for all the people whose life views I don't agree with; the religious reich in particular. I think that she's going to be very popular with the same people who deny science over faith, and who want to legislate punishment for sinners like those who engage in pre-martial sex (Cause lets face it - they don't care so much about the life of the unborn, as they have no interest in the living once they're here).

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/beyond_security.html

"Terrorism has always been rare, and for all we've heard about 9/11 changing the world, it's still rare. Even 9/11 failed to kill as many people as automobiles do in the US every single month. But there's a pervasive myth that terrorism is easy. It's easy to imagine terrorist plots, both large-scale "poison the food supply" and small-scale "10 guys with guns and cars." Movies and television bolster this myth, so many people are surprised that there have been so few attacks in Western cities since 9/11. Certainly intelligence and investigation successes have made it harder, but mostly it's because terrorist attacks are actually hard. It's hard to find willing recruits, to co-ordinate plans, and to execute those plans -- and it's easy to make mistakes."

Gee... Hannity got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, lying.

Well, lying twice. The first time, he and Fox used old Tea Party footage to make Bachmann's recent rally attempt look large and successful. I would guess since they had to lie about it that it was small and pitiful, but I don't care enough to look up the numbers - the lie itself is the thing.

Then Hannity apologized - well, if a smug assertion of "Ooops, somebody used the wrong footage" is an apology, delivered in a smug "we don't care what you think" manner.

Then this letter showed up:


I have been working in television for the past 15 years. I know in detail how these things work: 1) you are assigned a story, 2) you send out a crew to shoot the necessary footage, 3) the footage is brought back to the studio and loaded into the Avid, or whatever editing system you are using, 4) you cut together your piece based on THE FOOTAGE AT HAND.

For footage from a different event that took place months earlier to find its way into an entirely new piece, well, someone had to: 1) make the decision to lie in the first place (and lets be clear, it IS a lie), 2) locate the old footage, 3) cut the footage into the new piece, 4) a producer or the like had to approve the clip for air.

In short, it had to be a deliberate case where someone pulled the old footage from the archive. It was a deliberate act. Hannity may not have been aware of that editorial decision, but contrary to what he said, someone DID mean for it to happen.

Makes one wonder how often this is being done on his network.

Note: This does not lead me to believe that other networks are any better - just proof that Fox is a lying sack of propaganda.

"One thing that seems crucial to emphasize is how much this was not a “revolt” or an explosion of anti-GOP establishment fervor. I want to be very precise here. Many voters in NY-23 revolted against their local party leadership by backing Hoffman, but the outpouring of support for Hoffman came from the very center of what remains of the national Republican establishment. Viewed locally, Hoffman was not the establishment candidate. However, he was the national GOP establishment’s candidate, which is why I do not regard his defeat as such a great loss."

So, the local GOP candidate was the local establishment choice, which the rank-and-file rebelled against, and pulled it the now-mainstream national GOP talking heads like Back and Palin?

"To the extent that last night signaled the amount of right-populist discontent in the country, the establishment support for Hoffman represented yet another episode of the national party attempting to feed off of populist enthusiasm to sustain its own decaying body and to co-opt (and then ignore) populist themes while having no intention of ever governing in the interests of their constituents should they regain power."

Both parties have a tradition of this, best recently portrayed in Obama's first year of election-promise-breaking.

"The prominence of the pseudo-populist Palin in all of this was significant. Her presence served as a reminder of how often conservative voters are pandered to rhetorically and symbolically and how uninterested Republican leaders are in serving the interests of their constituents once elections are concluded."

Pretty much, yeah.

"Hoffman’s failure may mean that rank-and-file Republican voters in once-safe districts are no longer going to be taken for granted, and it could mean that their votes will have to be earned with policy proposals that address their concrete interests. The national and Congressional party has no clue how to do this, and so they keep failing. Candidates at the state level seem to grasp this basic idea and have started having some success."

So, I wonder how long before the Tea Partiers (conflating them with active rank-and-filers) get representation within the party by someone who isn't essentially a panderer?

His full article:

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/

Protest signs that deny the Tea Partiers credibility with anyone not already agreeing with them:

* "Get the Red Out of the White House"
* "Waterboard Congress"
* "Ken-ya Trust Obama?"
* "Traitor to the U.S. Constitution."
* Pictures of dead bodies at the Dachau concentration camp and compared health care reform to the Holocaust.
* Obama as Sambo
* "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds"



Just as the GOP declared the John Birchers unwelcome, the Tea Partiers who want to be taken more seriously need to exile the bigots and haters. So long as the media can focus on this aspect, they won't get much traction outside of the ever-shrinking GOP.

Even if I kinda sneakingly like the "Waterboard Congress" one. I mean, its just Enhanced Interrogation, riiiight? )

"I was too nice in ascribing merely a trillion dollar deficit bequeathed to Obama, as a reader reminds me:

'According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years. Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over Congress in 2007.'

Adding $5 trillion in debt in eight years is unprecedented in US history outside the Second World War. But that's what Bush and Rove and the GOP did. And now they lecture everyone else about fiscal responsibility.

Here's my litmus test for the Tea Party right: when they hold up effigies of Bush and Cheney as socialists, I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're more partisan than principled."

Something like that. There were many people who now carry Tea Party signs who defend the Bush administration like he was the Second Coming (Charlie is specifically exempted from this charge from me, and the rest of those whose primary protest is the erosion of 2nd Amendment rights). The federal deficit, the police-state powers (state secrecy trumping war crimes and illegal operations, like those of the 23 CIA operatives in Italy, et cetera) of the Bush administration, and torture, amongst other things.

But it wasn't until he was replaced with a Democrat that all of these things, so necessary under Bush/Cheney, became anathema for these folks.

"Here you get a special line that identifies the amount of the Federal Withholding was actually going to the defense budget all along, and it tells you what it is. You get a number that lets you identify exactly how much of your time you are working to keep the defense budget as large as it is."

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/my-friendly-nudge-of-the-day/

The Congressional Budget Office Wednesday night released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found that it would reduce health care premiums and cut the deficit by $68 billion over ten years.

I'll take it...

Its much less ambitious than the Dem plan, which IMO is a good thing. Its doing things in small steps, checking whether or not it worked before moving on. I'm always suspicious of huge, ambitious plans - usually their very magnitude is hiding something, given the theory that all politicians are corrupt to one degree or another.

According to CBO, the GOP bill would indeed lower costs, particularly for small businesses that have trouble finding affordable health care policies for their employees. The report found rates would drop by seven to 10 percent for this group, and by five to eight percent for the individual market, where it can also be difficult to find affordable policies.

The CBO found that under the Republican plan, insurance coverage would increase by about 3 million and that the percentage of insured non-elderly adults would remain at about 83 percent after ten years.

The CBO found that the Republican provision to reform medical malpractice liability would result in $41 billion in savings and increase revenues by $13 billion by reducing the cost of private health insurance plans.

So... why not do that, and then see what else needs doing? Tort reform? Check. Getting hard-to-insure people covered? Check. Enabling small businesses to provide coverage to their employees? Check.

As opposed to - essentially - Medicare for everyone. Even if it doesn't work, you'd never be able to take it back or scale it down - it would be political suicide.

Honest question...

Begging the question of how much continual engagement in Afghan costs - which is no side question, but for the purposes of this, it is - how many American servicemen/women and civilians will lose their lives in Afghanistan if we stay for another ten years (I know, we've only - only? - been there for eight, but still) vs. the possibility of another 9/11 attack that would happen if and only if we left?

I mean, how does one even begin a rational, non-political cost/benefit analysis of Afghanistan, and without one how can we make a rational decision as to the cost (as opposed to the "keyboard commando" chickenhawks like Cheney, telling Obama to "man up" while he took deferment after deferment), both in dollars and human lives. Throw in how we've degraded our country's standards and honor by torture, and then hiding the war criminals away, and...

The 9/11 atrocity was planned mainly in Germany and Florida, and the 7/7 London subway bombings in Yorkshire. Holding a patch of ground in Afghanistan doesn't do much for us IMO, except act as a recruiting flag for AQ, in the "See? Americans are imperialists and forcefully occupy an Islamic country, proping up the corrupt, puppet regime" category.

"To all incumbents, yesterday's warning was: Get to work and start listening to voters. They definitely are listening and watching you."

Light, I hope that the people who determine the local elections do precisely that, and vote the lazy, the corrupt, the too-busy-to-listen pols the hell out of office.

Full:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/04/democrats.election.warning/index.html"