In the WaPo: "The Action Americans Need."
(h/t: Oliver Willis)
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Elections Have Consequences!
Obama signs S-CHIP bill into law. This is similar to two bills vetoed by George WPE Bush.
Watch out, wingnuts! Eeeebull soshlists comin' ta git ya!
(h/t: AemJeff)
[Added] Least surprising first result of the news: Michelle Malkkkin is outraged! Outraged! And suddenly she cares about poor people! (Because tobacco taxes are how the expanded health care is going to be paid for.)
New term: Trojan Horse Republicans! Outrage! Outrage! Outrage!
Cole's On Fire
A good day. Or a bad one, more like.
Here he is ripping the MSM a new one.
Oh, and here he is, passing along the news that some Villager has just proposed that Newt Gingrich be Secretary of Health and Human Services. NEWT GINGRICH! You'll remember I noted earlier that two others too deep inside the Beltway have proposed Mitt Romney. MITT ROMNEY! I give it till the next David Brooks column before the third name On The Short List??TM is Megan McArdle.
I'm gonna be right behind John in line at the Goat 'n' Generator store, I'll tell you that much.
Wingnut Logic of the Day 2
If you believe that God's in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.
-- Kurt Warner
(h/t: PZ)
Wingnut Logic of the Day
Shorter Donna Garner:
Jeffrey Dahmer was an atheist. Therefore, we should teach creationism in science classes.
Firefox Updated to v.3.0.6
Mozilla has released a patch that closes several security holes and fixes some stability bugs (details). This brings us to version 3.0.6.
If you don't have automatic updates or notifications enabled, do Help → Check for Updates. The whole process went off without a hitch, and took less than a minute, for me.
(h/t: Steven Musil)
Wish I'd Thought of That
An email to Andrew Sullivan:
Someone should make the point that the theory on which Daschle did not pay taxes on an extraordinary non-salary benefit provided by his employer (car and driver) is exactly the theory on which Palin did not pay taxes on an extraordinary benefit (free air travel for her children, and 60 dollar per day per diem payments for use of her own house).
Palin never paid back taxes but simply produced a squirrelly letter from her lawyers saying that someone could believe in good faith that taxes were not owed on the travel or per diems she received, so her failure to report those items as income was excusable.
Dude, haven't you heard the word? IOKIYAR!
SCLM Watch
Good short post from Steven Leser, via Attaturk. There really is no end to the stupidity of the Villager mentality and the cable "news" blowhards' thirst for "controversy" and eagerness to be "tough" on the Administration only when it's a Democratic one. Facts need not apply.
Further discouraging evidence. High Broderism is out of control.
One for the Scrapbook
Though PJM has announced it will be pulling the plug (cf.), their ads will still be running for a couple more months. This one is a keeper:
Bedwetter Watch
Just when you thought Fox News and Greater Wingnuttia couldn't get any more stupidly paranoid …
Schlussel is a known known. But be sure to watch the cleverly edited "news" video that DougJ came across (the second one, although the first from CBS isn't much better).
Line of the Day: 2009-02-04
Surely Gregg’s desire to replace himself with somebody who will often oppose his new boss’s agenda is evidence of his deep commitment to the administration, the cabinet, and the agency he appears poised to head.
-- Brian Beutler
(h/t: Twin, via email)
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
If The NYT Really Wanted To Improve Their Op-Ed Page ...
... they'd run Doghouse Riley the following day after every David Brooks column appears.
Pentagon Budget Update
On Sunday, I referred to a Fox News story quoting an unnamed source (pinned your credibility meter yet?) that sent Wingnuttia into a link and cross-posting frenzy, Depends flapping in the breeze. I also noted a Reuters story that contradicted Fox News's account.
Fresh news and numbers, if you want 'em, from Think Progress. And don't miss color commentary from my hat tippee for the link: Attaturk.
The short version appears to be this: the Pentagon put together what amounted to a wish list that totaled way above the previous working number for the FY2010 budget (recommended by the Bush Administration, no less), the Obama Administration thinks the original number is plenty, since it is itself an increase, the difference between the wish list number and the original one was leaked as "a cut" to a sympathetic ear connected to a willing megaphone, the Keyboard Commandos reacted as expected, the end.
Kill Me Now
Emph. added:
When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.
Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package.
Thank goodness TBogg can find the humor in it.
[Added] At least they're consistent ... shorter Republican base: three IQ digits bad, two IQ digits good.
Line of the Day: 2009-02-03
He might as well have said, ‘Polenta is the new risotto’, then spent 500 words talking about oatmeal, for all the light he sheds …
-- D. Aristophanes
Visual Display of Quantitative Information of the Day
The spread of Wal-Mart across the United States, 1962-2007. A beautiful depiction of an ugly thing.
(h/t: Chez)
A Non-Recommendation
My reaction to the Bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Eve Fairbanks of The New Republic and Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard, originally posted in the BH.tv forums, cross-posted here just because I felt like it.
An admirable effort by Matthew to put a positive spin on the antics of the House Republicans vis a vis the stimulus bill, but I wasn't sold. I grant that, in the abstract, there is something to be said about voting one's conscience and sticking to one's principles. And yes, it's true that for any given Republican, the bill was going to pass irrespective of his or her vote.
Still, that does not change the way the House GOP has been spinning things themselves. To my eye, they showed extremely bad faith by raising a stink about various provisions of the bill, getting them removed, and then chortling over their unanimous "No" vote. The provisions were removed in large part because Obama put pressure on his own side, which irritated some in his base, which means that the GOP's earlier objections appear now to have been just another instance of Republicans looking for every opportunity to drive wedges. This past week has only more firmly convinced me that the Republican Party, or at least the ones in office, do not care a whit about the country, but only about their party's political fortunes.
There is certainly a case to be made about shortcomings in the stimulus bill, and Matthew did usefully touch on a couple of them in this diavlog, but I heard virtually nothing like this -- i.e., in the way of adult discussion -- from any Republican politician trotted out to talk about it. Instead, it was all demonizing and demagoguery (Condoms! Condoms! Condoms!) -- a bunch of fifth-graders dispensing Jolt and Skittles to their kindergartner base.
On a related note, Matthew completely missed the point when he attempted to belittle Frank Rich's column from this past Sunday. Rich articulated very well the irritation many of us feel about the Republican Party. Matthew is also wrong to say that "Republicans don't matter" when it comes to voting on important pieces of legislation. This is nothing but laying the groundwork for their plan in 2010 to disavow all responsibility for whatever happened during the past two years. This is not responsible governance in a time when we have serious problems to deal with. Rich was right to point this out.
Matthew's oily little bit at the end crystallized for me the insincerity of his entire affect. His mischaracterization of what Obama said* about the Us magazine cover reminded me of Byron York, who never misses a chance to get something just a little bit wrong -- about an absurd triviality, to boot -- and always in the direction of making his target look worse. It is nothing but an ongoing rightwing effort to sling mud while smirking disingenuously. Give me Rush Limbaugh any day; at least he's honest about where he's coming from.
Finally, I have to say that Eve let Matthew get away with too much in his pushing of these little digs. This pairing is a carbon copy of the Jonah Goldberg/Peter Beinart routine -- the faux-thoughtful conservative and the centrist wannabe Villager who is liberal only by contrast, who does nothing but murmur politely every time the conservative gets something wrong. This sort of diavlog is nothing so much as prep school for the Sunday talk shows. When George Will and Cokie Roberts are finally put out to pasture, I'm sure these two will be at the head of the line to be plopped in their seats.
==========
* See the clip, here on Rumproast, for example, to see what Obama actually said.
==========
[Added] Shoutout to Jyminee for catching Matthew's mischaracterization, too.
"What is more different from a secret torture memo than an open-thread blog post?"
Three bloggers hired by Obama to work in the Justice Department!
This is change I can believe in, and not just because of their erstwhile hobby -- their legal views sound really encouraging.
(h/t: Scott Lemieux/LGM)
GREat
Michael Bérubé just took the English literature GRE for the second time -- the first being in 1981 -- and then wrote about the experience. Just wonderfully, and I say this as someone who is as unread in the classics as anyone I know.
Before reading the full article, you may want to check out the prefatory blog post.
"You’ve done a great job with the dirt. But what about the water?"
We had this arbitrary distinction that if it was below sea level it didn’t count.
In news pleasing to many, Google Earth soon to follow the lead of the target of its attention to become misleadingly named software.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Can't Help Myself
Still enjoying the death of PJM (previous entries here and here). From Roy Edroso's report, this just killed me:
You mean they weren't making a fortune off bloggers yelling about Obama?
Nice Turn of Phrase
Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia and a free-culture advocate, puts it this way: if the fight over digitization of books is like horse-and-buggy makers against car manufacturers, Google wants to be the road.
You do not have to read the whole thing. If you've paid no attention to Google's ongoing efforts to digitize every book it can get its hands on, though, it may be a good place to start.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Surrender is Imminent!!!1!
Fox News had a quick story up on Friday, reporting:
The Obama administration has asked the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon's budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent -- about $55 billion -- a senior U.S. defense official tells FOX News.
To which I say hooray, if true.
However, although there has long been a sense that Obama would like the Pentagon to have a smaller slice of the pie, I still, two days later, haven't been able to find any independent news of this particular claim. About the only mention I can find (that isn't just repeating the Fox story as gospel, I mean) is this bit from Reuters [emph. added]:
The Obama administration last week directed the U.S. Defense Department to make substantial cuts to a budget proposal prepared under the leadership of Defense Secretary Robert Gates for fiscal year 2010, which added more than $60 billion, according to InsideDefense.com, a trade publication.
Fox News said the White House was seeking cuts of more than 10 percent, but U.S. officials declined to comment.
Rather than relying on a single anonymous source (though that never causes problems, right?), it's probably best to wait for a little more verification before drawing any firm conclusions, I'd think.
How say you, Greater Wingnuttia?
MEDIA BLACKOUT: still not a peep out of the mainstream media (other than Fox News).
[...]
Update III: Tommy emails: "We're all dead men walking."
[...]
Update X: As of 10:02AM, no mainstream media outlets -- other than Fox News -- are reporting on this debacle. Although the wheezing New York Times ("Obama Cultivates Military") and the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Army announces rise in suicide rates for 2008") found time to report on more important issues this morning.
-- Doug Ross
... the terrorists are praising Allah while plotting their next move.
-- The Jawa Report
This should make America’s enemies happy, including the American Left …
Well, if Obambi goes ahead and repeals don’t ask don’t tell, allowing openly gay men and women to serve, the cost of paying soldiers will go down, since 10% say they would not re-enlist or extend their service, and another 14% would consider not re-enlisting or extending their service.
-- Stop The ACLU
“Billions for free abortions on demand, expanded welfare programs and general pork for the buying of votes, not one PENNY for defense!”
-- Anti-Idiotarian Rotweiler
So while he can spend trillions to combat STD's, build golf courses, and prop up Hollywood, national security seems to be low on the priority list.
[...]
Sleep tight America, there may not be too many days left or nights that you can.
-- Jammie Wearing Fool
Then we begin to sense a theme …
... those would be weapons systems that actually employ people, create jobs, and help defend the nation. That may not be as sexy, figuratively and literally, as buying billions of condoms …
-- Ed Morrissey/Hot Air
President Obama wants to spend a trillion dollars on welfare, condoms, international STD prevention, 600,000 new government jobs and handouts for illegal immigrants...
-- Gateway Pundit
When someone says “The Pentagon needs more Stealth Bombers,” this president seems to think they’re talking about Bill Ayers.
[...]
Just last week, Obama swore: “I will preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”
With what?
Condoms?
-- Cold Fury
And yet there's all this money for condoms and bee insurance, apparently.
-- Ace of Spades
And if it's not condoms, it's that other dreaded C-word.
Missile defense has shown to be very successful under Bush. Some are saying it is operational now. But I'd expect that to be shelved as Obama does everything possible to make us weaker and less secure. Instead of deploying the ultimate anti-ballistic missile weapon, Obama instead makes nice with Putin in a most Carter-esque way.
-- Environmental Republican
Strategic retreat, indeed. B. Hussein Obama hinted at such a retreat in his interview with Al-Arabiya, looking back thirty years (the Carter administration) to a purported U.S.-Arab Golden Age.
-- The Texas Scribbler
But really, this all just part of a larger plan, right?
It Begins, The Dismantling Of the Military
-- Say Anything
OBAMA MAKING GOOD ON PROMISE TO WEAKEN OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE
[...]
THIS SHOWS WHAT OBAMA'S REAL PRIORITY REALLY IS: WEAKENING AMERICA.
-- The Astute Bloggers
(Thanks to Maru at WTF Is It Now?!? for the moving pic.)
[Added] See this later post for more solid numbers.
Amity Shlayed
There can never be enough awareness raised about this wingnut, so go see what davenoon has posted at LGM, and please follow all links contained therein.
As is noted by several commentators via that source, there is good reason to wonder how much longer the WaPo should be taken seriously.
[Added] DougJ at Balloon Juice has more on Shlaes. And the WaPo.
Pissed Off At The Republicans?
Reading today's column from Frank Rich will help.
And see the latest polling data posted by Kos -- despite the impression given by TV news, the country knows who the problem is.
More PJM Reactions
Following up on my earlier post regarding the death of Pajamas Media's blog advertising network:
- James Wolcott weighs in, deliciously.
- TBogg has a second post up.
- The Sadlys have two quick hits.
- Thers at Whiskey Fire reminds us all of the real reason for blogging.
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