Blog line o' the week

Was that a groundswell of excitement, or did my dishwasher just start a cycle?

That would be Doghouse Riley's reaction to the formidable pairing of Huntsman/Bachman 2012 suggested by everyone's favorite Reagan administration alumnus, Ed Rogers.

What he's made of

Paul Krugman is shrill.

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

No one has shown more faith in Obama's mastery of three-dimensional chess than I, but I have never been so dispirited than I was upon hearing of his decision to implement a federal pay freeze (nothing like freezing the pay of SEC "watchdogs" already looking to get their ticket stamped for a lucrative career on Wall Street). Never mind the futility of the gesture, giving concessions to Republicans after two years of evidence that they will not respond in kind -- on the contrary, that they'll take such a concession as a sign of proof of weakness -- is like watching the victim of domestic abuse inviting the tormentor back home.

Conciliatory gestures are not going to help him with Republicans in Congress and they won't help him with so-called Independents. If he isn't willing to stake out what he believes in, than the next two years are going to be long, slow, and depressing. He may not win many battles with a Republican House and a dysfunctional Senate -- victories that may not be remotely possible against a unified opposition intent on destroying him -- but he could at least try to look like he'd prefer not to give an excellent impression of a doormat.

Our long nightmare of "undertainty" is over

Republicans are back to controlling all three branches of government, along with the NFL commissioner's office, no doubt.

The twelve stitches the president received over the weekend are probably the first of many. He hasn't learned that when negotiating with Republicans, basketball isn't the right sport on which to train.

The Israeli model

I heard Rep. Mica on NPR last night, claiming that the Obama administration is screwing up airport security, that the TSA has too many desk jobs, and that we should follow El Al's security apparatus.

Never mind that there are two airports in Israel and 50 flights per day. We should be able to create an army of racial profilers behavioral pattern experts in no time. But if Rep. Mica thinks that air travel in Israel is so much more pleasant than dealing with fascist TSA union members wanting to "grope" you or look at titillating scans of your...well...tits, then I say he may not be so well briefed on the subject.*

As it turns out, the security methods employed by Israel’s famous Shin Bet security service at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv are frequently stricter and more intrusive than the full-body scanners and pat-downs American officials put into place Nov. 1, said security analysts and the travelers who regularly show up at Ben-Gurion four hours before their flights for screening.

At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes.

The Israeli approach highlights the difficult balance faced by the Obama administration as it tries to address terror threats without unduly alienating the people it is trying to protect. The Israeli system relies on steps that would be likely to provoke opposition in the United States on civil liberties grounds: collecting detailed information about passengers before they fly. Besides, Israel has only two airports and 50 flights a day, compared with 450 airports and thousands of daily flights in the United States.

The administration argues that by focusing at airports on the search for weapons — in contrast to the Israelis, who focus in airports on finding terrorists — the United States is mounting a valuable and necessary last line of defense without undermining civil liberties. The multiethnic population of the United States makes it more difficult here than in Israel to profile possible terrorists, experts say, leaving officials with little choice but to screen passengers carefully for illicit items.

* Which makes him an excellent choice to be the committee chairman on this subject.

Bomber blues

Mitt ("the man") Romney has an op ed screed in the NY Kaplan Post today in which he attacks the strategic arms treaty Obama signed with Russian president Medvedev. Trouble is, Romney -- or his ghost writer -- doesn't know very much about nuclear weapons, according to Fred Kaplan. I don't much about the subject either, but I do know the diference between a missile and a bomb.

"Similarly, multiple nuclear warheads that are mounted on bombers are effectively not counted. Unlike past treaty restrictions, ICBMs are not prohibited from bombers. This means that Russia is free to mount a nearly unlimited number of ICBMs on bombers—including MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) or multiple warheads—without tripping the treaty's limits."

This is where I began to wonder if Romney had fallen prey to someone, perhaps a spy from Sarah Palin's camp, who wanted to make him look like an idiot.

ICBMs are not "mounted on," or loaded inside, bombers. The only nuclear weapons carried by bombers are bombs; that's why they're called bombers. (Many years ago, some B-52s and B-1s were equipped with air-launched cruise missiles, which flew through the atmosphere, as opposed to intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arc outside the atmosphere. These ALCMs no longer exist, in any case.) Certainly bombers are incapable of carrying MIRVs (which, by the way, are "multiple warheads" loaded onto the tips of missiles).

I think Romney's ghostwriter might have mixed up one of his talking points. New START counts each bomber as if it is carrying just one nuclear bomb, even though it almost certainly carries several. This counting rule was established for practical reasons. A bomber might carry three bombs one day, a dozen the next, with no need to alter its design. There's no way to verify how many it's carrying. So they agreed just to count one bomber as one bomb.

The thing is, this counting rule is to the United States' advantage, not Russia's. We have 113 heavy bombers; they have 77. So, if this is what Romney's ghostwriter meant to take note of, it's not a problem with the treaty, not from the U.S. point of view.

The problem is, as Marc Ambinder muses, if Romney is pushing out propaganda about the treaty, it means he means to make it part of the 2012 campaign. Which means the treaty, which has the support of most U.S. experts as well as the Pentagon brass, will be another Republican talking-point and will surely not get the bipartisan support these treaties generally receive, whether negotiated by a Democratic or a Republican administration.

Are you kidding me?

Steve Benen asks "if the president acting like an adult iadult is going over the political world's head.

Pants pissing for fun and profit

Using an attempted murder for political and financial gain, Pete Hoekstra is a grand master.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is now jumping upon the Northwest Airlines attack -- and using it to raise money for his gubernatorial campaign, the Grand Rapids Press reports.

In the letter, Hoekstra denounces the Obama administration on a whole range of national security issues -- ranging from Flight 253 itself to Guantanamo Bay, investigation of the interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration, and what Hoekstra calls Obama policies that "impress the 'Blame America First' crowd at home and his thousands of fans overseas."

This neither surprises nor outrages me. Why is that.

Over the summer, 108 House Republicans voted against the final conference report of the 2010 appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security, which included funding for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures.

The no voters cited a procedural dispute over the appropriations process. They included Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Hoekstra and a who’s who of big-name House Republicans: Reps. Mike Pence, Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Joe Wilson (R-SC).

They've got a rep for that

Brilliant. Watch it now before Apple takes it down.



More here.

Via BJ.

Funny, I recall a debate on states' rights

It was called the Civil War. Over 600,000 men died.

The governor of Minnesota seems unaware of that historical blip.

Schadenfreude for all the wrong reasons

To be clear, I enjoy watching a sanctimonious conservative hoisted by his petard as much as the next lefty blogger, but Sanford should be demonized for his behavior in rejecting federal stimulus money to help the people of his state in financial distress during an economic catastrophe. He should not be demonized for something that's between his wife, his girlfriend, his children. Yes, he lost his mind there for a long weekend, but the first hints of his truly horrendous judgment were on view some months ago.

And the person who leaked Sanford's emails is truly sleazy.

UPDATE: As usual, Roy is on the case.

At least you can eat beans

Roy, as always, putting it best on the GOP's numberless budget:

The alterna-budge is a bag of magic Reagan beans. No one on God's green earth believes in them or wants them. Adding numbers to it would be like assigning a horsepower rating to Hot Wheels.

Stooges

I have no great hopes for Sean Penn as "Larry," but if you're looking for some laughs, here ya go.

"Diversionary tactics"

John "Ohio Tropics" Boehner decries the "tactics" of certain Democrats to use "straw men" such as "the party of 'no'" and, ohmygod, "Rush Limbaugh" to distract Americans from Republicans very real solutions for solving our economic meltdown. Solutions, he seems to forget, that led to the meltdown in the first place. Sorry, that was merely a diversion.

My point is that Boehner is all over "certain Democrats," but he takes great pains to avoid calling out "that one."

In the first two months of 2009, the Democratic Congress and the White House have spent more money than the combined cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

[...]

And in a carefully calculated campaign, operatives and allies of the Obama administration are seeking to divert attention toward radio host Rush Limbaugh

[...]

This strategy did not develop out of thin air. Democratic pollsters began laying the groundwork for this effort last fall.

[...]

President Obama has said that we must change the way Washington operates in order to address the unprecedented challenges of today. I hope that those inside and close to the administration begin heeding his advice

[...]

If only President Obama, and the majority of Americans who support him, would wake up and smell the Republican solutions.

Bleatings from CPAC

The Globe's Susan Milligan reports on Republican self-loathing at CPAC. Or, rather, loathing for the guy they think got them to this predicament.

"Sadly, our former president propelled America to socialism - all the way to third base," with Obama set to bring it to home, said conservative columnist Deroy Murdock. "Our side emerged with neither principle nor power."

And John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, was equally non-nostalgic in speaking about his former boss: "We are better off, in some sense, not having the Bush administration to defend," the former Bush administration official said. "Too many people connected the Bush administration to conservatism, and as we all know, that didn't happen."

Even former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich - while winning laughs for deriding Democrats in power - slammed the recently-retired president.

"We didn't get real change. We got big spending under Bush, now we have big spending under Obama," said Gingrich, author of the "Contract With America" that underlay the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. "The great irony . . . is that we have a Bush-Obama big spending program that is bipartisan in nature," Gingrich told conference attendees.

Strangely, other than John McCain, for whom the opprobrium is fierce, no other Senate or House Republicans are called to account for the years leading up to the first cracks in their control of the Federal government. It is George Bush who is responsible for fiscal irresponsibility, not the politicians who aided and abetted the looting of government purses, the razing of regulatory bodies, and the outsourcing to crony contractors.

And, more strangely still, they seem blissfully unaware that all of that "connections to conservatism" that Bolton weirdly describes, has helped create the financial conditions to which the federal government is now trying to respond. They seem equally unaware a majority of Americans seem to appreciate that response.

Eye of Newt

It is surely a sign of how pathetic House Republicans are that they are hotly engaged in the search for the next Gingrich.

WASHINGTON — The last time Congressional Republicans were this out of power, they turned to a college professor from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, to lead the opposition, first against President Bill Clinton in a budget battle in 1993, and then back into the majority the following year.

As Republicans confronted President Obama in another budget battle last week, their leadership included another new face: Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, who as the party’s chief vote wrangler is as responsible as anyone for the tough line the party has taken in this first legislative standoff with Mr. Obama. This battle has vaulted Mr. Cantor to the front lines of his party as it tries to recover from the losses of November.

As Republican whip, Mr. Cantor succeeded again on Friday in denying the White House the support of a single House Republican on the stimulus bill. That was a calculated challenge to the president, who, in his weekly address on Saturday, hailed the bill as “an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it.”

Mr. Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich’s years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich’s leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton’s package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks.

“I talk to Newt on a regular basis because he was in the position that we are in: in the extreme minority,” he said.

And leave it to Ad Nags to so fully echo the fun house mirrors of Washington conventional thinking to see this as a good thing for the GOP.

The Republicans badly misplayed this one. There's nothing like 100% obstructionism in response to an effort to stop the downward spiral of citizens' economic well-being to get your party out of its minority status. And there's nothing like the narcissism that fuels Washington to see this as a victory, even as poll after poll indicate that the public endorses Obama's handling of the stimulus package.

I don't know, perhaps they think that like Newt, they can maneuver an impeachable blowjob.

A change of heart

Wow.

No on 8.

Angry mobs

Jon Swift ably defends them as only he can.

The Republican Party certainly owes a lot to angry mobs. Angry mobs in Little Rock and Selma deeply concerned about the issue of state’s rights, angry mobs of parents in Boston who didn’t want their kids bussed across town and angry mobs of Chicago homeowners who didn’t want their property values to go down all helped give birth to the modern conservative movement. The Democrats had angry mobs of their own rioting in the cities and burning flags at antiwar protests and conservatives realized that the only way we would win is if we had better, angrier mobs. What was Nixon’s Silent Majority but a very quiet, very angry mob?

Tako Sushi

It's getting monotonous. Every day, another example of the statist, business friendly "elites" of the party, screaming "It's aliiiiive," as yet another monster of their making begin to get up off the operating table.

Dean Allen, a plump and friendly fellow sporting an American-flag tie, told me that he runs something called Spirit of Liberty; he’s also helping Witherspoon’s campaign. “Some of these people may be coming in here to get jobs washing dishes, but some of them are coming in here to hijack airplanes,” he explained. “If you’re down there trying to look at the people coming across the border, maybe a lot of them are just motivated by economics, and they want a job washing dishes or cutting grass. But I can’t tell Jose Cuervo from the Al Qaeda operatives by looking at them, because they cut their beard off. It’s like trying to get fly manure out of pepper without your glasses on, you know? I mean, not a racist thing, but they’re all brown with black hair and they don’t speak English and I don’t speak Arabic or Spanish, so if they don’t belong here and they don’t come here legally, I want to know who’s here.” He echoed McCain’s observation that the anti-immigrant feeling is strongest in states with new Hispanic populations. “The illegal Hispanic population, it’s definitely growing,” he said. “I can tell you just from how many you see when you walk in Wal-Mart, and you drive down the street and you see buildings now with writing in Spanish that says ‘tienda,’ which is Mexican for ‘store.’ You didn’t see that even a year or two ago.”

After speaking for forty-five minutes, Witherspoon walked across the street with me to Tako Sushi and we sat outside, where heat lamps warmed us. Witherspoon is tall and bald, and he spoke quickly, like a man full of opinions he’s been eager to vent. In his speech, he had run through many of the issues that have been festering on the right: the Law of the Sea treaty; an alleged plan to combine Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a super-state; the Patriot Act. But he was most exercised about immigration and about Lindsey Graham’s betrayal on that issue. “There’s a lot of unrest in South Carolina,” he told me gravely. “And people are concerned that the Senator no longer represents the views of mainstream South Carolinians in a lot of ways. Immigration is the No. 1 issue, no question there. We’re concerned about illegal immigrants coming in here and—well, under the Bush Administration, it’s now seven years into his term, and he hasn’t done a lot about it.” He was not impressed by Bush’s big-tent philosophy of courting Hispanics as the future of the Republican Party. “The big tent is great. But that doesn’t mean ’cause it’s a big tent you should include everything under the tent.”

The GOP is reaping what they've sown. For liberals of the past 50 or so years, it's been a matter of waiting -- sometimes patiently, sometimes not so much -- for the Democratic party leadership to "come around." Civil rights, environmental protections, wage fairness -- wacky ideas that were untenable to the party's "elites" at the time, but of which they would eventually come to see the political advantages. For the Republican leadership, it's different. It's never been about policy, beyond tax cuts and deregulation. It was only about power. So they fed a constituency of the aggrieved, the spittle-flecked, the xenophobes, the...um...obsessed. The Republicans encouraged the burgeoning stardom of phony fanatics, never seriously distancing themselves from their hateful speech. The Republicans, with the uneasy support of their corporate donors, empowered the crazies and the phony tough -- or at least made the idiots feel empowered. And now they aren't proving so patient.

Fighting below our weight?

Yes, Matt, this isn't just "inane," this is insane.

Our President: "So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

...This is inane. World War III? Against Iran? Really? Because Iran seems a lot like a medium-sized middle income country with few military capabilities rather than a near peer-competitor of the sort against which you might fight a world war.

Let's take stock. Six years and 30 some odd days ago, we were the world's lone superpower, a colossus, the world's policeman. But because 19 socially maladjusted, creepy assholes were able to hijack four planes and kill 3,000 people, we are now competing with Iran for world domination?

It has become clear what Bush's last remaining supporters (and hawks of both parties) believe: we should not so much promise we'll keep Americans safe as we should keep Americans in a constant state of fear.

"Wimps"

John Boehner taps into his inner twelve-year old. You start throwing fightin' words around like that -- especially when you look like this -- is a sure sign that things are falling apart all around you, John.

Of course, that's probably not the word he really wanted to use.