Biden's in charge

Quote of the day

"..I've got [Palin's] book, I have it right over here [..] I made a prediction when I talked with her yesterday. I said "You've got enough in here that people who get hold of this, like the AP, or any of the state-controlled media, they're going to focus on the soap opera aspects of your book and they're going to ignore what is truly one of the most substantive policy books I've read. This woman, governor Palin, clearly is jazzed by policy, particularly environmental policy and energy policy, as well as taxes and so forth."

—Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show, 13 November 2009

The decade in seven minutes

Quote of the day

"After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York -- to New York -- to answer for their alleged crimes, in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood."

—Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General

David and Goliath, 21st century edition

Palestinian demonstrators used slingshots to throw stones at Israeli soldiers during a protest against Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank village of Nilin, near Ramallah, Friday.

(via Pime)

How to eat a chicken wing

We've been doing it wrong our whole life! No, seriously.

Sen. Webb (D-VA) on the terror trials

Via TPM:

"I have never disputed the constitutional authority of the President to convene Article III courts in cases of international terrorism. However, I remain very concerned about the wisdom of doing so. Those who have committed acts of international terrorism are enemy combatants, just as certainly as the Japanese pilots who killed thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor. It will be disruptive, costly, and potentially counterproductive to try them as criminals in our civilian courts.

"The precedent set by this decision deserves careful scrutiny as we consider proper venues for trying those now held at Guantanamo who were apprehended outside of this country for acts that occurred outside of the country. And we must be especially careful with any decisions to bring onto American soil any of those prisoners who remain a threat to our country but whose cases have been adjudged as inappropriate for trial at all. They do not belong in our country, they do not belong in our courts, and they do not belong in our prisons.

"I have consistently argued that military commissions, with the additional procedural rules added by Congress and enacted by President Obama, are the most appropriate venue for trying individuals adjudged to be enemy combatants."

For most of the detainees now in Guantanamo, this is probably true. But I think the Obama administration appreciates that because previous commissions enacted by Bush lacked the fairness and legitimacy of due process, merely reforming them is not enough. We must break with that past somehow.

Viewed in this light, trying KSM and a handful of others in New York seems inspired and fitting.

May they get their just desserts at an indisputably fair trial. And may the rest of the mess Bush left at Guantanamo be dealt with fairly but more quietly with the new commissions.

"Offensive Cyber War Turned The Insurgency In 2007"

Ambers summarizes:

Now it can be fully revealed: In May of 2007, the National Security Agency launched a massive cyber offensive against insurgent cell and computer networks in Iraq, which officials believe was responsible for breaking the back of the insurgency.  Shane Harris at National Journal takes you inside the Oval Office as the decision was made:

Former officials with knowledge of the computer network attack, all of whom requested anonymity when discussing intelligence techniques, said that the operation helped turn the tide of the war. Even more than the thousands of additional ground troops that Bush ordered to Iraq as part of the 2007 "surge," they credit the cyberattacks with allowing military planners to track and kill some of the most influential insurgents. The cyber-intelligence augmented information coming in from unmanned aerial drones as well as an expanding network of human spies.

When Bob Woodward wrote about unspecified techniques used to turn the tide of the war, this is what he meant.

Morale plummets in Afghanistan, improves in Iraq

WASHINGTON – Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence,

Look for the Right to praise the surge as a success and berate Obama for dithering on Afghanistan.

Three cheers for limited government

It's sure taken the public long enough to arrive at this (correct) conclusion.

Alas, I'm pretty sure we have the Glenn Beck effect to thank for the shift, rather than a principled opposition to state-guaranteed positive rights.

Gallup's interpretation:

The wording of the healthcare bill the House passed last Saturday explicitly states that one of the bill's purposes is to provide "affordable, quality healthcare for all Americans."

The current poll results indicate that, with the renewed healthcare debate since Obama took office, Americans have become less convinced that it is an appropriate goal for the federal government to take on the responsibility of ensuring that all Americans have healthcare coverage. It is possible that the current debate has increased the average American's awareness as to the nuances of the various roles the government could play in the healthcare system, helping make the generic "make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage" sound less appealing. Plus, the current debate may have produced more skepticism among Americans that the government's role in healthcare could or should be this broad.

Catholics, gays, and the poor, ctd.

Earlier I linked to "Catholic diocese channels Christ's love, threatens to stop feeding the poor if gays marry.", a point that's been making the rounds on liberal blogs.

Turns out it doesn't hold water

What is this 'rule of law' and 'due process' you speak of?

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City.

Update: Redstate goes bonkers. The action alert I also received:

Stop Obama From Importing Terrorists Stateside

[..] the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

Horror of horrors!

Link blag

David Frum wonders if conservatives can govern.

Dish reader draws a lesson from Fort Hood. Another differs. American Muslim reaction here.

Library Grape: Catholic diocese channels Christ's love, threatens to stop feeding the poor if gays marry.

TMV: Can we please just tax the churches already?

Politico: The Republican National Committee's health insurance plan offers coverage for "a fundamental assault on innocent human life".

TPM has a Lou Dobbs slideshow retrospective. Krugman writes: "Until now it really has seemed as if there was nothing, nothing at all, that someone on the right could say and do that would make them unacceptable in polite company. Now it at least seems that there is a line somewhere."

Fallows: more than a hundred TSA agents have gone undercover...cleverly disguised as TSA agents! (he follows up)

Police arrest twenty-five dangerous deviants in Chicago.

Headline to appreciate: "Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF"

Unlike every other document on the Web, this page is in final form and completely finished. *grin*

Math is beautiful.

This guy can juggle. So can this one.

Soldiers and their dogs.

Quote of the day

From today's chat:

Reston, Va.: After the Stupak [anti-abortion] amendment victory, can we expect the pro-life community to attach amendments to the Defense budget saying that no public funds can be used to kill people?

Ezra Klein: Oh, definitely. I hear they're organizing on that right now.

Local news on Rand Paul

Text version here.

Also, Paul appeared on FBN Happy Hour today.

The other walls

Hoje Macau

Republicans pull ahead for 2010?

Seems some people are being reminded of why they don't like Democrats. In particular, disaffected Republicans who identify as Independents:



A six point swing in one month is rather surprising. But it's just one poll, so the usual caveats apply. Hopefully it'll prod more into the field to confirm. I'll be watching pollster.com's average with the sensitivity high and Rasmussen eliminated.

Photo of the day

Spectators watch as giant styrofoam dominoes topple along the route of the former Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate on November 9, 2009 in Berlin, Germany.

More at TBP; the fading image is especially cool.

The dead zone: implicit marginal tax rates on the working poor

A look at our awful system:



Mises Daily explains:

At A, the marginal tax rate is quite high, essentially because of the generosity of the package of cash and noncash benefits provided to those on welfare. At B, the marginal tax rate is relatively low (!) because of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). From B to D, we (or, rather, the working poor) are in the Dead Zone, with implicit marginal tax rates mostly exceeding 100 percent.

How stupid and evil must our elected representatives be to do this to the working poor! Actually, this being a democracy, there is nobody to blame but the electorate. Especially the left-liberal do-gooders. Since Milton Friedman developed the negative income tax, waaay back in the 1950s, there can be no excuse for any educated person to not be aware of the fact that taxes and means-tested benefits destroy the lower classes' positive incentive to work.

At C, the implicit marginal tax rate is momentarily "only" 75 percent. This is because, in the face of losing other means-tested benefits while the federal income tax kicks in, the children of the household still qualify for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The lull in the onslaught is momentary, however, ending as soon as that prop is removed from the household.

At D, the family is finally done with jumping through the hoops to qualify and remain qualified for the give-away programs. Now all it has to concern itself with is paying taxes. But there is no rest for the weary because, at E, the child tax credit phases out.

In the above scenario, I describe the effects of the tax and subsidy programs of the government with respect to a hypothetical family of three, consisting of one adult and two minors, with a focus on the working poor. I could just as well have talked of a middle-class family with one or more children of college age, and how means-tested financial aid programs such as the Pell Grant and federally subsidized loans make fools of those who save for college; or how Medicaid's rules for nursing-home eligibility make those who save for retirement into fools; or how bringing back the pre-Reagan tax rates will make utter fools of families in which the wife and husband both work.

Everywhere, the government's desire (meaning the left-liberal do-gooders' desire) to be generous to the poor is destroying the positive incentives to work and to save that are so necessary for a well-functioning economy. What they have done to Detroit, and are doing to New Jersey, they will do to the entire country.

(via Marginal Revolution)

And now, a history of the Internet

(via LGF)

Link blag

Conor Friedersdorf knows how to fix the Right. Now if only they were listening...

Larison has smart things to say about the Crist-Rubio Florida Senate Primary.

Pelosi was smart to pass cap and trade early.

The physics of free-throw shooting.

Researchers have found a way to grow new organs by grabbing cells, spraying them onto a protein frame, dunking them in "growth-stimulating compounds," and then sticking them in an oven. Naturally, they're using this technique to grow new penises.

Nicole LaPorte was a Twilight virgin.

A headline to appreciate: "Madonna to meet Jesus's parents".

New poll shows 100% of grandsons are talented...

ATLANTA—A Zogby poll of 1,542 American grandparents published Monday found that grandsons were described as "very" to "extremely" talented by 1,542 of the respondents. "Participants in the poll were emphatic in their descriptions of the talents of grandsons in fields as diverse as advertising and sales, choral performance, baseball, talking, crawling, making their beds, video games, and instructing their elders on proper cell-phone use," pollster Tom Waterton said. "In addition, an overwhelming percentage of grandchildren were described as outgoing, sharp, and looking just like Uncle Andy, you remember Uncle Andy, he was always up to something, too bad he passed so young, he would have loved the grandchild in question." Sources at Zogby admitted that the survey was incomplete, as several hundred pollsters are still unable to get their assigned grandparents off the phone.

The shape of things to come

Old prejudices die hard.

(via Yglesias)

Tear down that..wait, what?

A pretty silly cartoon if you consider the amount of money his administration poured into stabilizing the financial sector, or how many government appointees are Goldman Sachs alumni.

Afghanistan to get McChrystal light

Shadow Government:

[..] President Obama has made his decision on Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and is preparing for a roll-out sometime around the 19th or 20th of November. Senior officials are clearing their schedules, giving heads-up to allies, and generally girding their loins for a major public relations push. But a push for what?

McClatchey reports that, as expected, the president will split the difference between his warring advisors. He will embrace the counterinsurgency approach recommended by General McChrystal and other military advisors. He will reject the narrower approach favored by Vice President Biden and other political advisors. But he will not authorize the upper-bound of military resources McChrystal requested. If the McClatchey report is accurate, the final choice comes close to resembling the option dubbed "McChrystal light," but probably not light enough to avoid a political battle with the anti-war faction at home.

100 million dead

If you haven't read Matt Welch on The Unknown War, do so today.

Blaming the president for unemployment

Megan says bugger off:

The president has very little control over employment in the economy. The stimulus undoubtedly kept the economy from losing even more jobs than he did. But the economy is undergoing a hell of a deep structural adjustment: from debtors to savers, from housing-and-finance led growth to . . . well, if we knew that, the recession would already be over. Those adjustments need to happen, because the previous situation was totally unsustainable. But they definitionally imply higher unemployment and less consumer demand in the short run.

A third stimulus might lower the unemployment rate a little, at least from where it would otherwise be. But it would not put us back at 5% unemployment, and it would have a lot of other costs, including further risking our AAA bond rating. Stimulus is at best an incredibly blunt instrument. And it is made blunter by all of the procedural checks we've accumulated over decades of government growth, not to mention very powerful public sector unions. FDR could tell his government to go out and hire people to paint hallways or build dams. The current president needs Environmental Impact Statements, public review periods, and the okay of ACFSME.

The fact is, most of the time, the best the president can do is avoid making things much worse. And though I have many disagreements with the specifics of Obama's policies, I'd say that largely, he's kept from making stuff worse, and eased the worst of the damage on hurting families. We could be doing more with more generous unemployment benefits or other income assistance, less with atrocious auto bailouts. But the economics of recession is truly a dismal science, and demanding that the president cure the recession is about as effective as expecting him to cure Hep C.

Agreed on all counts.

But this won't stop me from gawking at the laughably rosy scenario Obama's economic team painted to sell the stimulus last February:



Though I suppose reassurance is part of the president's role, so as to avert greater panic. Don't worry people, everything is gonna be just fine!

Comparing Western Europe

Over at the League, Koz commented:

Liberalism should be seen as an unmitigated failure by anyone under 30.

To the extent that it isn’t, part of the reason is that American prosperity seems to them as a fact of nature. For anybody with any historical consciousness of the modern industrial state for the last thirty years or so, the rules are pretty simple: low taxes/free markets = prosperity, bloated welfare state = corrupt dependence on the state.

That's some pretty run-of-the-mill conservative boilerplate, which I think misses half the story. Hopefully my response is more interesting...

Koz, I deplore welfare and love myself some low tax rates and free markets as much as the next libertarian--but you should note that Western Europe's welfare states are doing quite well, in no small part because their governments (parliamentary: executive makes policy, legislature approves) and tax systems (consumption tax: VAT) are more efficient than the American model.

You ought to check out Bruce Bartlett's The New American Economy; he offers some good clear-headed explanations of the economic side of things.

My own thesis, in a nutshell, is that the better governance and taxation in Europe is what makes their welfare states politically palatable and attractive to their peoples. Whereas America's bad governance and absurd tax system are what make higher rates and more welfare politically unpalatable and unattractive to Americans.

I believe that if America kept its relatively-low welfare and tax rates but improved its governance and tax system, it would be better off.

And I believe that if Europe kept its good governance and tax system but reduced its welfare state and taxation rates, it would be better off.

Alas, the politics don't seem conducive to either outcome, because good governance/taxation seems to make people tolerant of the welfare state, whereas maintaining enough popular outrage against state expansion seems to depend on having inefficient governance/taxation like America's.

20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

A man waves to his relatives on the other side of the Berlin Wall, August 1967.

November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Built with barbed wire and concrete in August of 1961 by the Communist East, the 30-mile Berlin Wall was a Cold War symbol separating East and West Berlin, preventing people from leaving East Germany. According to the “August 13 Association” which specialises in the wall's history, at least 938 people died, shot by East German border guards, attempting to flee to West Berlin or West Germany. The wall stood for 28 years as a division between the Soviets and the Allies. During the summer of 1989, tens of thousands of East Germans fled the communist regime.



A man hammers away at the Berlin Wall, 12 November 1989.



Thousands of young East Berliners gather at the Berlin Wall near the Brandenburg Gate, 11 November 1989.



Peoples from East and West Germany greet each other, 22 December 1989.

(Source with more photos)

Weapons bound for Hezbollah

LGF:

The IDF has uploaded a video presentation showing the huge shipment of weaponry from Iran, intended for Hezbollah, that was intercepted this week by an Israel Navy commando force aboard the civilian ship Francop.

Sunday viewings

Spartacus (1960)
Gotcha! (1980)
V pilot

"An open letter to Jonah Goldberg"

Read Conor Friedersdorf on the state of the Republican party.

Climate change diavlog

In the past I've admired Manzi's cost-benefit analysis, but Professor Orr presents some bleak counter-views.

I'm eager to hear whether the next (fifth) IPCC report bears them out.

Dept. of memories

So, I found you can play DOOM in your browser. Sweet.

(Hell you can even play Quake 3 Arena in a browser.)

I'm reminded of a recent xkcd...



The tooltip:

I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.

Prince Ali! Mighty is he! Ali Ababwa.

What is this picture?

You'll never guess.

More on nukes

If you want zero-carbon power, they're the only practical solution.

"Under the Rightwing Rock"

Every time I think about maybe possibly voting Republican in the future, some bozo neocon opens his mouth and reminds me of the kind of people I'd be putting in government....here's Andrew:

If you don't think Bush's and Cheney's embrace of torture-as-policy has had a profound effect, check out this instant response to Fort Hood from Mark Noonan in the neocon camp:

A terrible event - but I don’t want anyone to call it an “act of violence” or “a terrible tragedy”. It was an attack - one or more men decided with malice to attack a US military base. We need to get right down to the bottom of this - and, liberals, if the stories of accomplices in custody are true, this is where harsh interrogation might be needed: whoever was involved in this most emphatically does not have a right to remain silent.

So we go from torturing a foreign terror suspect who may know the whereabouts of a WMD that is about to go off imminently (the original Krauthammer position) to torturing American suspects in a shooting spree (suspect, I might add, that subsequently turned out to be mirages).

This is not a slippery slope; it's a well-watered slide to throwing out the entire American system of government.

Obama on the debt

Ambers notes:

There will be talk of real, across-the-board limits to discretionary spending. There will probably be a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel set up, along with, perhaps, another Social Security reform commission.

Andrew sniffs:

Talk is cheap. And commissions are often ways of avoiding, not expediting real cuts in entitlements and defense. For this independent supporter of Obama, the key issue in the next year will be seriousness about reducing long term debt. If he cannot do it, or fails to make it a priority, he will lose me and many others. I understand why circumstances and inheritance have propelled the debt up right now. But circumstances cannot explain away the long-term crunch. A real leader tackles that. A phony leader ducks it.

I'm with Andrew. I want to see real progress before 2012.

Allowing Bush's tax cuts to expire won't be nearly enough.

Quote of the day

"It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war."

—Barack Obama, 2006

(via Obsidian Wings)

USPS, Inc.

Yglesias explains why we should privatize the postal service. Hear, hear.

No political lesson

Letter from a witness:

This was premeditated. This wasn't VBC again. That guy snapped, not this one. He was so damn calm when he was shooting. Methodical. And he was moving tactically. The Army really is diverse and we really do love all our own. We signed up to be shot at but not at home. Not unarmed. No one should ever see what the inside of that medical SRP building looked like. I suppose that's what VA Tech looked like. Except they didn't have soldiers coming from everywhere to tourniquet and compress and talk to the wounded while rounds are still coming out.

No one touched him...the shooter that is...other than to treat him. Though I told the medic (and I'm not proud of this) that was giving him plasma that there better not be anyone else who needed it because he should be the last one to be treated. But I had just finished holding a soldier who was critical (I counted three entry wounds) and talking to him about his children.... If the shooter had a grievance he should have taken it out on those responsible; he wasn't shooting people he knew (media reports to the contrary). He was just shooting anybody who happened to be present for SRP medical processing, mainly lower enlisted.

But please, no one use this politically! The Army is not "broken", PTSD doesn't turn people into killers, most Muslims aren't evil, and whether we should stay or go in Afghanistan has nothing to do with this. I'm babbling...sorry.

Megan concludes:

This guy was some form of lunatic or psychopath, and it seems pretty clear to me at this point that he was inspired by terrorists.  But there's no evidence that he was a terrorist--that is, that he was hooked into some organized network.  Lots of people do terrible things in the name of their religion--just ask George Tiller.  Their acts are, as the Catholic Church says, "sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance".  But they are no more indictments of a community than the acts of that Korean kid who went crazy at Virginia Tech.

There is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this.  Gun control would not have stopped a commissioned officer from obtaining guns.  Barack Obama had no power to stop this.   Infectious PTSD is a lousy theory.  And nations certainly do not--and should not--shape their foreign policy around the possibility that a random psychopath will start shooting up a crowd.  Evil people do evil things.  That's all.

Addendum: No lesson other than more examples of the Right's immaturity, of course.

Jon's epic spoof of Beck

Peace be upon the people of peace...

Another meaningless shooting?

Here's James Fallows...

One consequence of having been alive through a lot of modern American history is remembering a lot of mass shootings. I was working at a high school summer job when news came over the radio that Charles Whitman had gunned down more than 40 people, killing 14, from the main tower at the University of Texas at Austin. I was editing a news magazine during the schoolyard killings in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997 and sent reporters to try to figure out what it all meant. I can remember where I was when the live-news coverage switched to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, and the shootings at the one-room schoolhouse in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, and the Virginia Tech shootings two years ago. And all the rest.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

RIP.

Normally I'd be in agreement, as I was after the Virginia Tech massacre.

But for this Fort Hood case, the suspect, U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, is a devout Muslim and very religious. We don't know for certain that there's a connection between his faith and the shooting. But reports are he was troubled by the U.S. military's engagements and his coming deployment overseas against fellow Muslims. [Update: Witnesses say he shouted "Allahu akbar" during the rampage. He was to be deployed to Afghanistan.]

Given how many killings have been carried out in the name of Islam in recent history, well...



(Source: Pew, via Ordinary Scott)

Whether you think it's deserved or not, Islam has clearly earned a reputation for encouraging violence. This shooting will do its part to inflame the perception. No good shall come from this, but nor do I see how it will be empty or meaningless.

Stephen Colbert vs. Stephen Colber on AGW

With a little help from Mr. Gore...

GOP shoots and scores

The purged moderate speaks

The Daily Beast interviews Scozzafava:

How do you characterize yourself? We live in such a label-induced society – oh that person’s a liberal and this is a conservative. If I was to say to Dede Scozzafava, so what are you? What applies, if anything?

I’m a Republican.

Defined as what?

When I look at the Republican Party of Lincoln and I look back at eight principles of being a Republican, I think I pretty much identify with each one of those principles. Whether it’s less government dependency, promoting self-sufficiency, believing in lower taxes, believing in fewer government regulations, believing in less government spending, or believing in individual liberty, individual freedom, and less government interference in the lives of people. Those are all positions that I’ve always held to, I’ve always articulated on behalf of, and those are the things I stand for. And I think those are Republican principles.

I went through an editorial board during this most recent race. And at the end, the gentleman, the lead editor just looked across the table at me and he said, “A moderate Republican? You’re a conservative Republican.” The social issues sometimes people might not agree with, but I really think I govern according to the Constitution and I live my personal life according to my faith, and I try very hard not to mix up the two.

My kind of Republican!

Is it your intention to stay in the Republican Party?

I have every intention of staying in the Republican Party. This is my party too. There are a lot of moderate people—Republicans, like me--and I’m hearing from an awful lot from them. And I think the Republican Party needs to know if they don’t have room for us and they don’t want us working with them, we’re going to find a way to work against them. I’d much prefer for us to be a bigger party and us all to work on the things that are most important, the fiscal issues, foreign policy. If you listen to my foreign-policy positions, you know I’m a Republican.

Give me an example.

Israel. I’m pro-Israel. I’m pro-defense spending. I think diplomacy is good, but diplomacy only works if it’s backed up by a strong defense. And making sure you have a strong defense budget. When I see what’s going on with Iran it’s very, very scary. I don’t think that you can–it’s hard to put a peace branch out when you’re dealing with a regime like that. I think you have to be very, very firm with a lot of these countries. So if people took the time to know who I really was, I think they would have a Republican member in Congress today.

Er, so she's somewhat to my left on economics and clearly too much of a neocon on foreign policy.

But I'd definitely choose her over the Beck-Palin axis.

This is why they fight

Ordinary Jamelle sums up:

[..] we really should stop underestimating the extent to which raw prejudice drives political decisions.  As Freddie remarked on Twitter recently:

It has become impolite to say so, in either direction, but never doubt many in this country hate and fear gay people.

The corollary to this, of course, is that in a country where a near-majority is morally opposed to homosexuality, it is ridiculous (and almost cruel) to expect gay people to rely exclusively on legislatures as they fight to secure their rights as American citizens.  And that’s especially the case when you realize that when legislative efforts are successful, there is almost always an immediate effort to rescind or overturn the legislation.  The simple fact is that if current demographic trends hold true, a majority of Americans will eventually support marriage equality.  In the meantime though, I think LGBT activist groups should take a page from the Civil Rights Movement and again begin focusing their challenges on the courts.  It simply doesn’t make any sense to rely on the generosity of the majority (indeed, if black people did, segregation would have lasted for a whole lot longer).

Revisiting the achievements of the Veterans Health Administration

Alas, it's nowhere near the success model of government-run care for the rest of us that progressives think it is.

The progressive case for an excise tax

Ezra Klein makes it.

I support the excise tax as the best incremental compromise we're likely to get.

Ideally, like most health-care wonks, I'd want to eliminate tax credits for health benefits and require a transition to them being directly taken out of wages.

E.g. if you're making 70K/yr. and have a 10K/yr. health benefit, your employer would be required to recontract you for 80K/yr., and you would be directly responsible for contributing that 10K (or whatever other figure) to the health fund you wish to participate in (which could remain attached to your employer initially, but should eventually move to an individual market on a health exchange, so continued insurance is not directly tied to continued employment).

These are not the bombs you're looking for

Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has deployed paranormal bomb detectors at checkpoints...

[..] the ministry bought 800 of the devices from a company called ATSC (UK) Ltd. for $32 million in 2008, and an unspecified larger quantity for $53 million.

[..] ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

What'll they think of next?