DOSTOYESKY VS. DERSHOWITZ ON TORTURE

From The Brothers Karamazov, a different view of the moral issue involved in torture, very different from Prof. Dershowitz's view:

"Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that," said Ivan earnestly. "One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.

MONEY STILL TALKS

The Dems have been considering raising the income tax on hedge fund managers from 15% to the normal rate of 37.9 percent. The managers make donations to the Dems and suddenly the raise is in doubt. An old story.

Hedge-Fund Tax Rise Faces `Uphill Climb' in Senate, Baucus Says
By Ryan J. Donmoyer and Alison Fitzgerald
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg)

``I'm not ruling anything out,'' Baucus, a Montana Democrat, said yesterday. ``It's on the table, but it's an uphill climb. Let's see where we are at the end of the day.''

About half of the House proposal's tax increases on fund managers would come from taxing carried interest as wages at rates as high as 37.9 percent instead of the 15 percent capital gains rate.

Baucus said he suspects that enough Democrats oppose the carried-interest tax increase to prevent its backers from obtaining the 60 Senate votes it would need to overcome procedural hurdles.

Democrats Split Over Bill Affecting Backers
Tax Measure Targets Hedge Funds
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; Page A01

In early June, as the Senate Finance Committee began examining how a new breed of Wall Street titan could be paying a special low tax rate on executives' salaries, one of the richest of them, hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, cut the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee a check for $28,500.

Just days later, with DSCC Chairman Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) equivocating on legislation to raise taxes on publicly traded equity firms, hedge fund giant James H. Simons, who earned $1.7 billion last year at his Renaissance Technologies LLC, donated another $28,500 to the DSCC.

By late July, Schumer was off the fence -- and on the side of the hedge funds and private-equity firms in opposing the Democratic legislation.

A LITTLE FACT-CHECKING BY THE WAPO

It's only on page A6 instead of A1 but it's a good start:

Giuliani Is Still Standing By Questionable Figures
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; Page A06

The former New York mayor would have us believe that he was off by one percentage point at most in calculating his chances of surviving prostate cancer in Britain. In fact, he was spectacularly wrong the first time and equally wrong the second time.

CRAZY PAT ENDORSES RUDY; WINGNUTS UNSURE

Crazy Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani and the wingnuts aren't sure if this is good or bad.

Ramesh Ponnuru at NRO thinks it's good:

I do think the Robertson endorsement is a big plus for Giuliani.

John Podhoretz writing in Commentary thinks it's mixed:

Taken strictly as an electoral matter, the Robertson imprimatur is almost certainly a wash — meaning that any votes it will generate will be offset by votes it will cost among those, even on the Republican side, who find Robertson a singularly unappetizing figure (including among Evangelical Christians, many of whom come from a different eschatalogical tradition from Robertson’s).

Tammy Bruce, noted FAUX News political analyst, writes that it's bad:

Robertson is like a Fred Phelps Lite who condemns people on television instead of at funerals.

Overall, this is another reason to oppose Giuliani and it shows that the wingnuts are in disarray.

LIKUDNIK DERSHOWITZ ON TORTURE

Alan Dershowitz has an extremely precise mind but has shown a weak spot for anything that IN HIS VIEW seems to harm Israel. He recently wrote a piece for the WSJ's Opinion Journal that is an odd mixture of concern troll ("The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.", Godwinism ("many decent members of the French Resistance who, under Nazi torture, disclosed the locations of their closest friends and relatives.") and distracting hypotheticals ("But what if lawful interrogation failed to uncover the whereabouts of the suicide bomber?").

Dershowitz accuses the Democrats of making torture a partisan issue and inexplicably accuses them of adopting a "pacifistic stance." Well, it would be inexplicable if Dershowitz were HONEST but he's not. For example, he asserts that "tens of millions want the Moores and Sheehans of our nation as far away as possible from influencing national security policy." He cites no polls about this specific issue so I can only fill in what I know about the countries' attitude: About 50% of the country trusts the Democrats to handle Iraq and only 30% trusts the GOP. In addition, over 60% feel the Iraq War was a mistake. (ABC News/WaPo poll, 10/29 - 11/01)

In a narrow sense, it is probably true that 10s of millions don't want Moore or Sheehan near the national security decision making process but it is also true that a larger number don't want the neo-cons and the Likudniks near the levers of power. Dershowitz then points out that Giuliani is doing well with a broad segment of the population but fails to tell us that Giuliani's top advisors are neo-con war whores. Dershowitz can't seem to accept that Americans will no longer tolerate a foreign policy based on the Likud Party's goals.

Dershowitz does go on to make what I think is a sensible point but he does it by citing former President Bill Clinton: make a narrow law to cover the extreme "ticking bomb" scenario. He could've devoted his piece to a discussion of this idea instead of making a partisan attack on Democrats and liberals and the anti-war people who disagree with him. As he put it in the penultimate sentence: "The Democrats may lose the presidency if they are seen as the party of MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Dennis Kucinich and those senators who voted against Judge Mukasey because he refused to posture on a difficult issue relating to national security."

ECONOMIC SOLIPSISM

Robert J. Samuelson, a regular columnist for one of America's best papers, writes:

By and large, recessions are problems, not tragedies.

Matt Yglesias and others have posted on this despicable attempt to put conservative economic ideology above human beings and rea, a commenter at Matt's, found this great quote from the days Karl Rove and Grover Norquist think fondly of:

To quote Hoover himself:

the “leave it alone liquidationists” headed by [my] Secretary of the Treasury Mellon, who felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people”...
http://delong.typepad.com/delong_economics_only/2007/02/why_oh_why_cant.html

I'm struck by the line "when the people get an inflation brainstorm" because it glosses over the fact of the much larger role the Masters of the Universe have in these matters.

A LITTLE MORE ON THE ABX.HE INDEX

With costs like this, no wonder no one wants to insure against loss. Note that this came out last February and since then, some of the lower rated ABX.HE indices are less than 20!


Subprime mortgage derivatives index plunges
Bankruptcies, losses in subprime home loan industry spark drop
By Alistair Barr, MarketWatch
Last Update: 6:07 PM ET Feb 23, 2007


The ABX.HE index that tracks CDS on the riskiest subprime loans, rated BBB-, that were sold in the second half of 2006 fell to 69.39 on Friday, according to Markit.com, which administers the indexes. That's down from 72.71 on Thursday and 79.04 at the beginning of the week. In early February, this index was above 90.

Friday's price means that if investors wanted to buy protection against default on a notional $10 million of these loans, they would need to pay $3.061 million up front, plus a fixed 2.42% annual payment. This is a record low, and represents a spread of roughly 1,500 basis points.

CLINTON GETS SOME WALL STREET ENDORSEMENTS

I don't particularly care but it does show that the wingnuts are way out of line when they call her a Marxist or a socialist.

Citigroup's Rubin Says He Is Supporting Clinton for President
By Kristin Jensen

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc. Chairman and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is supporting New York Senator Hillary Clinton for president, adding to the Democratic candidate's support on Wall Street.

``Hillary is exceedingly well qualified and I'd like to see her be the next president of the United States,'' Rubin, 69, said in a statement released by a spokeswoman today.

Clinton, 60, already has a number of top executives in her corner. She won the backing of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein in August and Morgan Stanley Chairman and CEO John Mack in April.

"THE LAST BEST HOPE OF EARTH"

Well, maybe Lincoln was wrong. Via Atrios I learn that another "pillar" of the argument for war with Iraq has fallen.


CIA Rendition: The Smoking Gun Cable
November 06, 2007 2:33 PM
By Stephen Grey

In one such six-foot-by-10-foot cell in February 2004, equipped with a low mattress and a bucket as a toilet, sat a man in shackles named Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, the former al Qaeda camp commander described by former CIA director George Tenet in his autobiography last year as "the highest ranking al-Qa'ida member in U.S. custody" just after 9/11.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi's interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for "further debriefing."

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. ("I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda," Powell said. "Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.")

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a "foreign government service" (Egypt) that: "the next topic was al-Qa'ida's connections with Iraq...This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story."

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then "placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches]." He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to "tell the truth." When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that "he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back." Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then "was punched for 15 minutes." (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war -- the al Qaeda/Iraq link -- was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

OVER 4 YEARS TOO LATE

Sen. Horseface is a tad slow.

WEB EXTRA / Kerry says he’ll be ready next time
by TOM BENNER

Patriot Ledger
State House Bureau

Kerry, whose service as a U.S. Navy Swift boat skipper during the Vietnam War came under attack in his race against President Bush, said he has compiled a dossier on his war record critics that he wishes he had as the Democratic presidential nominee. ``We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,'' Kerry said following a morning address to the South Shore Chamber of Commerce. ``It’s a shame we weren’t ableto produce all that at the time.''

You're damn right it's a shame, Horse.

DEVELOPMENT BUT NO POOLS

I think John Kenneth Galbraith remarked on the poor state of public infrastructure in America, often a result of Republican policies. The LA Times reports that a few people are getting tired of that, especially with the housing downturn in the faster growing burbs. Schroeder is a mom and West is the Democratic candidate, Delgaudio the GOP scumbag.

Housing crisis tests GOP loyalties
The party could suffer in fast-growing exurban counties, where the real estate market is worst.
By Maura Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 6, 2007


Schroeder, who lives a few blocks from West, met the candidate on the street recently, and West made her case. "I've lived here 35 years," West said, looking at Schroeder's two boys, in the first and fourth grade. She noted that Delgaudio's children didn't go to public schools. "He really has no stake in the schools. He even voted against" the community pool, West said. Schroeder looked concerned. "We go there all the time," she said.

Delgaudio has a record of supporting new residential development. "Every house that's built out there raises my taxes," Schroeder fumed. "I don't appreciate getting my assessment telling me that my house is worth $500,000 and I'm paying taxes on that."

ANOTHER SLIDE IN THE CREDIT MARKETS

The ABX.HE indexes track how much it costs to insure a securitized debt that is based upon home mortgage loans against default. The greater the decline in the graphs below, the more it costs to insure. It costs more to insure because few want to guarantee collaterized securities. The costs have risen markedly for all types of debts, AAA to BBB-. Data from Markit:

The companies that have been selling the insurance may soon take big hits and perhaps fold:

MBIA, Ambac Losses Will Be `Massive,' Egan Jones Says (Update1)

By Christine Richard

Nov. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Bond insurers including MBIA Inc., Ambac Financial Group Inc. and ACA Capital Holdings Inc. face ``massive losses'' over the next few quarters that could test their ability to raise new capital, Egan-Jones Ratings Co. said.

MBIA may lose $20.2 billion on guarantees and securities holdings, Sean Egan, managing director of Egan-Jones, said on a conference call today. ACA Capital may take losses of at least $10 billion; New York-based Ambac may reach $4.3 billion; mortgage insurers MGIC Investment Corp. and Radian Group Inc. may see losses of $7.25 billion and $7.2 billion, respectively, Egan said.

``There is little doubt that the credit and bond insurers face massive losses over the next few quarters and many will be capital challenged,'' Egan said.

The Egan Jones loss estimates include existing guarantees, mainly on securities that rely on mortgages for repayment, and on securities holdings, he said. Haverford, Pennsylvania-based Egan Jones is paid by investors to rate debt, rather than by issuers.

Morgan Stanley analyst Ken Zerbe in a Nov. 2 report downgraded the financial guarantee industry to ``in-line'' from ``attractive,'' and questioned whether bond insurers will be able to survive mounting losses on CDOs and other mortgage-related securities that the companies guarantee.

I EDIT THE NY TIMES

In an article about the water projects bill, the Times has this paragraph:

Mr. Bush and Republican leaders are taking a harder line on spending out of a belief that voters in 2006 punished them for allowing federal spending to creep upward over the last six years and creating a costly new Medicare drug benefit. But not all Republicans are toeing that line. On the veto override this evening, 138 Republicans joined 223 Democrats in easily overcoming the president’s objections, and all of the annual spending bills have had solid bipartisan support.

There are 200 Republicans in the House. 138 of 200 is 69%. Couldn't the Times have written instead "Most Republicans aren't toeing that line"?

DEMS FINALLY SHOWING SOME SPINE ABOUT IRAQ???

We'll see what the next few days brings.

Democrats Reject G.O.P. Bid for More Iraq Spending
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: November 6, 2007
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — House and Senate negotiators approved a $459 billion military spending bill today, but rejected a Republican bid to provide $70 billion more to continue fighting the war in Iraq without any restrictions.

Senior Democrats said they would provide less money for the war, for a shorter time, with certain restrictions that are to be decided in the next few days.

FREDO'S FISCAL FOLLIES

The next time you hear a radio gasbag (e.g., Sean Hannity) talk about how great the U.S. economy is, bring this up:

Dollar Falls to Record on China's Plans to Diversify Reserves
By Stanley White and Kosuke Goto

Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar slid to record lows against the euro and the Canadian dollar on speculation China's plans to diversify its foreign exchange reserves will involve selling U.S. assets.

The dollar slumped to $1.4666 per euro, the lowest since the 13-nation currency debuted in January 1999, before trading at $1.4615 at 11:31 a.m. in Tokyo from $1.4557 late yesterday. It fell to $1.0975 per Canadian dollar, the lowest since Canada's currency was floated in 1950.
Against the pound, the dollar declined to $2.0947, the lowest since May 1981. The currency slid against the Australian dollar to 93.75 U.S. cents, the lowest since April 1984 from 92.87 U.S. cents.

UPDATE ALSO FROM BLOOMBERG:

The dollar's decline increased the attractiveness of commodities as alternative investments. A weaker dollar reduced the costs for buyers paying in other currencies.

Gold reached a 27-year high and silver rose to the most in 26 years as rising oil prices and a slumping dollar deepened concern that inflation will accelerate.

MORE EXPENSIVE OIL MEANS SWITCH TO COAL

I guess we really are shipping coal to Newcastle. Because of the dramatic rise in the price of oil (graph from USA Today)

coal is a much cheaper energy source:
Gore Nightmare Wins as Europe Pays to Ship U.S. Coal (Update1)
By Christopher Martin

Nov. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Now that the price of coal is at a historic low relative to oil, there's no stopping consumers and producers alike from embracing Al Gore's nightmare.

A ton of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 that European utilities will pay $50 to ship it across the Atlantic, according to Galbraith's Ltd., a 263-year-old London shipbroker. While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive after climbing to a record $96.24 on Nov. 1.

U.S. coal prices are equal to $1.98 for each million British thermal units of energy, compared with $12.51 for fuel oil and $6.91 for natural gas, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A million British thermal units is the equivalent of eight gallons of gasoline.

Coal generates 41 percent of the world's man-made carbon dioxide emissions, blamed for the warming of the Earth's climate, Gulf of Mexico hurricanes and rising sea levels.

WINGNUT WRITERS WHINE & SUE

Boy, talk about frivolous lawsuits! Hacks like Swiftboater Jerome Corsi and "We already won" Patterson are suing wingnut publisher Regnery because Regnery uses their crap books as promos for the Movement.



Conservative Authors Sue Publisher
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: November 7, 2007

New York Times



Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.



...the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”



In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”


The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.


“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”



Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels.



The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.

THE NEO-CONS, DETENTE AND ISRAEL, PART II

I wrote before that the neo-cons have been especially sensitive to Israel's needs and in Walter Isaacson's KISSINGER, there is more evidence of this senstivity in relation to detente. From pages 608-09:

More damaging than the conservative assault, which was to be expected, was the opposition to détente from former liberals, including those who had just recently been part of the peace movement. The neoconservatives, as these newcomers to the anticommunist crusade came to be called, were spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals and other strong supporters of Israel. They were partly motivated by the fear that America's weak-kneed anti-interventionist mood would combine with an eagerness to curry favor with Moscow and thus make the U.S. a less staunch defender of Israel. "There was a strong sense that Israel was doomed unless U.S. power in the world was maintained," said Richard Perle, one of the group's mandarins. "The Jewish-neoconservative connection sprang from that period of worries about détente and Israel."


These worries were heightened by the October 1973 war, during which Kissinger went to Moscow to arrange a cease-fire sooner than Israeli hard-liners wanted. Many viewed the heavy pressures he put on Israel, especially during the "reassessment" of American relations after the initial failure to reach a second Sinai accord in 1975, as part of his policy of détente. "Especially after the 1975 reassessment," Kissinger said, "assaults on détente stemmed from accusations that I was abandoning Israel." He also has a more personal explanation: "They could forgive me for being Jewish and secretary of state, but not for being Jewish, secretary of state, and marrying a tall, blond WASP."


Nixon, the staunch anticommunist, and Kissinger, the power-oriented defender of American credibility, found it astounding to be criticized as too soft on the Soviets by the likes of Norman Podhoretz and his contributors at Commentary magazine, many of whom had opposed the Vietnam war and major military programs. The intellectual stars of the neocons included Podhoretz; his wife, Midge Decter, who became director of the Committee for a Free World; Eugene Rostow, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger; Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest; and Moynihan, who in 1975 became America's U.N. ambassador.'

I GET AN ANSWER ABOUT THE RATINGS COMPANIES

I wondered if they will be held accountable for over-valuing the sub-prime crap and Jonathan Weil has the answer: NO

From Bloomberg:

What about all those fancy mathematical models that Citigroup used to calculate the values of these holdings, in the absence of quoted market prices?
Free Speech
It turns out the models depended to a large degree on inputs reflecting what the rating companies say, or more precisely, what the rating firms had gotten around to saying as of Sept. 30. These, recall, are the same ratings concerns that say they aren't liable for their errors or misjudgments -- like the one about housing prices rising forever -- because they merely write opinions protected by the First Amendment.

Let's see, the ratings companies make MONEY by providing the ratings but can't be held accountable? Isn't this a MORAL HAZARD?

THE RICH? THEY'LL WALK

The fallout from the sub-prime debacle won't be felt by some of the people responsible for the crisis, notably the credit rating agencies. Dean Baker asks about all the other VERY well-paid folks who helped push this crap on the market and wonders about them? I know a few of the Masters of the Universe have been fired but there are many more who profited from this scam.

THE ECONOMY IS WORSE THAN I THOUGHT...

A LOT WORSE and the future doesn't seem very promising either. Below I noted the tremendous increase in the National Debt but that tells only a part of the story. Hale "BONDDAD" Stewart at HuffPo points out that total household debt has also skyrocketed since Pres. Fredo took the reins. Here's the graph he provides:

Hale observes:

In the fourth quarter of 2001, total household debt outstanding totaled $7.680 trillion dollars. In the second quarter of 2007, total household debt outstanding increased to $13.331 trillion -- a 73.56 percent increase.

Let's place those figures in perspective.

In the fourth quarter of 2001, total household debt was 75.10 percent of GDP. In the second quarter of 2007 it was 96.82 percent

In the fourth quarter of 2001, total household debt was 102 percent of disposable income at the national level. In the second quarter of 2007 it was 129.62 percent of personal income at the national level.

The little there is of the Great Bush Expansion is due to MASSIVE DEBT.

INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE

From Fats Limbaugh's 11/05/07 show:

RUSH: If you learned it in a college classroom, we can't trust it.

SAME OLD LINKAGE

I went to Hot Air and found them rather dyspeptic about a group called THE WORLD CAN'T WAIT. It's an anti-war group that wants Fredo and Darth removed from office but in wingnut world, it's just another Communist front group. There is no doubt that Communists did have a hand in starting the group but the membership is MUCH broader than Marxist radicals.

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE NEO-CONS....

you must be an anti-Semite, so says wingnut Melanie Phillips in this article in the wingnut publication City Journal. (Slots Bennett is on the Publication Committee and Judith Miller is a Contributing Editor). Writing from Britain, she names the usual suspects and adds one new to me:

Like the media and the churches, Britain’s political and academic Left ismaking common cause with Islamist radicalism.

By "churches," Phillips is primarily referring to the Anglican Church: "The Church of England is especially unfriendly." Apparently a few Anglican canons think just like Ann Coulter, although Phillips does not mention her.

She reserves most of her disdain for the same Devils that the Freepers foam against:

After the Second World War, the radical Left set out to destroy the fundamentals of Western morality...The institutions that underpinned truth and morality—the traditional family and an education system that transmitted the national culture—collapsed. Britain’s monolithic intelligentsia soon embraced postmodernism, multiculturalism, victim culture, and a morally inverted hegemony of ideas in which the values of marginalized or transgressive groups replaced the values of the purportedly racist, oppressive West....Today’s British prejudices rest on a repudiation of truth and a refusal to defend Western moral values.

Almost no matter what the issue is, the wingnuts seem to find a way to blame the Left.

WHAT HINDERAKER WANTS TO KNOW

Bloomberg has an article about the collapse of the dollar that mentions Pres. Fredo - the near genius, in AssRocket's world - has some responsibility for this. AR complains that the article never mentions what " living beyond their means." means, so I guess he must NEVER read the business or finance sections of his local paper. It's no secret that the National Debt has increased tremendously since Fredo took office and a large part of that increase is owed to others. It's also no secret that Fredo didn't veto any spending bills until very recently.

Overall, the debt has increased by 58% since Fredo took office and is now over $9 TRILLION. The amount owed to the public has increased to $5.08 TRILLION, an increase of 54%.

By "public" is meant "all federal debt held by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, foreign governments, and other entities outside the United States Government less Federal Financing Bank securities. "

This is distinct from "Intragovernmental Holdings are Government Account Series securities held by Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds; and Federal Financing Bank securities. A small amount of marketable securities are held by government accounts. "

Intragovernmental holdings are pretty much what we owe ourselves.

REP. OBEY GETS IT RIGHT AND WINGNUTS WHINE

From Amanda Carpenter at Clown Hall:

“One of the reason we’ve had incidents of violence, sectarian violence go down is because they are running out of people to kill,” said the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee Rep. David Obey (D.-Wisc.) at a National Press Club luncheon Monday afternoon.

“They’ve killed so many in so many areas, that there are fewer opportunity targets, if you want to put it that way, for each side,” Obey said. “I welcome any reduction in the level in violence for whatever reasons it occurs, but I don’t think that tells us much for what the future is going to be.”

MediaMatters gets us a little closer to the truth than the wingnuts:

...ethnic cleansing may account for the decrease in civilian casualties, as noted by a number of other media outlets -- including McClatchy Newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post -- and the Government Accountability Office's (GAO) director of international affairs and trade, Joseph A. Christoff. During an October 30 House Appropriations Committee hearing regarding a recent GAO study that found that overall attacks in Iraq have declined, Christoff told the committee that the GAO's figures do "not tak[e] into consideration the fact that there might be fewer attacks [on civilians] because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods."

I KNOW IT'S A LONG WAY OFF BUT...

when will the "fatally flawed" Hillary stop doing well in the polls? :-)

A year from Election Day, Clinton remains person to beat

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a head-to-head matchup of the two front-runners, Clinton leads Giuliani 51 percent to 45 percent. That lead has increased since October, when Clinton led Giuliani 49 percent to 47 percent.

Complete poll results here.

NOTE:
Interviews with 1,024 adult Americans conducted by telephone
by Opinion Research Corporation on November 2-4, 2007.
The margin of sampling error for results based on the total
sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

THE NEO-CONS, DETENTE AND ISRAEL

I wrote below that some neo-conservatives were concerned that detente between the U.S. and the Soviet Union may not be good for Israel and I found some evidence from a neo-con insider, Richard Perle.

From the National Security Archives, The Cold War, Episode 19

INT: You had certain reservations about the way that Secretary of State Kissinger handled the American response to the Yom Kippur crisis. What exactly were those reservations?

RP: Well, it seemed to us when that war began suddenly that the Secretary of State was so eager to save détente, which was clearly shattered by Soviet involvement in that war, involvement that had been planned, involvement that was surreptitious, involvement that... the Russians calculated could tip the balance in favor of the Egyptians and the Syrians. right after signing in June an agreement pledging to collaborate to stop possible outbreaks of war, something that they were obliged to do under that agreement and of course they didn't do, they deceived us, it seemed to us that he was so eager to preserve the détente, that he was restraining the assistance that should be made available under urgent circumstances to Israel for fear that a wider war would destroy what remained of détente at that point. he certainly doesn't share that view and it's obviously very difficult to know what was going on in his mind. but the evidence at the time seemed pretty unambiguous, that the response to the re-supply of Syrian and Egyptian forces by the United States was not immediately to re-supply, but to wait and to wait a dangerously long time, even though it was only seventy two or maybe ninety six hours.

INT: Do you see that détente was, in that sense, a threat to the existence of Israel?

RP: It was certainly possible to imagine a crisis in which the interests of détente could be incompatible with Israel's interests, although, ironically, when the Soviets began to threaten Israel in the bluntest way, threatening Israel's survival and the words, Israel has embarked upon a path leading to its own destruction, were words in a message from Brezhnev, when it reached those proportions, then it was clear that détente required confrontation with the Soviet Union, rather than acquiescence, because there could be no conceivable détente with the Soviet Union if it had taken the action it threatened to destroy Israel.

THE ROT SPREADS

The sub-prime meltdown, another gift to all of us from the Masters of the Universe, is starting to get some people worried about the companies that insured the bonds. U.S. municipal bonds are also being affected.


Worries over distressed bond insurers
By Joanna Chung in London and Stacy-Marie Ishmael in New York
Published: November 5 2007 21:36 Last updated: November 5 2007 21:36
FINANCIAL TIMES


The deterioration in sentiment for insured bonds comes amid fears that specialist insurers – which provide credit guarantees to lenders and investors – could succumb to wider mortgage-related problems in the US.

MBIA and Ambac, the two biggest bond insurers in the US, have seen their shares plunge in recent weeks. They are now trading at 52-week lows.

Bond insurers guarantee a range of bonds, including complex securities backed by mortgages and less risky municipal bonds issued by US states and cities.

If top credit ratings of any of the insurers, often called “monoline” insurers, come under threat, investors fear that the value of bonds they have insured could also suffer.

Sentiment for US municipal bonds has also suffered. Spreads on insured AAA bonds have started to widen against similarly rated bonds that are not insured, analysts say. About half of the $400bn worth of bonds issued each year are insured.

Another FT article highlights the key problem:

Frederic Mishkin, a Federal Reserve governor, admitted that although the central bank could use monetary policy to offset the macroeconomic risk arising from the credit squeeze, it was “powerless” to deal with “valuation risk” – the difficulty assessing the value of complex or opaque securities.


So, how were these opaque instruments invented? Who gave them ratings? Who made money by selling them?

FUNDIES FOR ROMNEY???

UPDATE: Pat Robertson's CBN News also thinks this a a big boost for Romney.

AP reports that Paul Weyrich, one of the grandmasters of Movement Conservatism, has announced his support for Mitt Romney. Weyrich and Jerry Foulwell were the creeps who started the "Moral" Majority and have helped divide our country. Romney also got the endorsement of these barbarians:

During the past month, Romney has secured the endorsements of Bob Jones III and Robert Taylor, the grandson of the founder and a top dean at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.

Romney, who is seeking to become the first Mormon president, also won the backing of Dr. John Willke, a founder and past president of the National Right to Life Committee, as well as Don Wilton, the immediate past president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and pastor of a Spartanburg, S.C., megachurch.

Wilton later retracted his endorsement, saying he never intended for word of his support for Romney to become national news.

AMERICANS ARE STARTING TO WISE UP

As Warren Buffett said, there IS class warfare in America and it has been sponsored by the GOP.

From Pew:

ANOTHER GUY YOU'D "LIKE TO HAVE A BEER WITH"

Why does the MSM push this "regular guy" crap on us? I don't want a President who's a regular guy, I want someone better than that. Anyway, Newsweek does the obligatory for Huckabee, a man who takes the Bible literally:

It's hard not to like Mike Huckabee. ... Huckabee comes across as an easygoing, down-to-earth guy.

MORE STUPIDITY

Don Surber went sticky-wet after misreading a column by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek and in a post-orgasmic delusion wrote this:

And later Zakaria wrote: “That meant cozying up to Sunni tribesmen, even those with shady pasts.”
Oh gosh. We cannot do that.
Please, do not tell Zakaria about the deal we cut with Josef Stalin to win World War II.

Would someone remind Surber of what happened AFTER WW II?

BILLY CUNNINGHAM, DRUDGE'S REPLACEMENT

I just heard him say "Bush is God's Instrument." Earlier, he said America has the best health care in the world and that American citizens haven't lost any rights.

STUPID QUESTIONS

Freddie the Hutt said that he won't support a Human Life Amendment (= No Abortions) and that has some of the wingnuts asking stupid questions:

Jawa Report: Are the social conservatives really going to turn their backs on a 100% pro life candidate because he's committed to federalism?

David Brody: Is this too much federalism to the point of alienating social conservatives?

The answer is YES!

ANOTHER TRAVESTY

Tony Snow (job) was awarded the Media Institute's Freedom of Speech Award. This is the same Tony Snow who was a lying whore on FAUX News and a lying whore WH press secretary.

THIS JUST IN....

General Electric is a moonbat corporation. Well, at least according to the wingnuts who thinks Global Warming is another Stalinist conspiracy.

MANKIW'S NUMBERS

In an op-ed in the NY Times, Prof. N. GREGORY MANKIW tries to diminish the concerns about America's health care system. He tries to account for the longevity differences between Canadians and Americans by claiming that "Americans are more likely than Canadians to die by accident or by homicide." and those aren't health care issues. There is obviously some truth to that but it does not explain the fact that Canadians between the ages of 65-69 have a longer life expectancy than Americans.

Even worse, he claims that the amount of money we spend on health care is a good sign because it is a by-product of a wealthy society. This of course ignores the disparity between costs and outcomes between countries.

PROFOUND STUPIDITY

Thanx to Kevin Drum, I am now acquainted with this bit of maggot drool from a prominent wingnut:

April 11, 2003
"FOR SUCH AN ADVANCED SPECIES, THEY SURE KNOW HOW TO RUB IT IN." -- Marge Simpson
Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen's cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn't rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a "quagmire" were wrong -- again! -- how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong -- again! -- how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error -- again -- and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about "civilian casualties" now seem almost disappointed that there weren't more -- again -- and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American "liberators" were proven wrong -- again -- as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.
Nah.
UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald links this post in the -- as usual -- deluded notion that it proves his point. I've responded here.
posted at 04:36 PM by Glenn Reynolds

WINGNUTS ARE COWARDS!!!

UPDATE: Den Beste seems to have scrubbed the post from his site.

Kevin Drum has a contest to see what is the craziest wingnut blog post so far. One of the candidates is Steven Den Beste but he won't allow links directly from Kevin's site. This is what you get when you follow the link:



The text is:

BeeDaaaa!

GO AWAY!

(Readers of the site you came from are not welcome here.)

LACK OF "NUANCE" ON NPR

On WESAT 11/3/2007, Scott Simon interviewed Kenneth Adelman and Joshua Muravchik about the current outlook for the neo-con worldview and introduced the interview with this claim (from Lexis-Nexis):

But first, not too long ago neoconservatives were some of the most influential people in the government. They were often former liberals like Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who thought that liberals had accommodated communist totalitarianism at the cost of human rights.

First of all, many liberals objected to detente because of the seeming neglect of human rights. Second, the architects of detente, Nixon and Kissinger, were NOT liberals. Third, some neo-cons worried that detente meant Israel would have a less prominent place in American foreign policy.

DEMOCRACY IS NOT THE ANSWER

As I've pointed out before, bringing democracy to the Middle East will not end terrorism. The CRS Report of November 1, 2007 makes the point again:

Democratization, under certain circumstances, may actually undermine U.S. security interests and exacerbate the terrorism problem. Recent experience in the Middle East and South Asia has shown that democratic elections can bring to power governments that show little interest in the principles and practices of liberal democracy; possess insufficient power or legitimacy to counter or prevent terrorism within their borders; support or condone terrorist activity within or beyond their borders; and/or are hostile to U.S. national interests. As examples they cite: Iraqi Shiites voting in 2005 elections for an Iranian style Islamic republic in areas under their control; terror-linked organizations winning democratic elections in the Middle East (e.g., Hamas in Gaza and Hizbollah in Lebanon); and popular election of a radical Islamic government. The election of Pakistani President Musharraf is cited as well.

Also at issue is the question of whether democracy, in and of itself, can stabilize a nation, given the troubling growth in numbers and influence of radical groups in some democratic countries. Skeptics argue that the burgeoning popularity of extremist and terror-linked groups, such as the Mujaheddin Council in Indonesia, the Party Islam in Malaysia, the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia, Hizballah in Lebanon and the democratically elected Hamas party in Gaza, would seem to indicate that democracy per se does not entirely dissuade or discourage the ideology of terrorism. The rise of these parties in democratic societies presents a major foreign policy dilemma for the United States, since it pits U.S. support for democracy directly against U.S. commitment to combat terrorism aggressively.<sup>14


14</sup>See CRS Report RL33555, Trends in Terrorism: 2006, by Raphael Perl.

4 YEARS AGO AND NOW

Back in October 2003, Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo out to Gen. Dick Myers, Paul Wolfowitz, Gen. Pete Pace and Doug Feith. It addressed the WOT and had this pertinent question:

Today we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

A Congressional Research Service report on 11/01/07 raises the same damn question:

More than six years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, there are few agreed-upon criteria for measuring the success or failure of U.S. strategy or combating terrorism.
Therefore, while the Strategy can be analyzed, discussed and critiqued, its results and effectiveness are difficult to evaluate reliably. 11

¹¹See CRS Report RL33160, Combating Terrorism: The Challenge of Measuring
Effectiveness, by Raphael F. Perl, March 12, 2007.

RUDY SOUNDS JUST LIKE HANNITY

On health care, Rudy is just another idiotic wingnut. This is from Business Week:

In a freshly minted radio commercial, Republican Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani boasts, "We have the best health-care system in the world." It's an oft-heard refrain from politicians and policymakers.

A new Commonwealth Fund survey found that Americans don't believe this wingnut crap.


You can click on this for a larger version. The important numbers are how many Americans feel that our health care system needs either fundamental changes (48%) or needs to be rebuilt completely (34%). That adds up to 82% who are dissatisfied.

Looking at how quickly we receive care compared to other countries, we only beat Canada in this survey:



Cost was a greater impediment to health care in America than in ALL the other countries:



The authors sum up our health care:

With high rates of adults being uninsured and underinsured, the United States stands out for cost-related access barriers and financial stress. U.S. findings also reveal multiple indicators of inefficient care, including medical record/test result delays and mistakes, duplication, time spent on paperwork or disputes, and perceptions that doctors provide care of little value. Further, U.S. adults often report waits for primary care, find it difficult to get care after hours, and end up seeking care from ERs—joining Canada with symptoms of a primary care system under stress.

INVINCIBLE STUPIDITY

About Pakistan, AJSTRATA writes:

And we know the courts have been trying to create new law and pull of a
judicial coup d’etat in recent months. I am not sure who is in the right

Now, if the courts really have been doing what AJ claims, wouldn't that at least make them in the wrong?

JOE KLEIN IS BRAVE

In this post on Swampland, he asks why the neo-cons are so quiet about Pakistan, home to Al Qaeda training camps, and so noisy about Iran. His answer: Iran is a threat to Israel, Pakistan isn't. I think this is a valid point and it calls to mind what Russell Kirk said almost 20 years ago.

LONDON TIMES == NY POST

The London Times op-ed pages seem to resemble the wingnut crap we find at the NY Post or the WSJ. Today there's one proclaiming all the progress in Iraq and wondering why the MSM isn't broadcasting this 24/7. Let's repeat this once more: The point of the Surge was political reconsciliation. There has been none. Therefore, the Surge FAILED. Even George F. Will can grasp that.

In the comments for this op-ed, you'll read a lot of wingnut Americans and I suspect most of them aren't regular readers of the Times but were lead there by wingnut bloggers. When given the slightest opportunity to clap louder, they are all over it.

TERRORISTS - A BETTER WAY???

Last night I heard a BBC broadcast and David Blair mentioned that the Saudis had some success in changing the minds of Al Qaeda terrorists and that reminded me of a similar story about Yemen from a couple of years ago.

Koranic duels ease terror
from the February 04, 2005 edition
By James
Brandon Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

SANAA, YEMEN – When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and our other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen's Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence."

The prisoners eagerly agreed.

Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his "theological dialogues" with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can't find the David Blair segment on the BBC's site but I did find a recent op-ed he published in the Daily Telegraph:

How King Abdullah has tackled terrorism
By David Blair
Last Updated:
12:01am GMT 30/10/2007

Al-Qa'eda mounted a deadly campaign inside Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004, carrying out a series of bomb attacks.

Abdullah's response was notably effective. Saudi Arabia has probably succeeded in crushing most of the al-Qa'eda cells inside its borders. While the possibility of an attack remains, the threat has been greatly reduced.

Saudi Arabia's success cannot be explained by the brutality of its security forces. The kingdom runs a sophisticated campaign to rehabilitate terrorists inside its jails. Prisoners are brought before religious scholars who point out their erroneous interpretation of Islam.

If judged rehabilitated, ex-terrorists are rewarded with their freedom, a car and a job. Of the roughly 700 detainees who have experienced this course, the failure rate is between 10 and 20 per cent.

ANOTHER CONSERVATIVE HACK

Larry Kudlow, moron extraordinaire. This is his prediction about the effects of Pres. Fredo's tax cuts in 2001:

What's more, faster economic growth and more profitable productivity returns will generate higher tax revenues at the new lower tax-rate levels. Future budget surpluses will rise, not fall.

(h/t Jonathan Chait, The Big Con, p. 41)

THE CONSERVATIVE EXTREMISTS

I noted before that Hayek and Eric Hoffer saw the connection between leftist radicals and conservative radicals and now I learn from Jonathan Chait (p. 236) that there are many others who took the same path from the radical left to the radical right. Among them are Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Wilmoore Kendall and Norman Podhoretz.

AUSSIE MORON

Andrew Bolt writes that "The war in Iraq has been won" and if you aren't positive he's an idiot, here's a little more proof:

But we went to war on a lie!
Actually, we went to war to free Iraq from a tyrant who had used weapons of mass destruction, and would not guarantee he would not do so again.
No lie. Job done.

Ari Fleischer says NO, ANDREW:

"But make no mistake -- as I said earlier -- we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about." -Ari Fleischer Press Briefing 4/10/03

RADIO TIDBITS

Fats Limbaugh glossed over the credit crunch as if it were merely a creation of the liberal media. He then made the outrageous claim that the mainstream media or, as he calls it, the Drive-By Media, was against the Iraq War from the beginning.

Insannity was trying to make Hillary's gaffe about the NYS driver's licenses for illegals into something like Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it" statement. For the 1st time I know, he had Slots Bennett as a guest, apparently to talk about the gaffe.

Medved the Moral decided that Tom Tancredo was a threat to run as a 3rd party candidate and since that would hurt the GOP's candidate, Medved felt compelled to call him "Tancrazy."

HILLARY'S FAULT???

Some wingnuts have blamed Hillary for our current health care problems because she botched the overhaul she attempted in 1993. As usual, the truth lies elsewhere, as I learned from Jonathan Chait's book, The Big Con. Chait cites a 1995 article by Thomas B. Edsall and lets us know that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was supporting Hillary's plan UNTIL Norquist organized a campaign to make it change its position. From Lexis -Nexis:

The Washington Post
September 04, 1995, Monday, Final Edition
Right in the Middle Of the Revolution; Activist Rises to Influence In Conservative Movement
BYLINE: Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post Staff Writer
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01
LENGTH: 1704 words

Two years ago, Norquist orchestrated a 15-month drive to force -- shame is not too strong a word -- the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to repudiate its endorsement of employer health care mandates, a key provision of the Clinton health care plan.

Under Norquist's direction, GOP congressmen boycotted the Chamber's award ceremonies. National Empowerment Television broadcast two shows criticizing the Chamber, copies of which were shipped to state and local chambers. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, while the Small Business Survival Committee sent out a critique of Chamber policy to 800 talk radio shows. Under this assault, the Chamber gave in.

HACKS AT THE WSJ EDITORIAL PAGE

In a pathetic defense of Waterboard Mukasey, the editorial writers at the WSJ discover a hiterto unknown wingnut fact:

Could there be a clearer demonstration of why voters don't trust Democrats with national security

HERE'S THE REALITY:

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Sept. 27-30, 2007. N=1,114 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults). Fieldwork by TNS.

"Which political party -- the Democrats or the Republicans -- do you trust to do a better job handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism?" Parties rotated
						.
		Democrats	Republicans	Both (vol.)	Neither (vol.)	Unsure
		%	%	%	%	%
	9/27-30/07	41	40	5	10	4
	9/4-7/07	39	36	4	17	4
	10/5-8/06	47	41	4	6	2
	9/5-7/06	40	47	1	9	3
	8/3-6/06	46	38	1	11	4

THE DECIDER RUNS TO THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

This is the same wingnut think-tank that Fats Limbaugh thinks so highly of, so you can imagine it is filled to the rafters with partisan hacks. Fredo had the nerve to say "We must take the words of the enemy seriously. " when he ignored the August 6, 2001 PDB. His administration also has a history of using terror for political gain, in one case outing a mole in Al Qaeda. At Heritage, he repeated the LIE that Iraq was a threat to us and pulled a Podhoretz by comparing Bin Laden to Lenin and Hitler. He then made a new LIE by claiming that the senators on the Judiciary committee wanted Mukasey to make a legal determination on interrogation techniques, techniques Fredo claimed Mukasey isn't fully aware of. In fact, the senators simply wanted to know if Mukasey considered water-boarding torture.

The rest of his speech was filled with the same tired rhetoric that's been used for the past 6 years: "at time of war"; " we will fight them overseas so we do not have to fight them here at home."; "We are at war". I know this sort of agit-prop will play well with, say, Mark Levin's true believers but I doubt many others will fall for it.

LOCAL DOWNTURN

Today I learned that the reduction in sales tax receipts means that Arizona isn't getting enough money to pay its bills and that the county where I live is thinking hard about postponing a bond issue because the housing market is doing so poorly.

Not all is doom and gloom: There was an $8 million house sold by a local to a local! Can you say "Two Americas"?

MORE PROGRESS, PETRAEUS STYLE

(Via Attaturk)

Remember what Petraeus wrote 4 years ago?

John Cole at Balloon Juice found this clip that shows what Petraeus-style progress is all about.

HOW THE WINGNUTS THINK OF POLITICAL DIFFERENCES

I'm still surprised at the sheer amount of anger and hatred on the Right but I guess if I had been paying more attention back in the 80s, I wouldn't be. David Brock in Blinded by the Right, page 47, gives us a glimpse of what these extremists were thinking back then, in this case Newt Gingrich:

In a 1988 speech decrying the left's campaign against Bork, Newt Gingrich captured well how we saw things in the movement: "The left at its core understands in a way Grant understood after Shiloh that this is a civil war, that only one side will prevail, and that the other side will be relegated to history. This war has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars. While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefields, nonetheless it is a civil war."

UPDATE: Another source for this quote.

BABBLING AGAIN

David Brooks, house wingnut for the NY Times, writes that Americans want change and don't want it and buttresses that illogic with non-facts, such as this one. He ends up claiming that "people want the government to change so their own lives can stay the same." For most people, that means a radical change in government, away from the supply-siders, the Fundies and the neo-cons. In short, away from the GOP. USA Today offers a remarkable statistic about the likelihood that the Democrats will take back the WH:

Since World War II, no party has managed to hold the White House when the incumbent president had a job-approval rating below 45% one year before the election. Bush's approval rating now: 32%.