My Governor

My Governor has gone full bat crazy for the tea partiers to try and win his primary.

My guess is that he's really afraid of all the Dems (like me) who plan to cross over to vote against him.

Shorter Lou Dobbs

"I'll take my third place ratings in a three channel market and go elsewhere...."

Political bits

(CNN) Dede Scozzafava takes a shot at Sarah Palin, reminding us all of Palin's own apparent lack of qualifications, ""How can Sarah Palin come out and endorse someone who can't answer some basic questions?"

(TPM) The Christian Right Family Research Council seems to be egging someone to step into an Olympia Snowe primary. (She's "too moderate.")

(Post&Courier) The Charleston, South Carolina Republican county party votes to censure Lindsey Graham. (He's lucky he's not running next year.)

(WaPo) Dan Balz reports on the growing GOP conventional wisdom that Tim Pawlenty may not be ready for primetime. (Somebody's trying to chop Pawlenty down...)

(MinnPolitics) One of the largest GOP phone banks hires lots of convicted felons who handle GOP donor credit card information.

(Politico) David Plouffe reveals that it was Obama campaign oppo research that outed John Edwards' $400 haircut. (A safe disclosure since Edwards is in no position to strike back.)

And, (The Swamp) Sen. Jim DeMint calls for Congressional term limits. (Funny how they only seek term limits when they're out of power... Don't worry. It's dead in the water.)

I'm a softie

I love this genre. A collection of videos of dogs welcoming their soldiers back home.

Read in context

Politico says Republicans are going to try to "rekindle" the townhall anger from August, but, to me, it sounds alot more like they're trying to regain control and redirect it away from themselves.

We're still feeling reverberations from NY-23.

Interesting read

The WaPo has a very compelling article about the last two days of Dede Scozzafava's Congressional campaign and how she came to endorse the Dem Bill Owens.

I drew three insights from it. 1) It's interesting the level of White House involvement in gaining her endorsement. You can ask the question of their genuineness in the process, but it's also politically interesting that they saw heightening the "conservative" v. moderate Republican rift in this one tiny race as such an opportunity to impact the national narrative. (And it worked. This one little race has created a future political nightmare for those Republicans actually concerned with retaking the majority.)

2) Despite their loud mouthed power, there seems to have been no political machine on the tea-partier/"conservative" side. Despite all the noise, it was just a number of political opportunists juicing Scozzafava's demise for their own benefit. They don't have a machine or coordinator who can utilize Palin, Pawlenty, Club for Growth, etc, meaning that there will be lots of money and effort wasted on overlap and uncoordination.

3) The entire effort shows that right now the Republican internal mechanics are more calibrated towards pushing people out, while the pretty well coordinated Dem machine is still trying to lure people in.

Even though it's kind of an unimportant article, I'd recommend it as its subtexts feel expansive.

Pimping Jesus - The lessons of NY-23

Eyeing that 2012 run, Newt Gingrich tries to don the cloak of the religious right. If this doesn't tell us all about the state of the Republican party, that Newt Gingrich feels he has to prove his bona fides to the "base voters...."

It's interesting to me that Mike Huckabee appears to be the Republican model for 2012. Read Milbank's Gingrich piece and tell me you don't see that, too.

There's also the interesting positioning question of Romney. You can argue that he's not positioning "born again" like everyone else because he really can't, but, on the other hand, that also leaves him as the sole representative for the "business" side of the Republican party, and, thus far, no one seems to think they can challenge him there. That means he would come into the primary with "economics" as his sole purview and that he will likely have their huge money mostly to himself.

Peak oil

An IEA "whistleblower" says the current oil reserve estimates and future production estimates have been cooked due to pressure "from the Americans."

I don't know, but if you're a peak oil person, this is a must read. (It could just be market manipulation.)

Koreas "exchange fire"

North and South Korean naval ships exchanged fire as both sides claimed the other was in its territorial waters. This isn't all that unusual happening twice before over the last decade, and as in the past, the North apparently crossed the demarcation line. (Reports that their ship was badly damaged.)

The real problem is that now the North will have to stage some act to save face.

I'll link the Guardian first because it's the least sensationalistic. Also AP, NYTimes.

Pelosi's role

One of the reasons that the House vote on healthcare was so tight was that it was House Democrats' job to pass the furthest "left" thing they could get the votes for so that when it meets the watered down Senate bill in the reconciliation process, the House bill will allow the conference to pull left of what can get through a Senate filibuster.

Finding 50 votes for a "leftish" reconciled healthcare bill in the Senate is a whole lot easier than finding 60.

(And I accept that the bills being discussed aren't "leftish." I'm using that as a relative, not absolute, term.)

Quote

Paul Krugman's oped today wraps with a rather intriguing if....

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

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It really started in the 1970's

(Much bigger if you click it.)

Wow. My group gets a shout out from the President

In the very serious matter of the Fort Hood tragedy and fears over a Muslim backlash. President Obama said this.

Obama lauded the armed services' diversity. "They are Americans of every race, faith and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers," he said.

Now, I know a mention in this context. that I shouldn'r be discriminated against, isn't really the best moment, but, still. to hear a President actually recognize that "non-believers" exist and are an equal class feels pretty good. (although I would like a rename.)

Next up, destroying Christmas. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha......

Yahoo sucks

For almost ten years I've been using Yahoo as my home page, listing the same 10 news sources. For some reason,they've dropped Reuters, AP, and AFP and are now only giving me Yahoo's determined top ten AP stories which appears to be no deeper than the USA Today.

34,000 more troops to Afghanistan

McClatchy's Landay, who is usually very good about cautious facts, reports that the likely Obama plan is to send another 34,000 soldiers to Afghanistan with the announcement coming sometime next month.

Picture of the Day

(Speaker Nancy Pelosi smiles during a press conference after the passage in the house of the health care reform bill at the U.S. Capitol, Saturday, Nov. 7. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon))

The middle finger of the Great Orange Satan

Worth a chuckling watch as Markos Moulitsas makes a comment to Tom Tancredo about chickenhawking Vietnam that led to Tancredo storming off the set.

(For a bigot, Tancredo has pretty thin skin.)

Inconsistently dangerous

Does anyone else notice that in the aftermath of the Fort Hood tragedy, FoxNews/rightists/whatever are casually saying we need to "debrief" all American Muslims in the military (see below,) or that we need to investigate all the Muslim interns on the Hill, and yet at the same time, at the exact same time, they're screaming that the Obama administration is trying to take away their "liberties?"

Cool

Underwater "kites" could be a cost effective alternative energy source.

Another tragedy in Afghanistan

Two American soldiers disappeared in western Afghanistan after a routine resupply mission, and more than 25 NATO and Afghan security forces members have been wounded during the search mission for them, the alliance said.

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Pet peeve

It annoys me to no end that it is taken as such a given that Congress members' first priority should be to shape their votes to keep their jobs.

I mean, it's not like these folks would go hungry if they voted their conscience and lost their seats, but there's not a single voice anywhere that questions the assumption that they should be worrying about their own jobs first.

Quote - The happy white people of Fox

"Do you think it's time for the military to have special debriefings of Muslim Army officers -- anybody enlisted?" Fox's Brian Kilmeade asked Geraldo Rivera on Friday morning. "Because if I'm going to be deployed in a foxhole, if I'm going to be sticking in an outpost, I got to know the guy next to me is not going to want to kill me."

Or maybe you prefer (news not editorial) Shep Smith,

In an interview with US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Fox host Shepard Smith asked: "The names tells us a lot, does it not, senator?"

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Linked everywhere

John Stewart did a Glenn Beck impersonation(?) last night that was so uncomfortably on the edge. The mannerisms are brilliant. (Click the little box on the bottom right to watch full screen.)

Iran tested advanced nuclear warhead design

With all of the smoke, we don't really know what's true about Iran's nuclear program, but this, coming from the IAEA, sounds pretty legit.

The Iranians reportedly tested the non-nuclear part of a two point implosion weapons design which matters because multi-point implosion is key to shrinking weapons so they require less fissile material and can fit on warheads. (I'm guessing they assembled and timed the rapid explosives. No word on whether the electronics and other elements were made into a warhead sized package.)

This comes from El Baradei who seems convinced, so I'd guess it's pretty real. Assuming the test worked, this would change the timeline/threat from Iranian enrichment, and could potentially shift the worldwide proliferation game if the Iranians chose to share their findings.

(It's interesting that we're learning all these new facts (like the Qum enrichment faclity) since the Obama folks came into office. All of this appears to have been at least substantially suspected under the Bush folks, and yet, despite their warlike stance in Iran, they seem to have held lots of information back.)

There's also the question of whether Iran wants actual weapons or the ability to have a "latent" nuclear program like Japan or South Korea who don't have nuclear wepons, but have the technology and ability to assemble them in months.

Saudis jets bomb Yemeni Shiites

I'm putting this up mainly because I haven't seen it anywhere else. Saudi jets bombed across the Yemeni border, targeting a Shiite group that has been conducting actions against the Yemeni Sunni authorities for years. Troops are supposedly headed for the border.

This is likely a response to the suicide bombing that was possibly targeting "Muhammad bin Nayef, a member of the Saudi royal family and the country's top counter-terrorism official," although the official explanation is likely to focus on yesterday's incursion and attack which killed a Saudi security officer on the Saudi side of the border.

The Yemeni government, who are currently in a campaign against these Shiites at all, has denied that any bombing took place. There are allegations the Iranians are supporting the Shiite separatists.

See ya.

Out for awhile. Maybe later.

Quote

John Voight at the "tea party" rally in Washington today,

"His only success in his one-year term as president is taking America apart, piece by piece. Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Rev. Wright to damn America?"

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I'm sure the gays made her do it.

So, Carrie Prejean, little Miss "I hate gays" California, had to abandon her lawsuit against the Miss California people after they obtained an "extremely graphic" solo sex tape she'd made.....