Steve Benen wants to know why folks trying to actively make America weaker are not being called out.
If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it's a healthy development in our system of government.
I gather most sensible people think that John McCain made a wee error in selecting Palin to be his Veep candidate, but I've never really read anyone seriously try to explore what would have happened if his personal first choice, Lieberman, had been chosen. I know Kristol and the gang told him that the lunatic right wouldn't accept him, but I'm just not sure that was true. At that point in time Lieberman was still pretty good at pissing off liberals, and that's mostly what they want...
That rhetoric is just what they regularly acknowledge, that the Greenspan commission was a con, and that the buildup of the Social Security Trust Fund was just a way to raise taxes on poor people in order to cut taxes on rich people who have no intention of having their taxes increased in order to pay it back.
Teh Crazee response to any failed attempt to blow up an airplane is to assume that everybody in the future who gets on an airplane may attempt to blow it up in the same way that failed. It's been unfortunate that The Crazee happen to be in charge of the TSA, but there it is.
One wondered what they were gonna do in response to the failed undie bomber attempt.
Turns out, they wanna look underneath, or, failing that, feel up your undies.
This seems to have hit some kind of tipping point. Taking off the three year old's shoes makes people safer apparently, but having some bureaucrat completely mess with the "don't let any stranger touch you there" lesson crosses the WTF? line.
Fallows has been writing about the idiocy of security theater in commercial aviation for some time.
Normally I appreciate on location film shooting as I think it can provide a great deal of genuine atmosphere to a film, but judging by all of the NYPD cars around I gather that my urban hellhole is just a fake NYC.
Really nobody should consider buying a house now. The whole system is fucked.
The companies have opened wide their wallets for lobbying and are flying top executives to Washington for one-on-one meetings with lawmakers. They are holding briefings for key staffers, including an event last week that drew more than 60 aides. And they are blanketing Congress with white papers, memos and other documents that lay out their arguments.
The focal point of their efforts is Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, the controversial, privately run electronic database that is used by practically every lending institution and investment company to track the transfer of the ownership of mortgages as they are packaged into securities and traded at lightning speed around the globe.
Just after the '06 election, a very chastened George Bush responded to the election losses of his party and the tremendous unpopularity of the war in Iraq by... increasing troop levels.
Unless the banksters finally get around to lending money to John Galt so he can fund his perpetual motion machine I'm really not sure what's going to save things.
I don't know how to convince Villagers that nobody gives a shit about the deficit, but they do care about having jobs and not getting thrown out of their homes.
Probably someone will announce a new Gingrich-Kerrey deficit commission tomorrow.
I'm certainly in the "actions speak louder than words" category, or more specifically the "results speak louder than actions and words" category, but the fact is that before the election the Democrats failed to present a coherent agenda and thus far after the election they've failed to do that as well. We can quibble about how many seats an awesome post-Labor Day messaging and agenda strategy would have saved, but it's certainly incorrect messaging doesn't matter at all, especially when it's all you've got.
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