Rand Paul: The real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 1: A $2,000 deductible?
KY Senior 2: Rand Paul wants us to pay $2,000 just to get Medicare?
KY Senior 3: That’s crazy.
KY Senior 4: I can’t afford that.
Rand Paul: The real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 1: I don’t know what planet he’s from.
KY Senior 5: Rand Paul is off the wall with a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 6: Doesn’t he know that we can’t afford that.
KY Senior 3: The more we learn about Rand Paul, the worse it gets.
Attorney General Jack Conway: I’m Jack Conway. I approve this message.
Month: September 2010
What are your thoughts on third parties? I’d prefer Obama to any of the floated Republican candidates, but I don’t think I can bring myself to vote for a man that thinks extra-judicial targeted killings are a good idea.
All for them but doubt their viability. Even at the Congressional level, true “something elses” (as opposed to, say, Connecticut for Joe Lieberman partiers) are vanishingly rare, and if there were a real third-party groundswell, you’d expect to see real evidence of it. Yes, Perot got ~18% of the popular vote with no national apparatus and none of this “prior evidence” I’m calling for, but he still managed a grand total of zero in the Electoral College. The game is rigged towards the bigs (and they like it that way).
Certainly such an outsider candidate is not going to win the Oval Office in 2012 unless there is an epic upheaval between now and then. Even that person would have to be on the scene by now in order to benefit from said upheval. Though I don’t doubt Palin may run as a Tea Klanner before she ever runs as a GOP nominee (and no, I don’t think she will ever have the GOP nomination), I see her as a cosmically unlikely third-party winner of the Presidency.
But I honestly don’t think Obama is for extrajudicial targeted killings. The larger security apparatus is for them, and taking on that system is essentially suicide. Even pairing back small parts of it that everyone could agree are redundant or outdated in some way is probably politically impossible in this environment. The sad truth is that zero effort has been expended in building the national conversation towards some future reassessment (maybe even a Blue Ribbon commission!) of this idiotic state of affairs in which we have a security state no one understands and certainly no one (in power, anyway) wants to questions much. The Washington Post, of all institutions, did at least make a pass at moving discussion in that direction, and it largely fell on deaf ears. And that is the true sound of our Republic dying.
Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens
At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.
I never thought I could seriously type the title above. It sounds crazy right? The President running an assassination program where he can, without judicial or legislative oversight, kill any US citizen. If Greenwald didn’t link to the legal document above, I wouldn’t have believed it. Nothing can be done so long as the court sees it as a “state secret” so the only recourse is to elect another President in 2012.
Except that “electing another President” won’t help either. Implicit in the election of Obama (or any Democrat who ran in 2008, for that matter) was the notion that, leaving aside every other possible policy decision that might come up in their term, said Democrat would be working to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney “Security State.” That this has not happened is an understatement. From what I can see, the Obama administration has largely embraced and extended the Bush/Cheney security state.
Electing “another President” won’t help either. Your choices come 2012 are going to be a) Obama (again, forgetting everything else that has happened by 2012: on the essential freedoms that were formerly implicit to citizenship he is a failure thus far and shows no sign of changing) or b) Palin/Romney/Pawlenty/whoever. Do you really think anyone the GOP runs is going to be to the left of Obama on basic freedoms and the rights of a citizen? I, for one, do not. Because, honestly, there is no way they let any Democrat seize the security state thing from them. It won’t even come up if they think they can’t get sufficiently far to the right of him.
One can only conclude that these policies are then, for all intents and purposes, permanent. You get one chance to roll them back: when the next person comes in. And Obama’s administration has decided they like them just fine. It would be one thing to charge and try Awlaki in absentia, and then issue the orders as something along the lines of “look, he’s a convicted criminal in a war zone; we’re bringing him to justice; he may well die in that effort, but we hope to bring him to face his sentence.” There are very few people who would argue with such a truly conservative approach. Instead: no charges, no trial, everything made a “state secret,” and not even a passing effort made at even implying that there’s a real, legal case that even can be made against this guy. He’s delivered some strident sermons. That’s the full case against him in five words. On those grounds, the future GOP-in-charge could choose to round up Jeremiah Wright. Is that a country we want to live in?
And yet the Tea Klan screams tyranny because they are still going to buy their health insurance from a private company come 2014 and the top marginal rates might rise slightly. Indeed they have their fingers on the pulse of The Founders’ deepest wishes.
On our last national poll 49% of respondents said the economy had gotten worse since Barack Obama became President.
The folks who thought the economy had gotten worse who had already decided how to vote in November are going Republican by a 92-8 margin.
Public Policy Polling
But, then again, the real problem come November will have been that the “professional left” failed to quit whining and buck up.
But, then again, the real problem come November will have been that the “professional left” failed to quit whining and buck up.
OG
Barack Obama: My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards. A lot of classical music. I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need. Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president’s personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.
FOXnews: President of the United States Loves Gangsta Rap
I am not a Journalist
Jay Rosen, chair of the Journalism Institute at NYU, recalls the auld tale of how and why he didn’t end up working as a journalist:
In April I was supposed to contact [Buffalo Courier-Express editor] Doug Turner about a starting date. I did so by calling his office. He wasn’t in and didn’t return my call. I called him again. No call back. I called him a third time. Nothing. Thinking he was too busy to answer his phone, I wrote him a note. He didn’t reply to my note. I wrote him a second note. Again, no reply. Now it’s mid-May and I have graduated from college. Turner ignored my third note, too. But why? In my desperation and confusion I went down to the newspaper and headed straight to his office.
“Do you remember me? You wanted me to quit school and come to work for you. You promised me a job after graduation. Now you won’t even talk to me… What is going on here?”
Turner wouldn’t look directly at me. He said, “There’s an explanation, but you’ll have to sue me to find out.” Then he picked up the phone and had the security guard escort me from the building.
[…]
A few years later, through a friend who had a friend who worked at the Courier-Express, the mystery was solved. My case was a newsroom legend. It turns out that the job I had [separately] applied for, “Northeast Daily: General Assignment Reporter…” was for an opening at the Courier-Express. Yes. But I didn’t know this because in the standard format for those ads the newspaper was never named. You applied to a box number. The employer was described vaguely. What you were supposed to do is write on the envelope, “Do not forward to the Dayton Daily News” if you worked at the Dayton Daily News and didn’t want your boss to know you were on the prowl for something better. But I didn’t know any of that.
Not only had I stupidly applied to the newspaper that had already offered me a job, but it was my job they were advertising in Editor and Publisher! Yes. Turner had to post the opening to fulfill legal requirements; in reality he had reserved that slot for me [based on a prior verbal agreement]. When he got my application he obviously considered it an act of disloyalty, and that’s why he ceased all communication. So I lost my job by applying for my job.
and then, as if that’s not enough of a story, he gets this quote from the editor in question, whose memory of these long-ago events is spotty:
We’re both aware fortunately that the events you describe happened more than 30 years ago. I wish that my recollection of my conversations with interns such as yourself was as firm as those with whom I worked closely for a year or two. Yet “sue me for it” does sound like me in those days.
Priceless.
And I have to disagree, Jay: you are one hell of a journalist. You just don’t play one professionally.
We are starting to wonder whether Congressional Democrats lack the courage of their convictions, or simply lack convictions.
New York Times Editorial Board.
Wait, starting? At any rate, we should really just buck up and quit whining about it.
Wait, starting? At any rate, we should really just buck up and quit whining about it.
File under: graphs you will never see a Democrat use, talk about, reference, admit the existence of, or in any way shape or form build an electoral strategy around.
Quite the opposite. They’ll wholeheartedly adopt the goddamned “Pledge to America” come November 3, 2010.
And yes, I know when new members of Congress take office. I also know that President DeMint can be very impatient.
Amateur re-processes Voyager images of Jupiter to great effect:
The images I used were obtained on March 4, 1979 at a distance of about 1.85 million kilometers. The first image (C1635314.IMQ) was obtained at 07:08:36 and the last one (C1635400.IMQ) at 07:45:24. The resolution is roughly 18 km/pixel.
The detail present in the full-size version is amazing.
I support tax increases that will reduce my own after-tax income; I worry greatly about unemployment, even though my own living is secure; I warn about growing inequality, even though I’m of the class that has gained from rising disparities; I’m upset about the direction this country is going, even though my own life is comfortable. And this is supposed to cast doubt on my motives?
Lemkin 