At last: divergence. Must be all the GOP gainsaying that’s bringing output around.

Lieberman to US: Drop Dead

Lieberman has officially and categorically joined the “Go Die in the Streets” brigade:

SCHIEFFER: But is what you’re also saying is that nothing is better than a government health insurance, or a health insurance reform that includes a public option? Nothing is better than that?

LIEBERMAN: Well, the truth is that nothing is better than that because I think we ought to follow, if I may, the doctor’s oath in Congress as we deal with health care reform, do no harm.

You’ll note that Lieberman also opposed the original, public option free version of the Baucus bill. He seriously just wants the CATO-inspired answer: yes, if you are poor and cannot afford care, you should just go die in the streets. Any other course of action would simply be unfair.

[People] are fed up – frustrated and fed up and angry about the way in which our government does not work, about the way in which we come down here and get into a lot of political games and seem to – partisan tugs of war and forget why we’re here, which is to serve the American people. And I think the filibuster has become not only in reality an obstacle to accomplishment here, but it also a symbol of a lot that ails Washington today.“

"But I do want to say that the Republicans were not the only perpetrators of filibuster gridlock, there were occasions when Democrats did it as well. And the long and the short of it is that the abuse of the filibuster was bipartisan and so its demise should be bipartisan as well.”

“The whole process of individual senators being able to hold up legislation, which in a sense is an extension of the filibuster because the hold has been understood in one way to be a threat to filibuster – it’s just unfair.

Joe Lieberman (yes, that Joe Lieberman), in 1994.

When Newt Gingrich is trying to pull you back to the center, you’ve gone so far right that the average voter can’t see you any longer.

Ezra Klein telling the GOP something critically important that, at this rate, they’ll internalize sometime well after 2012.

[Lieberman] still wants to be a part of the Democratic Party although he is a registered independent,“ Harkin said. "He wants to caucus with us and, of course, he enjoys his chairmanship of the [Homeland Security] committee because of the indulgence of the Democratic Caucus. So, I’m sure all of those things will cross his mind before the final vote.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), noting that Joementum has a nice place here, and he’d sure hate to see anything happen to it.

Apple:Sprint::Google:Verizon

Why doesn’t Apple just buy Sprint? While they use fundamentally different 3G technologies, it seems to me that Sprint’s WiMax and Clearwire based 4G service lines up better with an iPhone/iTouch world than do any of AT&T or Verizon’s planned services. Such a union certainly makes radically better sense than the total platform switch into a technological dead end that would be involved in switching to seemingly everyone’s favorite prediction hobby-horse: a Verizon-based iPhone network. First off the idea actually works because Sprint’s already rolling out an essentially platform agnostic 4G wireless network, while AT&T is basically testing improvements on its lock-in 3G network and merely promising a similarly proprietary 4G (using LTE, which is also what Verizon and T-Mobile’s current plans map) in select major cities sometime in 2011 or later. Given a choice, do you really think Steve Jobs selects another vendor-tied (and vendor-constrained) proprietary network over a dumb pipe, especially if said pipe can be had for a song and especially after seemingly four decades of dealing with AT&T, the company that can’t even handle MMS, much less tethering?

But, more importantly, an Apple with Sprint suddenly has what the platform has wanted all along: dumb pipes. The phone becomes an app, and many users could/would get by with an iTouch +Skype or GoogleVoice, instantly becoming a product for which there’s (currently) no comparison, really. Then Apple starts building 4G modems into its desktops, laptops, AppleTVs, tablets, and etc… And BOOM: An always on, fully wireless, nationwide distribution network. It puts Apple directly in competition with the other content providers, which seems to me to be where they’ve been going for a while now. Sure, they are still a hardware company, but more and more of that hardware is purpose built to provide access to the Apple’s ever increasing supply of content. It positions them to own, and I mean own the mobile phone space in a way that would end the very term “mobile phone,” as you market connection to the network at a flat rate for unlimited data that covers your mobile and home phone, cable bill, movie downloads, and has potential add-ons like iTunes based rentals and an all-devices app store all the while utterly eviscerating the current mobile telco’s market that rests on $4000/byte SMS, crippled phones, and so forth. They wouldn’t know what hit them, and have shown no capacity to compete in a market shaped in those terms. Makes Apple’s sudden interest in new datacenters start to come into focus, doesn’t it? That’s certainly not the move of a dedicated hardware company…

Add to that mix Sprint’s money- and customer-hemorrhaging performance of late, Apple’s pile of cash and credit, and then stir in this natural future-products synergy…and you’ve got an interesting development cycle going forward. I think the answer may well come when the tablet ships. If Sprint is provisioning the network service to that device, then look out AT&T. You are a very few years away from utter collapse.

In this way, Apple would be Sprint’s white knight in much the way that Verizon hopes Google/Android is theirs. What both of these phone companies don’t seem to realize is that the light they are currently seeing at the end of their tunnels is the dumb-pipes truck bearing down on them.

To prevent the immense evils of self-pollution, therefore, in our boys and students … They should always subsist on a plain, simple, unstimulating, vegetable, and water diet; and care should be taken that they do not eat too fast, and are not excessive, in quantity. They should never be kept too long a time in a sitting, confined, or inactive posture. They should never sleep on feathers.

Sylvester Graham, Lectures on Chastity (1834)

Your Liberal Media

Gene Lyons absolutely nails the seemingly insane FoxNEWS defense brigade that has materialized in the larger MSM (in response to the Obama administration’s shocking charge that FoxNEWS is little more than the communications arm of the far-right, fringe element of the GOP):

the reality is that celebrity journalists rarely, if ever, get hurt for abusing Democrats. Mistreat a name-brand Republican, however, and …

Well, remember “60 Minutes’” Dan Rather?

Democrats complain; Republicans get even.

Hence “mainstream” political journalists, who cower like beaten dogs for fear of ending up on Fox boss (and Nixon alumnus) Roger Ailes’ own enemies list, haven’t had to fear the Obama White House. Last week’s collective cringe makes it abundantly clear how badly they’d like to keep it that way.

It really is as simple as that. In response to a hopelessly biased hit-piece Democrats may lodge a polite complaint, Republicans harvest your job(s), then move on to destroy your reputation, then move on to your children’s activities, then try to turn you out of your house, then force you to kill and eat your dog. Dan Rather is but one example of the phenomenon, but a powerful one. Lost in the Rather nonsense was the fact that not one of the principles in the affair denied the content of the (possibly forged) memo. Some doubted its authenticity, in terms of it being the actual memo; none doubted that “such a memo” existed.

But, more to the point, the media at large has so internalized the myth of the Liberal Media that they immediately retire to the fainting couch at the slightest whiff of a complaint. They fancy themselves as social liberals, you see. They have a gay friend. Whatever. However, in reality, these celebrity journalists are quite the fiscal conservatives. They own several houses and make multi-million dollar salaries. They make all the right noises, mind you; Tim Russert was just a good-old-boy from Buffalo, as he endlessly reminded us, at least while not summering on Nantucket.

Media Matters and others have begun, begun, to turn the tide here. What was missing for the better part of a decade was any sense of “screaming” from the left. These folks still bristle at the “coarse” language of the internets and just don’t get any technology that happened post-TV: so it’s going to take a while. But, sooner or later and no matter what, this lost generation of self-absorbed Reaganite millionaires in control of our discourse will die or retire. One can only hope that whatever follows serves the industry and the nation in a better, more balanced way.

(via jimray)