We’re talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe isn’t a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it. Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas are on American soil, and under Constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.

Sharon Angle has the courage to speak about Sharia law and how it’s taking over various cities conveniently located in states she’s not running in.
Apart from this statement being utter gibberish (I mean, seriously, what is she even saying? That the northern reaches of the Dallas | Fort Worth metroplex are now anwering to the edicts of a mullah?), she’s also previously established her overriding concern that The Democrat is setting itself up as a god to be worshiped, in clear violation of The First Commandment. Christian God, after all, is the only Lord God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God that this country should be worshiping. And you sir, don’t seem to be worshiping quite hard enough. Don’t let it happen again.

Senate 2010 in one chart: product of 30 hour cloture motions, constant procedural delays, and a portrait of a broken confirmation system. Why does anybody below Secretary level and lifetime-bench-appointment need confirmation anyway?

Up or down vote. Remember when that was all the rage? Oh, to be young and fancy-free again.

Now, [the GOP] will say, ‘Well, we’re going to cut spending.’ So you say, ‘Okay, what are you going to cut?’ And then what they say is, ‘Well, we’ll cut education by 20 percent. We’ll eliminate 200,000 children from early childhood education programs like Head Start. We’ll cut financial aid for 8 million college students.
At a time when the education of our country’s citizens is probably the best predictor of that country’s economic success, they think it’s more important to give another tax break to folks who are on the Forbes 400 list.
Now, I want to ask my Republican friends: Do you think China is cutting back on education? Do you think South Korea is making it harder for its citizens to get a college education? These countries aren’t playing for second place. And guess what. The United States doesn’t play for second place. We play for first place.

Barack Obama, finally playing for first place himself.

I tell ya, we’ve got some new problems in Washington. Big problems. Just today, Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta said people in America are not eating enough fruits and vegetables. They want to give all the power to the federal government to force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. This is what the federal, CDC, they gonna be calling you to make sure you eat fruits and vegetables, every day. This is socialism of the highest order!

Rep. Paul Broun ® of Georgia, giving you a hint of the level of discourse that is to come. Cannot wait. Might I suggest a full investigation into the WH garden?

Twilight of the Bombs

How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—all of the Cold War players, major and minor […]. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.

Twilight of the Bombs

The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.
If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones.

Kevin D. Williamson, writing for The National Review Online.
Yes, that’s right: I just gave the NRO a yep. That’s where we are. It is beyond belief that Obama, who the NRO folk would very likely identify as “Barack Hussein Obama, lately of Kenya: prove he’s not!!!,” is to the right of the very same NRO on this issue, and is making them uncomfortable with his administration’s aggressive stance on extra-judicial powers of the President. This is who we are. Unbelievable.
(via Peter Daou)

Fox has lost 21% of their total viewers, and 26% of their younger viewers.

jonathan-cunningham:

The biggest loser on the network was Bill O’Reilly who saw his program The O’Reilly Factor lose 12% of its total viewers and 21% of its young viewers. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bret Baier, and Greta Van Susteren rounded out the top five cable news shows, and they each posted double digit declines.

My initial thought was “people are just sick of ‘The News’” but uff-da these numbers hurt, and are specific:

Fox News is now averaging 1.831 million prime time viewers a day, and only 443,000 viewers age 25-54.

[…]

While Glenn Beck suffered double digit losses at 5PM, Chris Matthews posted modest gains of 1% overall and 8% in the demo. While Bret Baier declined, Ed Schultz has seen his viewership skyrocket at 6 PM. The Ed Show is up 24% over last year in total viewers and 8% in the demo. Keith Olbermann’s Countdown was down over last year by 6% in total viewers and 19% in the demo, but Olbermann’s was the only cable news show to gain audience since the second quarter. Rachel Maddow gained 6% in total views, but lost 1% with the demo.

Now, obviously, some of that is that msnbc has more room to grow (an odd converse to the situation The Democrat faces in the Congress, actually)…but still. The line item that’s got to shiver the timbers of one Rupert Murdoch (who, far from being any sort of true believer, simply puts up with whatever the message is so long as it makes a nice bottom line) is that demo analysis…only ~25% of your viewership is under 55? That’s what you’re selling to advertisers? Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph I may yet live to see the end of that particular brand of “discourse”…

Fox has lost 21% of their total viewers, and 26% of their younger viewers.

Obama and National Security

This excerpt from Woodward’s (sigh) new book is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier:

In Woodward’s account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.

Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options — two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn’t agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.

In the end, Woodward reveals, Obama devised his own alternative strategy and personally wrote out its terms in a six-page, single-spaced memo that he made his top civilian and military advisers read and sign on to.

Recall that this same group of generals and their proxies were simultaneously waging a press-based war using damaging leaks against the President in the hopes of forcing his hand towards their preferred outcome(s).
Now flip that to an entity that you can’t engage publicly in any way. That only the smallest subset of your advisers can even know about. And that issues you memos each and every day telling you “They’re coming!”, any one of which may turn out to be your “bin Laden determined to strike in US,” so you can’t just shut these folks out, distrustful though you may be of both them and their data, spiteful as you are of their heavy handed and blowback-inducing approaches: they own your ass. That’s what it is to be President. Even when you’re one who knows his Constitution well enough to recoil at the thought of the very extra-judicial extermination of inconvenient citizens these folks are pitching.

The only real option seems to be to contain this apparatus everywhere you can, wait for the excess and overuse to explode, and then try to ratchet this thing down. Or another large-scale attack occurs that ratchets it up even further. Or a military coup when the economy utterly collapses. Whichever.