Nether Lands

Between the past and the future lie the Nether Lands.


My best wishes to all for a good year and many more after.
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In Appreciation

As the hours tick down to midnight -- when I'll probably be asleep -- I can't help but look back over the year and think about what a wild ride it's been, both in good ways and bad, and realize what blessings and good things I have to appreciate.

Mercifully -- for you -- I don't need to go into all the details, because, if you've been reading this blog, you know most of what went on in my life this year. Through it all I have come to rely on and appreciate the people who made those good things happen and who helped me through the rough times. So in no particular order I thought I'd take a moment and indulge in a little public appreciation of them. Some I can't name because I respect their privacy, but I think I can give them enough clues that they will know who they are and know how much they mean to me.

It was, to say the least, an interesting year for me at work, and since I make it a rule never to write about my job, I will leave it at that... except to say that if you've been following the state of public education in Miami-Dade County, you know what I'm talking about. To all the people I work with, especially MF, IRMC, CB, ML, LM, MR, AR, LVS, MS, AN, thank you for everything. And a special shout-out to my new friends in the ERP program, especially VV, EV, and ECC (and fellow baseball fan Awesome Todd); thanks for helping me figure out what all those acronyms like BPP, BPML, and FRICEW mean. At one point I was thinking WTF and STFU, but it was better than BOHICA.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the incredible friends I've made whom I've never met in person. The on-line community of the blogosphere has opened up an amazing -- and often eye-opening -- world, and I am appreciative of the people who have welcomed and encouraged me to participate. Thanks to the generosity of Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, Michael J.W. Stickings at The Reaction, Rick at South Florida Daily Blog, Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly's Political Animal, and a lot of other bloggers -- too numerous to mention -- who support this effort. Without them, I'd be just a guy at a computer.

I can't get through this without thinking of my close friends here, Bob and the Old Professor, who are as close as I come to having real family here. As most of you know, OP was my professor at the University of Miami when I was all of 19 and a freshman, and he -- to his undying regret, I'm sure -- cast me in my very first play in college, The Beaux' Stratagem, playing the first of many "The" roles, as in "The Thief" and "The Priest." (It wasn't until I was in grad school that I got to play characters with real names...and by then I was writing plays.) Now, nearly forty years later, we are still close and still can spend hours talking about everything from playwriting to great memories at Stratford. And through him, I got to know Bob. Coincidentally -- or not -- Bob and I shared an office together for four years where we set new standards for jokes and one-liners, and we also share our love of antique cars, which has been both a joy and an obligation we have come to appreciate. Thank you both for everything: Friday night dinners, the occasional Sunday meat loaf, a shared affinity for teasing Skitz the cat, and all the millions of things that make friendship what it is and my life better because of it.

And there's my family. Distant though they may be, I am still blessed with the good health and ever-present love and bond with my parents who this year celebrated 61 years of marriage and are looking forward to many more years of being the rock of foundation of an ever-growing family, scattered all over the country from Miami to Seattle. And I am thankful to have the love and counsel of my brothers and sister who touch me in their own ways and never know how much a part of me they truly are.

Finally, of course, there's you, dear Reader. This year the readership at Bark Bark Woof Woof has showed a steady increase, and I owe that in large part to your participation -- and in no small part to the redesign of the site by my brother. If you've gotten this far in this maudlin parade of sentiment, I truly appreciate your thoughts, your best wishes, your comments, even your brickbats, japes, snark, corrections, and the occasional OFFS and WTF? Thanks. You keep me writing, you keep me honest, and you keep reminding me that it's you I'm writing to ... and for.
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Random Thought

How much money did the DNC raise off of Richard "Shoe-bomber" Reid?
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No-Fly Panda

Chris Matthews ruminated on how to protect ourselves against terrorists that might know the sacred art.

I think we have got to get serious about catching terrorists, not just catching weapons. I'm waiting for the terrorist who knows kung fu or something that gets on an airplane without a weapon. God knows what that is going to be like.

I wonder if Mr. Matthews was on the same flight I was that showed Kung Fu Panda as the in-flight movie, and that's where he got that particular brain-wave.

Does that mean that Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman are now on the no-fly list?

HT to Steve.
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Looking Back / Looking Forward

It's time once again for my annual look back at what I predicted for the year 2009, see what I got right in this post a year ago and boldly blunder into the predictions for the coming year.

On December 31, 2008, I wrote:

- President Obama will get a honeymoon for a few months where he will actually get some things done. He knows he has only eighteen months at the most to do his most effective work; by June 2010 Congress will be gearing up for the mid-terms, then before you know it, it will be 2012. So expect a big economic stimulus package like FDR's New Deal and a middle-class tax cut, and expect a lot of blow-back from the GOP who will scream about socialism and boondoggles. There will be set-backs and issues taken off the front burner, including health care reform, and getting out of Iraq will be harder than we thought. Of course some foreign government will test the new administration -- like they're not already -- and we will be surprised at how the new president handles it. The economy will show signs of recovery by September, thanks in part to the stimulus by the government but also from the ingenuity and resilience of the American people.

I'll give myself a B on that one. I was right about the stimulus and right beyond measure on the blow-back from the GOP. I was wrong about healthcare being put on the back burner and about Iraq, although that seems to be having issues today. I was close on the foreign governments testing him; it was actually Somali pirates and his response to them that surprised folks. And surprise, surprise, especially for someone who is not an economist, I was pretty damn close on the start of the economic recovery in September except for the jobs figures.

- In spite of setbacks like Prop 8 and Amendment 2, the march toward equality for the queer community will continue. I think we'll see the repeal of DADT within the first year of the Obama administration and a continued shift in public attitudes about the treatment of gay and lesbian citizens. There will be bumps, bruises, hurt feelings, and setbacks, but the tide is turning.

I wish I was right on this one, but we're not making much progress on a large scale; it's small victories like electing an openly gay mayor in Houston that are happening rather than on the federal level. President Obama has made a lot of nice talk and he actually welcomed LGBT people into the White House and into his administration, but maybe we need a new metaphor -- glacial progress rather than tidal.

- The rest of the world will welcome us back like the prodigal child, and we will reach out to them, recognizing that we have a lot of atonement to do. This will be in part to try to bring peace, but also to help get our economy back on track; you can't sell things to people when you're calling them part of the axis of evil. In that vein, the Obama administration will take steps to ease the travel and money restrictions on Cuba, which will infuriate a few loudmouths on Calle Ocho in Little Havana and make farmers and auto parts distributors very happy.

That was easy; Don Rickles would have been a better world-wide ambassador than the previous administration. As for Cuba, Mr. Obama did lift some of the restrictions on travel and money, but only for Cuban-Americans. It's time to do the whole thing.

- Jeb Bush will run for the Senate here in Florida and win in 2010. But he will become the Ted Kennedy of the Bush family; the Senate is as far as he will ever go in national politics; the only way he would ever get beyond that is if he changed his name to John Ellis Obama.

Wrong. But the way the race is going -- Charlie Crist in a tight race with Marco Rubio in the GOP primary -- Jeb Bush may wish he had decided to run after all.

- Meanwhile, Florida will still struggle with a lousy economy and the fall-off in the housing and tourist trade. The state legislature will refuse to consider raising taxes and will probably end up taking even more money from education, all the while wondering why test scores are falling. D'oh.

- The Detroit Lions will actually win a football game. And while I make no predictions about how the Tigers will do, they -- along with the Yankees -- proved that spending a lot of money on star players doesn't buy you a winning season.

Right again, although those were low-hanging fruit. Actually, the Tigers did a lot better than I expected, missing out on winning the division by one bobbled catch in a tie-breaker with the Twins.

Okay, let's boldly go into predictions for 2010:

- Healthcare reform passes after some wrangling and compromises that make it slightly palatable to both the left and moderates; a milquetoast version of the public option will be added somehow. The Republicans are out of the picture on it except for their plan to run in the mid-year elections on a platform of repealing it, which, as Steve Benen notes, hands the Democrats their own platform: "A vote for a Republican is a vote to let insurance companies screw over American families. Know those new protections that just became law? Republicans will take them away unless you vote Democratic." The president will shift the focus back to the economy just in time to ride the inevitable upturn in the economy which will show growth by the end of the second quarter and at last a noticeable drop in the unemployment figures. That will be just in time for the mid-term election campaigns to go into full speed, and prevent more than the usual number of losses for the majority party that come in the first mid-term election of a new president. The House will stay Democratic but just barely, and the Senate will probably go 55-45 for the Democrats, making Senate rules reform, i.e. changing the filibuster rules a priority ... and a non-starter.

- In Florida, the GOP primary race for the open U.S. Senate seat between Gov. Charlie Crist and former state House Speaker Marco Rubio will get really nasty; you can expect to see some ads put out by the teabaggers about Mr. Crist's private life coming out of the, uh, closet. I predict that Mr. Crist will narrowly win the primary and it will make the general election race close between him and Rep. Kendrick Meek with Crist narrowly winning. Alex Sink (D) will beat Bill McCollum (R) for the governor's race. I'm basing that purely on style and wishful thinking; Mr. McCollum is truly the tale from the dork side.

- Don't Ask Don't Tell will be repealed, not because the president pushes for it but because the Congress finally gets around to it. Marriage equality will still be an issue as the sex-obsessed homophobes and Jesus-shouters try to force it onto the ballot in other states that haven't already dealt with it. This battle will be fought in the courts; Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal case filed in California by Theodore Olson and David Boies on behalf of same-sex marriage, is scheduled to go to trial on January 11, 2010. No matter the outcome there, it will inevitably get to the Supreme Court, where there will probably be at least one more appointment to the court by President Obama by the time the case gets there. Meanwhile, the glacial process will go on.

- It's still a scary world out there. The war in Afghanistan and the president's steps to wage it are giving me flashbacks to 1967, and, as I said earlier this year, not in a Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band way. We are, like in Vietnam, butting into a civil war in a country with a weak and corrupt government and a population that doesn't really care about abstract ideas like democracy and free elections; they want food, shelter, and peace in their valley. I hope that a year from now, the president will have the insight to get out. Terrorism will arise from every corner; this year it's Yemen, next year it's Colombia or Venezuela or North Korea or Alabama. Trying to preemptively stop terrorism is like trying to keep squirrels out of the bird feeder: no matter how well you plan or think you've got all the food safe, they still find a way to sneak in. You don't stop feeding the birds, though; you just try to keep ahead of the squirrels.

- The Tigers will go all the way this year. (I say that every year.)

- There will be the usual silly distractions in the manner of balloon boys, ditzy pageant queens, celebrity melt-downs, hypocritical bluenose politicians getting busted for screwing around, and the usual hand-wringing over how technology is taking over the world and leaving no one with any privacy. That last missive will be twittered, by the way.

- I won't get all ghoulish about predicting who will leave us this year; it was tough enough to see people like Ted Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, and Robert Anderson go. I just hope we remember to cherish and honor them while they're still with us.

- Personal predictions: I will finish that novel that I've been working on since I put Small Town Boys on hiatus. Can't Live Without You will get another production, this time in a bigger theatre. It's going to be another interesting year at work but things are looking up as the SAP rises. This year will be my 20th trip to the William Inge Theatre Festival in April, and this year will be the best yet...until next year. I will not get an iPhone, a Twitter account, or even text messaging on my cell phone. I will still be driving the same car this time next year, and the Pontiac will still be in the garage, an orphan but still loved.

- And of course, the usual prediction: One year from now I'll write a post just like this one, look back at this one, and think, "Gee, that was dumb." Or not.
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Fact Checking Dick

Rachel Maddow lays out the facts for a candid world on the case of the Obama administration, the war on terror, and former Vice President Dick Cheney's lies.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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Shut Up, He Explained

It had to happen that former Vice President Dick Cheney would shoot off his mouth (as opposed to someone else's face) about the undie bomber, and true to form, he let fly the other day with more of his bellicosity, accusing President Obama of "pretending we're not at war" with terrorism. While that claim is demonstrably false, Mr. Cheney apparently thinks that the way to stop terrorism is to go all butch and brag on yourself.

There's apparently an expectation that the president can -- and probably should -- exploit incidents for as much political gain as possible. So, for example, when U.S. forces, acting on the president's orders, successfully took out Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, the ringleader of a Qaeda cell in Kenya and one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa, the president should appear before the cameras and explain, "Hey, look at me! I took out one of the world's most dangerous terrorists!" When U.S. forces, acting on the president's orders, killed Baitullah Mehsud, the terrorist leader of the Taliban movement Pakistan, Obama should assemble reporters to declare, "Booyah! Who's da man?"

When the Obama administration took suspected terrorists Najibullah Zazi, Talib Islam, and Hosam Maher Husein Smadi into custody before they could launch their planned attacks, each and every instance requires its own press conference, in which the president can proclaim, "Republicans' talk is cheap; I'm the one keeping Americans safe."

That's obviously not Mr. Obama's style; after all, he's not twelve years old. But the White House did respond to Mr. Cheney yesterday with a blog posting by Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer that pretty much takes it right back to the former vice president.

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action. Seven years of bellicose rhetoric failed to reduce the threat from al Qaeda and succeeded in dividing this country. And it seems strangely off-key now, at a time when our country is under attack, for the architect of those policies to be attacking the President.

As for the "not at war" line, he put it very neatly:

There are numerous other such public statements that explicitly state we are at war. The difference is this: President Obama doesn't need to beat his chest to prove it, and -- unlike the last Administration -- we are not at war with a tactic ("terrorism"), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

I have to admire Mr. Pfeiffer for his restraint. Had it been me, I would have told Mr. Cheney to STFU.

HT to Steve.
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Rush to the Hospital

Rush Limbaugh, on vacation in Hawaii, had chest pains yesterday afternoon and was taken to a hospital in Honolulu, where he is reported to be "resting comfortably."

I would never wish anyone ill health for any reason, so I hope he has a rapid and uneventful recovery.

And I hope his listeners will suddenly grasp the concept that yes, Hawaii is a state, not a foreign country, and it's okay to take a vacation there.
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Short Takes

Eight Americans were killed in Afghanistan by a suicide bomber.

Connecting the dots on the intelligence on the undie bomber.

Yemen says they are trying very hard to catch the al-Qaeda people in their country.

We -- as in the U.S. taxpayer -- now own a major stake in GMAC.

A Miami-based cyberthief has pleaded guilty to stealing over 130 million identities.

A plot of land that used to be a soda ash pit for a glass factory in Rossford, Ohio, will be the site of Hollywood Casino Toledo, a $250 million gambling operation expected to open in 2012.

Planning ahead -- Russian space researchers are meeting to try to figure out how to fend off an asteroid heading toward Earth ... in 2029.

Cuba is so over Barack Obama.
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Geography Lesson

Kevin Madden, the former spokesman for Mitt Romney, told John Roberts of CNN that he thinks President Obama is making a mistake by vacationing in "a foreign place" -- Hawaii.

MADDEN: President Obama right now has suffered very greatly in the last few months because of the fight over health care, and he has very little political capital right now. So Republicans feel it is in vogue to criticize this president.

And then lastly, you have to also remember the fact that the president being on vacation in Hawaii, it’s much different than being in Texas. Hawaii to many Americans seems like a foreign place. And I think those images, the optics, hurt President Obama very badly.

Later, when he was told that Hawaii is a state (and has been for half a century), he changed his tune slightly:

...to many Americans, Hawaii seems like this very tropical place, and the optics of many of these reporters reporting about the president’s response with surfers behind them is much different.

It should also be noted that Hawaii is the president's home state, and he has the birth certificate to prove it.

So the president should take a vacation because of what might be politically popular? How stupid would that be?

Imagine what would happen if he decided to vacation in The Conch Republic.
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Up There

We saw Up in the Air last night, and while I thought the acting was good -- George Clooney rarely hits a false note and this time he was very good -- and the direction by Jason Reitman was excellent, I thought the plot was predictable (I figured out the end long before it happened) and I left the theatre wondering if it wasn't all a little too neat and tidy. Order is restored, and the beat goes on. "Make no mistake, moving is living."

There's a lot of Oscar buzz about this film. Perhaps, but if there's one thing that made the film a winner for me it was the nod, deliberate or not, to the cult classic (and now the subject of doctoral dissertations) The Big Lebowski. That said, if it's a choice between the films this year that had "Up" in their title and dealt with frequent fliers, I'd just as soon go with this one.
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Orchids in Michigan

We took a drive up to Taylor Orchids in Monroe, Michigan, today where they were having a clearance sale on orchids, and I got to look around, ask questions, and take some pictures. Here are a few of them. Please don't ask me the names of the varieties; all I know are the two that I have on my patio. One is Fred, the other is Ethel.


More below the fold.










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Enough Failure to Go Around

President Obama's statement yesterday about "systemic failure" in the security system will undoubtedly give his opponents and political opportunists all the room they need to point and say he's weak on defense or not taking it seriously or waiting too long to say anything or not carrying on like a banshee when he does speak up. That noise is meant to distract you from the fact that the system he's saying is broken was put in place by the people who are now making the most noise, that his taking three days to respond to the incident is twice as fast as the response the Bush administration had in the case of Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid, and the response then was very understated because then, as now, they weren't sure what they were dealing with. At the time, the response by a lot of people to the Bush's laconic response wasn't a purple-faced shriek from a congressman running for governor of Michigan, but rather a bit of relief that people were not over-reacting to the incident, especially since it took place three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mr. Reid was tried and convicted in a civil court, afforded all the legal rights under the laws and the Constitution of the United States, and is now spending the rest of his life in the Supermax prison in Colorado. When Mr. Abdulmutallab goes to trial, it should be under the same circumstances since, after all, it would only be for political reasons that he would receive different treatment. (In one respect, the system did work flawlessly: the Obama administration did something, and the right-wing had a full-tilt off-with-their-heads knee-jerk -- emphasis on "jerk" -- response. It never fails.)

The Obama administration has a lot to answer for. They're the ones in charge, and they are the grown-ups now. As tempting as it may be, it's not going to make travel any safer if we keep reminding ourselves that the Department of Homeland Security has been without a leader because a right-wing senator is holding up the confirmation, or that some of the people who trained Mr. Abdulmutallab were released from Gitmo in November 2007 to attend "art therapy rehabilitation program" in Saudi Arabia, or that it was both the Dutch and the Nigerian authorities who allowed him to get on the plane in the first place.

If there is any comfort in what the president said yesterday, is that he admitted that things didn't work the way they should have. That's a far cry from previous administrations that refused to admit that they had screwed up for fear of handing their opponents some kind of crowing rights amongst the Villagers. That would happen no matter what, and if the president isn't quick enough on the draw for Maureen Dowd, well, dems da berries. If heads roll and someone gets fired or is forced to resign, be it Secretary Napolitano or someone else, let it be because of a real failure to do the job, not for the sake of political expediency.
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Short Takes

President Obama: "systemic failures" led to the attempted attack on the NWA jet on Christmas.

Iran is blaming the West for their internal strife.

An Afghan soldier killed an American soldier; it wasn't "friendly fire."

Feeling better -- consumer confidence is growing.

Order the salad -- E. coli tainted beef has infected 19 people in 16 states.

Here's a Lifetime movie in the making: a Denver mother and child that apparently died during childbirth were both revived.

Cold, then hot, then cold again: Miami's weather this week will be like a yo-yo. Also, the coldest day in Miami in 2009 was recorded on February 5 when it got down to 38. The hottest was on June 22, when it got to 98.
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Musical Interlude

Ted Nugent was in England last week and had this to say:

I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist. Mao Tse Tung lives and his name is Barack Hussein Obama. This country should be ashamed. I wanna throw up.

Oh, Mr. Nugent, the Dixie Chicks would like to have a word with you.

HT to Digby.
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Quote of the Day

Rep. Peter King (R-NY):

The fact is while the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding people, on the other hand 100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims, and that is our main enemy today.

Nothing gets past this guy.

HT to Balloon Juice.
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Hoekstra the Huckster

Never let it be said that Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) didn't know how to exploit terrorism for fun and profit.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) is now jumping upon the the Northwest Airlines attack -- and using it to raise money for his gubernatorial campaign, the Grand Rapids Press reports.

In the letter, Hoekstra denounces the Obama administration on a whole range of national security issues -- ranging from Flight 253 itself to Guantanamo Bay, investigation of the interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration, and what Hoekstra calls Obama policies that "impress the 'Blame America First' crowd at home and his thousands of fans overseas."

By contrast, Hoekstra promises to stand up for Michigan. And he asks for your financial help to do it.

Steve Benen wonders "just how pathetic does a politician have to be to try to raise money off the attempted murder of hundreds of innocent Americans? Just how desperate does that politician have to be to see a plot to blow up an airplane over American soil and think, 'You know, maybe I can exploit this to pick up a few checks.'"

As I've noted many times before, no one ever lost an election by exploiting the fear and paranoia of the American electorate. But maybe it's time someone did.
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Back to 2001

Years may come and years may go, but Pat Buchanan's right-wing nutsery never changes. It was actually nostalgic for me to hear the old Nixon retainer and wistful supporter of white supremacy debating Spencer Ackerman on Morning Joe this morning and calling for "hostile interrogation" (aka torture) of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The hell with mollycoddling people with liberal mush like civil rights and stuff like that. What does it matter that it happened on an American airliner in U.S. airspace? "We're at war!"


It's like it's 2001 all over again.
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Short Takes

President Obama addressed the press yesterday about the undie bomber and the violent protests in Iran.

China executed a Briton on drug charges despite protests from London that he was mentally ill.

Okinawa is becoming a battleground again for US/Japan relations.

North Korea has detained an American whom they say entered the country illegally.

The Department of Homeland Security has been trying to strengthen the aviation security network since 2001 despite GOP attempts to cut funding.

The TSA has been without a leader for almost a year; Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has put a hold on the appointment because of his fear of union labor.

Somali pirates are still at it.

Miami and South Florida will get a taste of cool weather for the new year.
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2-D or Not 2-D...

Every time you think you've caught up with technology, along comes something new to replace it, and of course, this being a capitalist world, your old technology has to be replaced. Case in point: me. I used to have reel-to-reel tapes, but they were replaced by 8-tracks, then by cassettes. (At one point I had all three.) Vinyl records were replaced by CD's, which are now obsolete because of MP3's. (On that score, I am still in the CD era with a large collection of vinyl records as well.) BetaMax video tape format lost out to VHS which, after a brief attempt by LaserDisc and SelectaVision, lost out to DVD's, and now they're history thanks to BluRay. At some point we're all going to just throw up our hands and go back to Super 8 movies (remember how that beat out old regular 8mm?) and 45's. (And don't get me started on the differences between Mac and PC.)

But this battle isn't being waged just in the home entertainment field any more. If you go to the movies, you have to chose between which version of a 3-D film you want to see.

While the blue-skinned Na’vi are shooting arrows out of the screen toward the audience in the 3-D movie “Avatar,” another battle is being fought in the theater — over the goofy-looking glasses that moviegoers must wear to see the three-dimensional effects.

Four companies are fighting for bridge of the nose with three different technologies. Each of them is more advanced than the paper glasses worn to view “Bwana Devil,” regarded as the first of the commercial 3-D movies in the 1950s, but all work on the same general principle. Each eye sees a slightly different frame of the movie, but the brain puts them together and perceives depth.

About four million glasses made by RealD, the market leader, were worn during Avatar’s opening weekend in the United States. RealD’s glasses use polarized lenses and cost about 65 cents each. MasterImage 3D, another vendor, uses a similar technology.

Dolby Laboratories, the company behind theater sound systems, makes glasses that filter out different frequencies of red, green and blue. They cost about $28 each. The glasses of the third company, XpanD, use battery-powered LCD shutters that open and shut so each eye sees the appropriate frame of the movie. Those cost as much as $50 each.

Each company claims its glasses and projection-system technology is better. Because glasses using one technology are useless in a theater using a different digital projection system, the companies backing the three technologies are scrambling for the upper hand while the 3-D industry is still in its infancy.

What seems to be lost in this battle are two points. First, it's not always the best technology that wins; it's the one with the bigger budget for PR and greasing the studios and producers so that they will prefer one brand over the other, even if the image isn't as good as the other. And then there are those of us with a condition known as strabismus, which means that our eyes don't fuse the images from each eye in the brain, so we do not have 3-D vision naturally. If you're born with it, you don't miss 3-D because you never had it to begin with. As far as I can tell, it's never inhibited my ability to do things that might require 3-D vision such as drive a car or even fly an airplane. (I used to blame my inability to play tennis on it, but I suspect that was an excuse for just not being very good at it. It obviously didn't hurt Pete Sampras.) But seeing a 3-D movie with the glasses would be a lost cause; I suspect that it might even make me nauseous as my brain tries to process the image from one lens to the other.

So if I go see Avatar, it will be the 2-D version. At least the studio had the courtesy to release that version so those of us without the software upgrade can see it. I just hope they don't decide that all movies have to be done in 3-D. I may just have to go back to my BetaMax.
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Question of the Day

So we're counting down the last days of 2009 and starting a new decade (I know; the decade changes when it becomes 2011 since we all decided in 1999 that the 21st Century didn't begin until 2001). Anyway, here's a rather off-beat thing that I've not really thought about during the last ten years, but it might change next week:

Do you say the year is "Two thousand-nine" or "Twenty-oh-nine" and will you say "Two thousand-ten" or "Twenty-ten"?

I have said "Two thousand-[whatever]" for the last whatever and will keep on that track. "Twenty-oh=[whatever]" is just too awkward for me.
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Terrorists Fly Coach

I guess earning all those frequent flier miles makes a difference.

Earlier in the afternoon, Delta Airlines, which acquired Northwest last year, said in a statement that the crew had requested police assistance on the ground because a passenger was “verbally disruptive.” The Transportation Safety Administration said in a statement that it had been alerted to a “disruptive passenger on board” Flight 253. The T.S.A. said that the flight landed safely at Detroit International Airport at approximately 12:35 p.m. Eastern “without incident.”

“The aircraft has been moved to a remote location for additional screening,” the agency had said then. “T.S.A. and law enforcement met the aircraft upon arrival, the passenger is now in custody.”

The man in question, who happened to be from Nigeria, locked himself in the lavatory because he had "stomach troubles" (the trots) and didn't want to leave the biffy. Who can blame him? There's more than one way of carrying explosives in your shorts. So they parked the plane at a remote location and took all the precautions.

Compare that with this story.

Donald Trump's ex-wife, Ivana, was forcefully removed from a New York City-bound Delta Airlines flight...after causing a scene and screaming at crew members.

According to the Associated Press, Trump's 60-year-old former wife became angered by a group of children running in the aisle of her first class cabin while the flight was waiting to depart Palm Beach International Airport en route to New York.

Flight attendants were unable to calm the socialite down and the pilot taxied the plane back to the gate where law enforcement tried to convince Trump to voluntarily exit the aircraft.

When she refused and continued to hurl obscenities at crew members and fellow passengers, deputies "physically escorted her off the aircraft," a department spokesman told RadarOnline.com.

Yet the former Mrs. Trump got on a later flight and was not detained; nor, I presume, did anyone examine her underwear for explosives.

The sick Nigerian's mistake was that he didn't pay for the upgrade to first class.

HT to Digby.
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Fly Me To The Moon

Nate Silver does the numbers on terrorist attacks.

Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas…

Over the past decade, according to BTS [the Bureau of Transportation Statistics], there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune…

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

You can now get a great deal on lightning rods through the Skymall catalog located in the seat pocket in front of you. Please make sure your seat belts are securely fastened and your seat backs and tray tables are locked as we make our final approach into the Sea of Tranquility.

HT to Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice.
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Trying Out A New Act

Mary Matalin and James Carville, the vaudeville routine of political punditry, are always good for a chuckle; he's corny and she's arrogant. And when they're not burning it up as a team act, Ms. Matalin is doing what can only be described as hypocrisy and snake oil. Yesterday on CNN, moments after complaining that President Obama is always blaming poor George W. Bush for his problems, she comes out with her own version of revisionist history.

I was there [in the Bush White House]. We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history. And President Bush dealt with it. And within a year of his presidency at this comparable time, unemployment was at 5 percent. And we were creating jobs.

Steve Benen picks it up from there.

As a factual matter, Matalin, as is usually the case, doesn't have the foggiest idea what she's talking about. Bush didn't "inherit" the attacks of 9/11 -- they happened more than eight months into Bush's presidency, after his administration largely ignored warnings about the threat. Bush didn't "inherit" a recession -- it began in March 2001. Matalin didn't even get the unemployment numbers right.

This, coupled with Dana Perino's assertion last month that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term” must be part of the new right-wing talking points that coalesce around the theory that no one should ever look back at what happened in previous administrations unless they can either get the facts wrong or just make stuff up. Ms. Matalin seems to have that part of the act down pretty well; now it's time to move on to the talent portion of the program.
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Short Takes

Thin warning -- There are so many people on so many lists it's hard to tell who's who.

A lot of protesters have been killed in anti-government clashes in Iran.

There was yet another suicide attack in Pakistan.

High hopes? -- Some states are looking to reform marijuana laws.

Love letters -- The feds are investigating the e-mails between Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and indicted financier Allen Stanford, including one that said "I love you."

Holiday shopping figures are promising.

Hockey night in Toledo -- The largest crowd ever to see a hockey game in Toledo saw the Walleye beat Johnstown 7-3 in ECHL action.
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Pants On Fire

The hysteria over the shlub who set his genitalia on fire on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in an attempt to blow up the plane is getting beyond ridiculous. It's not that we're not taking the threat of terrorism seriously, and kudos to the people on the flight who subdued him, but this politicizing of the event to score cheap points by dimwits like Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) tells us more about the mindset of these people than it does about anything else: nothing is safe from being turned into a political hacky-sack.

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) said Sunday that it is fair to blame the Obama administration for the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit on Christmas Day.

Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Select Intelligence Committee said that the administration has not taken the threat of terrorist threats on the U.S. seriously.

Asked by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace if it is fair to blame the Obama administration for the attacks, the Michigan Republican replied "Yeah, I think it really is."

Obviously what the righties want is for the president to either man every TSA security checkpoint at every airport himself, or get out there making some kind of testosterone-laced threat to every brown-skinned guy who gets on a plane in Nigeria bound for Amsterdam. As if that would do a lot of good. (And I don't remember the righties criticizing President Bush for playing a little golf during his term of office or during times of crisis. But then again, he deserved all that time off; after all, presidentin' is hard work.) The reason we have a Department of Homeland Security and the TSA is so that they are the ones doing the job. From all accounts, Mr. Abdulmutallab boarded the plane in Amsterdam after clearing Dutch security checks. Would Rep. Hoekstra like to have the United States take over airport security all over the world?

Steve Benen wrote,

Let's be clear. First, the Obama administration's record on counter-terrorism is very impressive. Second, Pete Hoekstra's record on national security issues is so ridiculous, it's hard not to point and laugh. And third, Hoekstra's attempts to exploit an attack that failed is almost certainly motivated by an effort to impress right-wing primary voters in advance of his gubernatorial campaign, making his attacks against the president cheap and disgusting.

It sound like there is more than just Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with his pants on fire.
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Sunday Reading

New Year's Resolution -- Ezra Klein says that the Senate needs to be reformed.

This might seem an odd moment to argue that the Senate is fundamentally broken and repairs should top our list of priorities. After all, the Senate passed a $900 billion health-care bill Thursday morning. But consider the context: Arlen Specter's defection from the Republican Party earlier this year gave Democrats 60 votes in the Senate -- a larger majority than either party has had since the '70s. Democrats also controlled the House and the presidency, and were working in the aftermath of a financial crisis that occurred on a Republican president's watch. This was a test of whether a party could govern when everything was stacked in its favor.

The answer seems to be, well, not really. The Democrats ended up focusing on health-care reform's low-hanging fruit: the bill the Senate ultimately passed does much more to increase coverage than it does to address the considerably harder problem of cost control, it strengthens the existing private insurance system and it does not include a public insurance option. And Democrats still could not find a single Republican vote, which meant they had to give Nebraska a coupon entitling it to a free Medicaid expansion and hand Joe Lieberman a voucher that's good for anything he wants. If the Senate cannot govern effectively even when history conspires to free its hand, then it cannot govern.

To understand why the modern legislative process is so bad, why every Senator seems able to demand a king's ransom in return for his or her vote and no bill ever seems to be truly bipartisan, you need to understand one basic fact: The government can function if the minority party has either the incentive to make the majority fail or the power to make the majority fail. It cannot function if it has both.

In decades past, the parties did not feel they had both. Cooperation was the Senate's custom, if not its rule. But in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, then the minority whip of the House, and Bob Dole, then the minority leader of the Senate, realized they did have both. A strategy of relentless obstruction brought then-president Bill Clinton to his knees, as the minority party discovered it had the tools to make the majority party fail.

Unfortunately, both parties have followed Gingrich's playbook ever since. According to UCLA political scientist Barbara Sinclair, about 8 percent of major bills faced a filibuster in the 1960s. This decade, that jumped to 70 percent. The problem with the minority party continually making the majority party fail, of course, is that it means neither party can ever successfully govern the country.

Way Up in the Air -- First class is coach for these frequent fliers.

United States airlines have cut back on all but the most basic services in recent years — for most passengers.

But for their very best customers, some airlines are providing extra perks and creating new tiers of status to make them feel special. Continental Airlines, for example, created a new top category this month, Presidential Platinum, for customers flying at least 125,000 miles and spending $30,000 a year on plane tickets. Delta Air Lines established the new Diamond level this summer for customers who earn a minimum of 125,000 miles each year.

Members at these levels, in addition to getting bragging rights, might be offered free access to airport clubs and automatic check-in, might get fees for extra bags waived, and might be allowed to go to the front of any line — and sit in the front of the cabin — even when other travelers paid more for their tickets.

Once inside those airline clubs, these elite fliers can get free cocktails and buffet meals, perhaps a shower, and in the case of some Delta clubs, practice time on putting greens.

Airlines are also studying how to create a greater sense of personalized service on board — perhaps allowing passengers to preorder a favorite wine for an international flight or a special treat for an anniversary, or letting them designate a favorite seat on various kinds of aircraft so they sit in the same place on every flight.

Giving special perks to the biggest spenders is an old trick used by casinos, who pamper the “whales” so they feel appreciated more than all the “minnows” that populate lower-stakes poker tables.

The Kindness of Strangers -- More than fifty years after being written, an unproduced screenplay of Tennessee Williams finally gets made.

GORE VIDAL once remarked that if Tennessee Williams had nothing better to do, he would rewrite something he had already published. Almost until the day he died, in February 1983, Williams kept working, and not just on plays. He also turned out poems, novels, short stories, screenplays. The Williams archive is so vast that much of it is still uncataloged, and there are also works that are hiding in plain sight. “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond,” a script he wrote in 1957, when he was at the peak of his fame and powers, was collected in an anthology of his screenplays in the mid-’80s but remained unproduced until recently, when Jodie Markell, who had never directed a feature before, exhumed it.

Though he was a famously successful adapter of his own work, Williams was not a natural screenwriter, and, remarkably, of the almost 50 movies made from Williams material, Ms. Markell’s film — starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Ellen Burstyn and Ann-Margret and opening on Wednesday — is the only one that didn’t begin life as something else. It’s also the first major Williams movie in decades — a reanimation of a film career that once rivaled his stage success.

Ms. Markell, who is also an actress, is herself a bit of a Williams character. She grew up in Memphis and has a courtly, genteel Southern manner that conceals a steely purposefulness. She is also a rummager in the past who loves to dust off antiques everyone has forgotten about. She was largely responsible, for example, for the Public Theater’s eye-opening 1990 revival of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play “Machinal,” in which she also starred. She came upon “Teardrop Diamond” at roughly the same time as “Machinal,” she recalled recently, but because she wasn’t very savvy about the film business did nothing about it for a while. “I tend to carry things in my heart,” she said.

In the early ’90s she interested the producer Brad Michael Gilbert in the project. “It felt fresh and honest,” he said, “and it’s a little more hopeful than a lot of Williams films. I decided I wanted to give these characters a lift and hand Jodie the wheel.”

It took him years to secure the rights, however, because, like many others, he found Maria St. Just, a friend of Williams’s who had commandeered the estate, impossible to deal with. After Ms. St. Just died in 1994, he again approached the Williams estate, now administered by the University of the South, and what finally won over the trustees, he said, was Ms. Markell’s award-winning short film based on the Eudora Welty short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” “I think they liked the idea of bringing Tennessee Williams home to the South,” he said.

Doonesbury -- Still alive?
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Short Takes

There's more information on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the guy who tried to blow up the plane on Christmas Day.

There will be more restrictions on air passengers.

More protests in Tehran.

The Midwest is still snowed under.

Michigan sues Illinois over the Asian carp.
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Travel Note

Welcome to Perrysburg, Ohio where I'm spending a little holiday time with my folks. The town is named in honor of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the victor in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. There is a monument to him in the center of town (see picture). It's also the site of Fort Meigs, another battlefield during that war.

In spite of the attempt yesterday by someone to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit, the security inspection at Miami this morning was no different than in the past -- at least as far as I could tell -- and even though I was flying to Detroit, it was an uneventful flight... unless you count getting a re-run of 30 Rock and The Office as eventful.

Now that I'm here, the blogging may be a little less than usual since I'll be spending time with my folks. It may be cold and grey outside but the surroundings are warm.
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Why I Still Miss Sam

Via Andrew Sullivan, one of the things I miss the most about not having Sam around any more is that he would engage in behavior like this all his long life.


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Happy Boxing Day

In many parts of the world, including Canada, today is Boxing Day and it's a holiday, too.

The name derives from the tradition of giving seasonal gifts, on the day after Christmas, to less wealthy people and social inferiors, which was later extended to various workpeople such as labourers and servants.

The traditional recorded celebration of Boxing Day has long included giving money and other gifts to charitable institutions, the needy and people in service positions. The European tradition has been dated to the Middle Ages, but the exact origin is unknown and there are some claims that it goes back to the late Roman/early Christian era.

In the United Kingdom it certainly became a custom of the nineteenth century Victorians for tradesmen to collect their 'Christmas boxes' or gifts in return for good and reliable service throughout the year on the day after Christmas.[1]

The establishment of Boxing Day as a defined public Holiday under the legislation that created the UK's Bank Holidays started the separation of 'Boxing Day' from the 'Feast of St Stephen' and today it is almost entirely a secular holiday with a tradition of shopping and post Christmas sales starting.

As mentioned, it's also St. Stephen's day, which, unless you're up on your Catholic mythology, you only know about because of the Christmas carol, Good King Wenceslaus. (According to Bryan, he wasn't that good a king... or person.)

At any rate, today is the day to clean up after the holiday if you celebrated or head out to the mall if you want to exchange the mystery gift or use the gift card you got from a friend at work. Or you could stay at home and nosh on the leftovers from Christmas dinner, start writing your thank-you notes, or, like some of us, finish packing and get ready for a trip to a colder climate for a holiday visit.
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Short Takes

A man tried to light a device on a plane in what the White House claims was an act of terrorism.

The Taliban showed a video of a captured American soldier.

Things are getting testy in Iran.

The Vatican will review security procedures.

Being PWOP (Pregnant Without Permission) is no longer a court-martial offense.

Mourners marked the fifth anniversary of the 2004 tsunami.

One family had a white Christmas in the Florida Keys.
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Merry Christmas

Let there be peace on earth
And let it begin with me
Let there be peace on earth
The peace that was meant to be

From my family to yours...

(From 1953 - I'm the kid sitting on my grandmother's lap.)

And from my house to yours.


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Question of the Day

Here's something to argue about over the eggnog:

Which is the best version of A Christmas Carol on film?

I agree with Louis Bayard in Salon.com: the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge. Yes, Alastair Sim (with or without colorization) is good, but this one really gets it with the depth of the language and the true transformation of the character. The link provides links to the entire performance. Check it out. (Hey, what else do you have to do on Christmas Day?)
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Short Takes

The presents from "Twelve Days of Christmas" are easier to sing than to purchase.

Travelers in the Midwest, you're better off staying home for the holiday.

"Oh, honey, you shouldn't have!" -- giving the gift of CO2.

It's Christmas time in the city...

Back to Bach -- A replica of an 18th-century organ sounds off.

All Christmas all the time -- some businesses go all the way.

Sharing the season.
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Friday Blogaround

It may be Christmas Day, but it's also a Friday, and the LC blogaround goes on.

- A Blog Around The Clock: is there a link between early onset of puberty and obesity?
- archy has healthcare questions... and answers.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof does some blogroll housekeeping.
- Bloggg: Happy Festivus.
- Dohiyi Mir: Merry [*******] Christmas.
- Echidne Of The Snakes on bubble-gum anti-feminism.
- Florida Progressive Coalition Blog: third-party politics.
- Left Is Right: some little bits and pieces for the week.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web provides us with the cats' meow of Christmas.
- Rook's Rant with a great pay-it-forward story for the season of giving.
- rubber hose on the perils and quirks of blogging in Каучуктан.
- Scrutiny Hooligans on the healthcare end game.
- Stupid Enough Unexplanation says this year's "war on Christmas" was more like a tantrum.
- The Invisible Library reviews Avatar.
- The Yellow Something Something is revamped and refreshed and reloaded.
- WTF Is It Now?? -- isn't that special?

Let there be peace on earth.
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Friday Catblogging

Skitz is the Christmas cat.

"And what did I get?
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Carol of the Bells

As I said when it was the QotD, this is my favorite piece of Christmas music, and this version of it by George Winston is my favorite.


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The Sense of Christmas

Originally posted on December 24, 2004

My folks sent me a lovely wreath for the front door made from cut evergreens, and every time I open the door I get a powerful sense-memory of Christmas as a child.

We had a house with tall ceilings so we always got a Christmas tree that was at least ten feet tall - maybe taller. (It could have been less, but when you're six or seven, it looks a lot taller.) We had tons of decorations from our family history; gingerbread decorations held together with fine wire, bubble lights that never seemed to work right, and hundreds of ornaments. We always had a debate about tinsel - I hated it, my sister wanted it. Guess who won that one. Every year we put the tree in a different room - one year in the living room, the next in the front parlor, and then in the bay window in the dining room.

That was not the extent of the decorating by any means. While my family was not particularly religious, we went all out for the season in the decor mode that would have made Martha Stewart get out of the business. This was a tradition carried on from both of my parent's families; my father tells how his father was a meticulous hanger of the old-fashioned lead tinsel, and my mother's family did it up to the heights of giddiness that included the tree and presents magically appearing overnight on Christmas Eve. So we had a legacy to live up to. Lights on the front porch were interwoven in the cedar roping that looped down from the eaves. There was more roping on the banister going up the front stairs, tied on with red ribbons, and roping again around the big mirror in the front hall. Candles in Christmas candelabra filled the house with the scent of candle smoke, merging with the evergreens, and on Christmas Eve, when the big roast was in the oven for the dinner with Aunt Margaret, the house was awash with homey aromas.

We had an old-fashioned hi-fi system with speakers throughout the first floor of the house, and as we put up the tree and the roping - usually the weekend before Christmas - we would dig out the Christmas LP's. The perennial was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's Joy To the World that began with "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming." That would be followed by the Bing Crosby Merry Christmas album and anything else we had in the rack.

We had two fireplaces in the house, including one in the kitchen, so that's where we hung our stockings with care. Christmas morning would arrive and the four kids would line up, youngest first, on the back stairs, squirming with anticipation until we were let into the kitchen and a breakfast of Christmas baked treats, including a Scandanavian stollen baked by a family friend. (Never one who liked things like that, I often wished the stollen would be stolen....) Then we'd line up at the appropriate closed door behind which lay the treasure. Nearly fainting with the anticipation, the door would be flung open - a four-voiced gasp of breath, followed by pounding feet and squeals of delight. We took turns, shredding the wrapping, opening the boxes, reading the tags - "From Mom and Dad," "From Santa," "From Grammie." My mother kept a list of who got what from whom so that the thank-you notes could be written. There was always one Big Present for each kid - a bicycle, skis, a train set, a kitten - and lots of books and clothes, too. And each child was sure to give his sibling something, usually something oddly appropriate; like lavender bath beads from me to my sister.

When it was all over, the trash can was filled with the wrappings, the loot taken upstairs, and new clothes tried on. I would pore through the new books until I was nagged to get dressed to go to Christmas dinner somewhere else - with cross-town relatives or the Carranor Club - and the streets would be empty as we piled into the station wagon. We'd come home in the cold and dark, tired from all the excitement, ready to come down from the sugar-spiked high. The next day we'd pack up for our annual skiing trip to Boyne Mountain in Michigan, complete with its own set of sense memories.

These traditions were carried on as we each grew up and started our own families, adding our own touches; Allen and I merged some of each to come up with our own for fifteen years, including the tree (artificial, though - he's allergic to pine) and music. (I've got the Bing Crosby CD on as I write this.) My sister has passed it on to her children, and my younger brother, with his three kids, carries on much as we did when we were young.

So while there may not be a whole lot of religion in any of it, there's the strength of the ties of family and love that surpasses any denominational definition. It is a common thread that binds us all together whether we say "Happy Holidays," "Merry Christmas," "Felice Navidad" (which I immediately corrupted to "Fleas On Your Dad"), "Happy Hannukah," or "Good Kwanzaa." It's the sense of togetherness and hope that can be spread regardless of whether or not you celebrate the birth of the son of God, and the thankfulness that you feel that you have made it through yet another year and look forward to making the next one better.
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The Dickens You Say

For the Old Professor and his new computer...

Alastair Sim in the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol (which was titled Scrooge in Great Britain).


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60-39

The Senate passed the healthcare bill.

The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.

The 60-to-39 party-line vote, on the 25th straight day of debate on the legislation, brings Democrats a step closer to a goal they have pursued for decades. It clears the way for negotiations with the House, which passed a broadly similar bill last month by a vote of 220 to 215.

If the two chambers can strike a deal, as seems likely, the resulting product would vastly expand the role and responsibilities of the federal government. It would, as lawmakers said repeatedly in the debate, touch the lives of nearly all Americans.

The only question that remains is how far the opponents of the bill -- on both sides -- and the special interests -- on both sides -- will go to try to shape the final piece of sausage that comes out of the House-Senate conference. Based on what we've seen so far, there will be death panels, dead grannies, and socialistic grand guignol TV commercials and even more fiction from Sarah Palin's Facebook pages that would get P.T. Barnum to get out of the business. And in the logic that always makes sense after you've had too much eggnog, the pundits and spinners are already saying that the passage of this bill, which probably ranks up there with the passage of Social Security and Medicare, is really bad news for President Obama and the Democrats. Sic semper meshuggeneh

Now the fun begins.
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It's A Small World After All

Via Andrew Sullivan, a look at the known universe.


It puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Of course, there's another way to look at it...
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Short Takes

Once healthcare passes the Senate, the work begins on getting the bill finalized.

The recovery continues with personal income growing for the second straight month.

Gitmo may be open for a lot longer.

Want to buy an electric car? (Nah, me neither.)

This is reality: "Balloon Boy" parents get 90 days in the joint.

There was a father and son reunion in Brazil after a five-year custody battle.

They otter find another way to travel....
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Way Back and Far Right

Rick reminded me of the story on the Rachel Maddow Show last week that one of the sponsors of the upcoming Conservative Political Action Committee convention will be the John Birch Society.

The what? Well, if you're under fifty, you probably don't remember the Birchers, but they were -- and apparently still are -- the teabaggers of the 1950's and '60's; virulently right-wing and obsessed with conspiracy theories: fluoridated water was socialized medicine, school integration was a plot to despoil our children with "jungle" music and infect the toilet seats in the boys' room with social diseases (I had a high school history teacher who actually believed that), and of course, anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy was a communist, including President Eisenhower. They're so nuts that even William F. Buckley, the godfather of the modern conservative movement, wanted nothing to do with them.



That reminded me of the song* by the legendary Chad Mitchell Trio from 1962:



To quote LGF,

This is where the conservative movement has been heading ever since Barack Obama was elected, and now they’re finally arriving at the black helicopter landing pad.

And not a single GOP politician or right wing blogger has so much as blinked at the news that they’ll be sharing CPAC with this group of creeps, creationists, racists, and extremists. This CPAC is going to be a hoot.

*For those of you under fifty, here are links to some of the more obscure cultural references like Westbrook Pegler (a precursor of Glenn Beck) and the WCTU (prohibitionists) in the song.
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Car Karma

I was driving back from the store this morning and got behind a car with a bumper sticker that read "No Hope in Socialism." The "O" in "Socialism" was the Obama logo. When the SUV (of course, and an import built in a country that embraces what the driver would consider to be "socialism" like universal health care) came to the stop light, I noticed that the right tail light bulb was burned out.

I thought that was funny. And truthful.
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Florida GOP Infighting

TPM's Eric Kleefeld reports on the disarray in the Florida GOP.

The Florida Republican Party organization is now in the midst of a civil war, with the latest shoe to drop being that embattled party chairman Jim Greer has called for a special executive committee meeting, in response to a request that he be ousted as chairman -- but at the same time, he's telling his enemies that the motion itself isn't allowed under the party rules.

Greer, an ally of moderate Gov. Charlie Crist, has come under fire by intra-party critics who accuse him of mismanaging the state GOP's finances. For his part, Greer is putting the blame for this controversy on allies of former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, the more conservative challenger against Crist in the Senate primary. And Greer has accused these critics of "slander," "libel," and even "treason" against the Republican Party!

Meanwhile, Reps. Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, brothers and congressmen from the Cuban-American community here in Miami, have withdrawn their endorsement of Gov. Crist for reasons that they are keeping to themselves. The Miami Herald speculates that it's because Mr. Crist didn't appoint a family friend to a judgeship.

Get the plantain chips... this is going to be fun to watch.
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Be Careful What You Pray For

UPDATED

A tea-bagger called C-SPAN yesterday morning in tears because he was afraid his prayers to kill Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) may have hit the wrong target.

Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night.

How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough?

The real thing or a prank? You decide.


Update: The folks at TPM are pretty sure this caller is the same guy who called in last April and punk'd David Brooks. Listen to them side by side here.
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Short Takes

An American Airlines plane from Miami ran off the end of the runway in Kingston, Jamaica; a lot of injuries but no one was killed.

The Senate clears the way to vote on the healthcare bill on Thursday morning.

Gitmo may be in business for another year if Congress doesn't pay for the move.

Economic growth was not as strong in the third quarter as expected.

Rep. Parker Griffith, a conservative Democrat from Alabama, switches to the GOP.

Being PWOP (Pregnant Without Permission) is not going to be a court-martial offense in Iraq.

Home sales go way up in South Florida as prices go way down.

A lot of people will be digging through their files to renew their drivers license in Florida.
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Question of the Day

My sister gave me the inspiration for this one:

On your computer, are you are mouser or a padder? Can you do it with either hand?

I am a leftie mouser, which sounds like a political affiliation. I learned to use a mouse when I went to work at a company where I did a lot of ten-key entry on the keyboard and it was easier to mouse with my left and enter the data with the right. I have tried using my right hand, but I'm terrible at it. As for the little mouse pad or pencil-head thing on laptops, forget it. I tried using them and I hate them.
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Stop That Noise!

Welcome to Pottersville

Steve Benen notes a right-wing blog that is calling out for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to drop dead.

The post was headlined "All I Want Is A Byrd Dropping For Christmas." It added that if Byrd didn't die, the blogger would settle: "Even a nice coma would do."

I was also struck by the conclusion, in which "Confederate Yankee" conceded that some may be offended by such distasteful commentary. He responded:

I'd remind them that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame.

Except that they wouldn't have to do that if the Republicans weren't insisting on filibustering the bill in the first place, even after it is a foregone conclusion that they would lose.

Combined with the aforementioned Sen. Coburn and his death wishes, the GOP seems to be the party of "death panels." And such deliberate heartlessness would make even Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life recoil in shame.
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High-Priced Steele

According to the Washington Times, RNC Chairman Michael Steele has a little income on the side.

Michael S. Steele, Republican National Committee chairman, is using his title to market himself for paid appearances nationwide, personally profiting from speeches with fees of up to $20,000 at colleges, trade associations and other groups - an unusual practice criticized by a string of past party chairmen.

Mr. Steele, elected in January to the $223,500-a-year RNC post, is working with at least four outside agencies in Washington, New York, Boston and Nashville that book the speaking engagements. He charges between $8,000 and $20,000 for an address, plus first-class travel and lodging expenses.

The article goes on to state that former RNC chairs are shocked, shocked that Mr. Steele is charging speaking fees and riding upfront on the airplane.

I don't know why they're so worked up. Isn't it the GOP mantra to make money any way you can? Mr. Steele is just doing what any other Republican would do given the chance.
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