Me: Frank Lynch. Bio These are my daily rants, mostly political. For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), perhaps your best online resource for insight into his thinking.
Updating "What if you had a war and no one showed up?" Obama's declaration that he wanted a televised, bipartisan congressional discussion to solve health care reform on February 25 had me scratching my head. Not just because the Democrats and the Republicans have different goals, they don't even share realities. (Has anyone heard a Republican mention that Harvard study conclusion that a good 45,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health care?)
And with the horrible showing the Republicans had when they lured the President into that televised question and answer period ten days ago, why on earth would the Republicans want to make themselves look unprepared again? Why?
Well, that's a rhetorical question of course, because they won't want to, and they're probably going to find a way to harumph their way out of attending. While doing the dishes earlier, I figured they'd start claiming it was pointless over some trumped up complaint that Obama and the Democrats continue to misrepresent the Republican positions.
Palin BUSTED! Did Palin look at crib notes she'd written in her left hand, and then try to rub them off on her leg? It looked that way in the video, but I was honestly going to give her the benefit of the doubt: she couldn't have done something so foolish, not after mocking Obama's use of teleprompters. And while her motions seemed strange, we've seen her do stranger things.
The chart shows month-to-month job losses over the past two years. The pace was accelerating under Bush (red bars), and arrested under Obama (blue bars). Perhaps it was just coincidence that the graph changed direction just after Obama's stimulus plan was in place — it really could well be, since all government actions take time before their full effects are felt. But the lower figures thereafter? Do you really want to credit that to Bush and Paulson?
Even if you credit Bush, what would you be blaming Obama for? It's not like there's evidence that he's inhibited Bush recovery policies in this chart.
SC Governor regrets the flip in his flip-flop. Truly, flops after bad flips are a good thing. SC Governor Mark Sanford now wants his state's share of stimulus funds for education, even though he was against it before. Decrying the stimulus was a party-popular thing for the GOP to do a year ago, and Sanford was big on that bandwagon, along with other governors like Louisiana's Jindal. (Jindal, you may recall, came out against stimulus-backed programs that saved lives, such as volcano warning systems.) And Florida governor Charlie Crist's warm 2009 welcome to Obama is being exploited by Marco Rubio, his more conservative opponent for US senate.
It would be nice if SC thought hard about the limited value of partisan politics.
Absolutely do NOT ask Harold Ford how you get to Carnegie Hall. Even though he "lives" in NYC, I wouldn't trust him to know how to get to his building lobby.
"As Howard Kurtz goes, so goes Froomkin." If you haven't seen the whole Jon Stewart interview from Bill O'Reilly, it's here. (The Kurtz-Froomkin line happens at about 7:40, part of a discussion of Kurtz's column that Obama had "lost" Stewart.)
UPDATE: Over at Gawker, John Cook reviews the significance of what O'Reilly chose not to air, to the detriment of Stewart's arguments.
Take a deep breath, deficit hawks. That's Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's suggestion: short term deficits aren't as big a deal as they're made out to be, and the frenzy against them is starting to sound like the "groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war." And we know how well that bit of Chicken Littleism worked out, don't we?
Maverick against good sense? Earlier this week, McCain did a flip-flop on the military's "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy: although in prior years he seemed open to its repeal, he always used the military brass's desire to keep the policy as cover; and all of a sudden when the Secretary of Defense and the head of the Joint Cheif of Staffs said it was time to get rid of the policy, McCain got indignant. And in the prior week, he voted against "Pay As You Go," a fiscal policy he argued for when Bush was in office.
Strike three seems to be a hold he placed on a nominee to the National Labor Relations Board: he's had the hold on the nominee for months, and never submitted any questions for the nominee to answer. Franken called him out, not by name, but those in the know didn't need to hear McCain's name.
Say what you want about Obama's approval ratings: they'd have to sink a long way further before he'd lose to McCain in an open campaign. With McCain as the alternative, Obama wins any election held today.
Whoops, there goes another right wing talking point... The alleged "underwear bomber" should never have been read his Miranda rights! That's when he stopped talking! (False: he'd already stopped.) And now he's talking again.
It's because Lindsay Graham says so, basically. Graham is sponsoring legislation to end funding civilian trials for 9/11 suspects. Says he means no disrespect to civilian courts, he just thinks that they're war criminals and don't belong in civilian courts — never mind that the civilian courts have handled 200 terrorist trials since 9/11, according to a source in the article, and those that would include Moussaoui and Reid, of course.
Really not sure what he's talking about when he talks about public outrage over KSM being tried in NYC: part of that outrage has been ginned up by his party, deadset against anything and everyhting coming out of the Obama administration, or the expressions of fear here and there. (Note: outrage and fear are not synonyms.) Sounds like grandstanding to me.
James Joyce. Today is the 118th 128th anniversary of his birthday. Not to eclipse the groundhogs and their impact on scheduling your skiing vacation, Joyce was always amused that his birthday fell today (according to the Ellman biography, but I don't recall that Ellman said why in particular).
Anyway, if you have a spare moment you might want to pull something off the shelf and read a little of what he did, seeing as how he transformed fiction and all that.
Update on Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index. This morning's numbers are completely post State of The Union address, and Rasmussen's Presidential Approval Index is significantly less negative than it was even yesterday, when a third of the included respondents had been interviewed before the address. Yesterday it stood at -12%, this morning it stands at -7%. That's as good as it's been since early November. (For more context, see what I wrote yesterday.)
I'm glad abortion isn't mandatory. Frankly, I never undestood why anyone got upset over the upcoming Tim Tebow ad. I haven't seen it yet, but from what I've read of its content, it's "pro life" in the original sense, that if you have a choice, you might want to choose life. So far as I know, although its backers are fundamentally anti-abortion and want to eliminate that alternative, Tim Tebow's mom's story doesn't make that case: it says think twice.
And if you think about, the "risk of the mother's life" is kind of a side issue. A mother of any famous child could do the same ad: sure, I knew abortion was available, but if I'd chosen that, I'd have been aborting fill-in-the-blank. And they could choose some mother who wasn't wed, or facing economic hardship at the time, too.
What I wonder is whether CBS would have refused an ad where a widower talks about his wife who died after choosing to try to bring a child to term, knowing that her life was at risk. I hope their new revised position on advocacy ads doesn't pivot like a windsock. We know they've rejected an ad for a gay dating service, but perhaps its commercial purpose gives them justification (I don't think so, myself).
