Me: Frank Lynch

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These are my mundane daily ramblings.
For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

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Richard Wolffe's ignorance. I hate to link to the Daily Caller, but I have to admit, when I heard Wolffe say this on Hardball my jaw dropped too.

I mean... How could Wolffe not know?

Link | | | 8:13 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Your GOP Senators at work. They blocked the 9/11 first-responders health bill. Says Reid:

"Republicans denied adequate health care to the heroes who developed illnesses from rushing into burning buildings on 9/11. ... Yet they will stop at nothing to give tax breaks to millionaires and CEOs."

I wonder if any on the GOP side have thought about the precedent this sets? As in, giving those we depend on an additional reason to fear rescuing us? I very much doubt that any rescuer would say "screw you" in deciding whether or not to rescue a GOP Senator, but it's sure not going to give them a cozy feeling.

I guess that Good Samaritan message only goes so far in Washington.

Link | | | 7:21 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Bloomberg's alternatives to congestion pricing. Bloomberg gets what he wants, somehow: if it's not mysteriously hiring the new Education Chancellor, it's overcoming the hurdles to congestion pricing. One approach he took to make it more difficult for drivers was to convert major triangles where Broadway intersects avenues into pedestrian plazas complete with chairs and tables (see Times Square... see the Flatiron). And now he's increasing parking fees.

I like this approach, but then again I was in favor of congestion pricing, too. Aside from crosstown buses, a city so well blessed with transit as we are could do with a lot fewer cars.

This does not mean I'd vote for him for President. It would take some really poor alternatives to make me do that. (When he was at his lowest in the polls, maybe back around 2003, I wrote him a letter of support. But his switcheroo on term limits was a huge turn off, as well as his process for hiring the new Schools Chancellor.)

Link | | | 7:24 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Won't you pleeaase...

Link | | | 9:08 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

And in the meantime... Shostakovich, by Ruslan Sviridov.

Link | | | 10:10 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

So Mike Pence wants my feedback in a fundraising "poll". Here's one of the questions:

5.National debt is quickly approaching $14 trillion, but the Democrat Congress continues to spend our money frivolously. Do you believe that Congress should enact a moratorium on earmarks to help reduce the amount of money that our government spends?

So the GOP just struck a deal with Obama that's going to cost close to a trillion, in borrowed money. And Mike Pence is asking us about earmarks?

Link | | | 7:49 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

OK, here's the plan. Just before midnight, I come up with a plan! This tax deal Obama struck with the GOP leaders may actually be the best he could have done now, if he didn't want to put the middle class at risk. But that he was even in a position where he needed to take what anyone would have considered an untenable deal in September speaks volumes about his ability to play poker, weigh his strengths and weaknesses, and leverage his power. He just doesn't have it.

If this is a "good deal" for the American people, as he claims, it's a good deal kinda sorta in the sense that the Braves made a good deal when they hired Claudell Washington for a kings' ransom back in '81. ("Claudell who?" you say? Yeah, that's my point.) The GOP won so big in this deal, getting everything they wanted, giving up little that they didn't mind giving up, and have for all intents and purposes cemented the same economic imbalances which fueled Bush and his cronies throughout the last decade.

The economic disparities are now more firmly in place, and Obama helped. And with that grand Citizens United decision adding fire to campaign spending, I just have real trouble feeling as if Obama isn't hopeless. This is what I feared all along.

Link | | | 7:25 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

An important film returns to the U.S. A nine hour film about what we call the Holocaust is not going to break any box office records, but "Shoah" is coming back. I was only able to see the first part on its earlier release (25 years ago), and wished I could have seen both: its portrayal of continuing pockets? pervasive? anti-Semitism in Poland was riveting. But unfortunately it wasn't an easy film to schedule into your life: part 1 was in the theater for a single block of time, and part 2 for another, single block of time. There were no other opportunities to see it, and I suspect that this will be overcome by what I presume will be eventual release on DVD through some rental agency, or streaming.

It was a riveting film, I'm glad it's coming back out,and I hope you get to see it. It is a hard film, and understandably the director distances it from Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful.

As a small aside, I was also struck by audience reactions when I saw it. It played in one theater on the Upper West Side, and there were gaps in the audience's understanding of what they were seeing in an RC benediction service -- a priest's carrying a monstrance was mistaken as an effort by the priest to hide his face from the camera after expressing anti-Semitism. Aside from the spritual nature of carrying a monstrance, it would have been illogical for the priest to hide his face out of shame, when he wasn't really aware of his anti-Semitism. (At least, that's my recollection from 25 years ago.)

Sorry I can't say more about the film, but it has been a while.

Link | | | 7:51 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Pity the rich. We know that maintaining that extra special bonus of a tax cut for those making over $250,000 (in addition to the tax cuts they already get on the first $250,000) is important because of what they do with their money. Like, pay $53 million for a house and never live in it. Your tax cuts at work!

Meanwhile, what else could be done with the proceeds from that extra layer of tax cuts? The NYT's David Leonhart has a list, and the opportunity cost is huge.

Link | | | 6:06 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

If gun ownership is for self-defense, why would you want a silencer? Texas leads in silencer sales. What legal purpose do they serve?

Link | | | 8:41 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

The Republicans just aren't listening to America. New polls continue to show that a majority of Americans favor maintaining middle class tax cuts and letting the wealthy ones expire.

They refuse to listen. And when the House held its vote this week, all but three Republicans voted for higher taxes, not lower taxes.

It's astonishing that more voters didn't see this GOP train wreck coming.

Link | | | 8:10 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Last night's poker hand. I'm sure I'm not the first to express this, but I'm completely flummoxed by how the Democrats waited until after the midterms to bring the Bush tax cuts to a vote. All the logic for bringing it to a vote was there before the midterms, all of it. I fear they grossly underestimated the intelligence of the American people - - unless you're going to try and tell me that the GOP Senators and Reps, prior to the midterm, would have voted with the will of the nation (extending the cuts on the first $250,000, letting the rest expire).

If they had voted with the nation in that scenario, the Democrats would have had one less arrow in the quiver. I think that would have been an unlikely event, but even if true, there would have been plenty of others. And if the GOP hadn't? Well, we have different midterm campaigns.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda. They're an embarrassment; shocking we don't have better game players, isn't it?

Link | | | 10:23 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Another benefit of that whole "ownership society" goal? It wasn't just about fueling the whole credit machine for those tranches of securities, you know. In an ownership society, the wrong people don't get to vote.

Link | | | 9:01 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

Who needs historians when you've got Glenn Beck? Well, perhaps Glenn Beck himself should study up.

Next, Glenn talks about whether or not the saddles on dinosaurs were English-style.

Link | | | 7:56 PM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

You want to fend off tyranny, Tea Partiers? How about when a minority party wants to block everything unless it gets its way?

I look forward to you all carrying signs with Mitch McConnell in "Joker" face paint.

Link | | | 7:51 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

I'm wondering about how this conversation would go at Walden Pond.

Been busy with work for a number of days, even over the long weekend... Hello!

Link | | | 9:41 PM | Home

Another HCR challenge parried. The HCR bill is more popular than the GOP would have you think; you may have heard the McClatchy poll results that showed that more Americans want the law kept as is or expanded than want it repealed or whittled down. There's good reason for that: it has a lot to offer, and by now America has heard that costs have gotten out of control. Perhaps (is there polling?) more also know that higher costs don't always mean better care.

But the mandate continues to rankle some. And that seeeeems to be the main basis of court challenges. But yesterday another federal court ruled against this challenge. (Of course, it won't stop at this level, it will head to the SCOTUS.)

And speaking of the SCOTUS, Jeffrey Toobin has a nice assessment on the tenth anniversary of Bush v. Gore. What a very different case. What a different ten years we've had since. (No, Justice Scalia, it is not time we got "over it.")

Link | | | 8:43 AM | Home
(DISCLOSURE: I work for Abt SRBI. My company does polling. My opinions should not be construed as representing those of my employer.)

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