North Korea

For some time now various bed wetters have been wetting their beds about Obama's failure to blow up North Korea as it sought to send its satellite/icbm into the dangeroussphere. In the event, the satellite/icbm broke into pieces in short order.

This outcome isn't surprising. North Korea has no money, can't feed its people, and generally hasn't the resources needed to make a decent airplane let alone a satellite/icbm.

Will this, one wonders, stop the bed wetters from wetting their beds when it comes to the next 50th rate country becoming a threat to whirled peas?

I suspect not.

And So To Bed

It has long been apparent that 1) Sarah Palin is incapable as a politician and 2) no one likes here. Yet the this fact has not kept news outlets both various and sundry from treating here as a potential something or another. Today, I think it is,  TPM, after covering the various ins and outs of her speech to a group no one cares about as if it were news, makes this point. So, I ask TPM et alia why report on Palin? Except, of course, it's easier than engaging in actual reporting about issues that make something like a difference. Horse race for all.

Jonah Goldberg: Still Dumb

There is an old phrase: death before dishonor. It means all manner of things specifically but in general it means that to live because you blotted your copybook you'd be better off dead. Or, more specifically, better, for example, to be killed by the Nazis than to live by collaboration. Recently it has become impossible to ignore the general cupidity and criminality of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Many who work for his media empire violate laws, suborn politicians, and generally lie like there is no tomorrow. One newspaper chose death before dishonor and Goldberg, who is reliably dumb, casts a puzzled eye at anyone who would rather do something else than work for the devil. Dolt.

Jonah Goldberg: Still Dumb

Jonah Goldberg complains that Obama was too quick to tell the world of Osama's death because by so doing he ruined the "actionable" intelligence. He compares the information that the Navy Seals gathered to a stolen NFL playbook and suggests that by admitting to Osama's death Obama alerted our opponents to the fact that we have the playbook. The analogy holds true only if we add that Green Bay stole the Jets' playbook by flying into Rex Ryan's back yard and shooting him in the head in front of family and associates and then dumping the body in the sea.

I mean really, does Goldberg actually think that Osama's associates, on hearing that he had been assassinated, didn't know that whatever information Osama had on any pending or other operations was compromised? I understand, as of course, that Goldberg and the rest of the Conservative punditocracy cannot allow Obama even so much as a smidgen of credit for Osama's murder but still this is the weakest of weak and lamest of lame attempts. It is, in other words, a nearly perfect encapsulation of Jonah Goldberg's continuing argument against nepotism.

Doncha Kinda Sorta Miss the Old Days

Missing The Point Yet Even More

Matt Yglesias writes for an progressive think tank. All progressives and most Americans believe that an accused fellow citizen is innocent until proven guilty.  Lots of his and my fellow citizens think that Wikileaks is no big deal and to the extent that it is a big deal it's a good thing.  What Yglesias thinks about the second point, I don't know; what he thinks about the first point is illuminated here (via here):

So as best I can tell Manning is, in fact, guilty of serious crimes.

What does this mean?  As best he can tell from? Press releases? The Government's accusations?  The various stuff floating hither and yon on the web?

Another thing all progressives and many Americans believe is that the state ought to improve prison condition particularly for individuals awaiting trial because they have yet to be convicted and, consequently, are presumed innocent.  Yglesias thinks

Somewhat punitive post-arrest pre-trial measures are kind of a necessary evil, but the prolonged confinement of Manning under cruel conditions go well beyond the necessary into the straightforward evil.

So Manning's treatment is "evil" but some lesser form of the "evil" is "kind of necessary" because? It's irresponsible to reform prisons and jails unless that reform involves the destruction of unions and decreasing prison workers salaries?

Is it the case that Yglesias has been making bad arguments for so long that he has now ascended to the Broderosphere where he is free at last, thank God almighty free at last, to simply assert position central to the progressive worldview, in this case reform of necessary evils, i.e., prisons and jails, will lead inexorably to a humane system of incarceration for the presumed innocent as well as the proven guilty  fellow citizens hapless enough to fall afoul of the state's policing function.

And while were at it Megan McCardle, in a similar wrong-headed analysis of something else, she comes up with two tiers of crime: white collared and blue collared:

This is basically a variant of complaints that white-collar crime is treated less harshly than blue collar crime.  And there's some justice in the complaints--white collar crimes usually involve larger sums, and the people who commit them can rarely claim that they are victims of society.

White-collared crime is clear to all: Madoffesque stuff.  Blue-collared crime is? Calling in sick when you're well? Does she mean "ordinary" crimes like murder, rape, and etc?  Does she mean to suggest that only the lower orders commit such crimes?  She seems to because she, humorously?, suggests that the lower orders who can blame society for their crimes, as in Kniock Any Door starring Humphrey Bogart, commit blue collared crimes.

And those of us who want to tax the rich to pay for the things we need tomorrow today are accused of class warfare; McArdle classifies violent crimes as the work of only the lower orders.

Would it surprise you to know that they are pals?

UPDATE:
Yglesias on private mass transportation

And, yes, I’m well-aware that none of this is going to happen any time soon. But I think people are oftentimes insufficiently utopian in their thinking about public policy. Think about how different policy was in 1960 compared to today.

Got that? When in comes to incarceration of the presumably innocent some degree of abuse is a "necessary evil" when it comes to making a buck off of getting from here to there, people just aren't clapping loud enough.

Jonah Goldberg Hates America

America is as much a state of mind as it is a state.  For the longest time, America, as a state of mind, meant things like rule of law, fair play, politeness, and related whatnotery.  Recently, Jonah Goldberg decided that to be authentically American meant not just rejecting all those fundamentally American state of mind dealios but developing a new mindset that more closely reflects the false allegations about Lucrezia Borgia.  To wit:

So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?
It’s a serious question.

He concludes that Assange's death is, unfortunately, unlikely because

it’s the law. Ultimately, I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him. Alas, as of now, the plan seems to be to do nothing at all.

 What, I wonder, does he expect America to do? And, I ask, why does Jonah Goldberg hate America?

Two Things

Recently Jonah Goldberg made a series of errors relative to an NYTimes online round table about Conservative hatred toward Woodrow Wilson.  He acknowledged one error in an update to the initial post: the historians weren't defending WW but rather trying to explain Conservative hatred of WW.  This was on October 11.  In an online piece dated October 25, Goldberg wrote, concerning Liberal defenses of WW that

[m]ost of the defensive operations are really more of a counter-attack (I addressed the last wave).

In other words, he still gets the point of the round table wrong.  He is, in short, not only reliably wrong but he is the exception that proves the rule of the self-correcting blogosphere.

More on the First Amendment

Christine O'Donnell, who embarrassed herself concerning the Constitution and the separation of church and state, now claims that she won the debate on the 1st Amendment because Coons didn't name the five freedoms it protects. During the debate, however, she was asked a question concerning specific constitutional amendments and she said:

I didn’t bring my Constitution with me. Fortunately, senators don’t have to memorize the Constitution,” Christine O’Donnell, Delaware’s Republican Senate nominee, declared at the forum, held in the moot courtroom of Widener University.

She won the debate because when she said senators didn't need to memorize the constitution she meant the opposite when it concerns Democratic candidates.  See also.

Here In Wisconsin

Ron Johnson, who is a manufacturer, accountant, and lucky in his wife's family's business acumen, is running for US Senate in the great state of Wisconsin, home to the House on the Rock, was quizzed recently on his plan for the middle class.  He said, in part, nothing. When not saying nothing, he promoted the policies that failed for the past 30 or so years as the policies he, as an accountant and manufacturer, would put in place.  Ron Johnson follower of failed policies wants a chance to watch those policies fail yet again.

Conservatives Explained

This has been making the rounds and with the point that the guy's trashing of the woman is kinda of creepy, and it is. Watch:



What is creepier, I think, is Goldberg's belly laugh when the prematurely aged begins to make sleazy allegations about his ex. Even odder is the description he provides of the woman's ideas. Finally, Goldberg is an editor?


UPDATE:
Apparently the guy wrote a blog post explaining how he wasn't a creep. Oddly enough, yesterday I could access his blog and today? Restricted access. One wonders why.

Proof of the Crazification Factor

Today TPM reports thatNazi reenactor and appologist Iott, who is running for Congress in Ohio, claimed that his opponent and he

". . . have known each other for 25 years," Iott said. "You know my family, I've contributed personally to your campaign in the past, and together we've done a lot for this community. But now because you want to win reelection so badly, you've thrown all of that out the window."

His opponent, Nancy Kaptur,

denied knowning [sic] Iott for 25 years, as he claimed: "I met my opponent for the first time this year, this summer, when I walked up to him at the Point Place Parade and I introduced myself to him. I really don't know him. I know what we learned through this campaign."

For the record, according to this fine webpage, a Richard Iott of Montclova OH donated 200 dollars to Kaptur in 1994. He donated more to Republicans and what appear to be lobby groups for grocers.

UPDATE:
There is quite a bit more on the creepiness of Nazi reenacting here, scroll down, you must.

By His Enemies Ye Shall Know Him

This billboard is up in Grand Junction, Colorado

Via, with no condemnation and one comment argues that it is a Democratic dirty trick. It isn't. The author of the billboard? Paul Snover, among whose editorial cartoons numbers this one:

Stay classy.

Words! Words! I'm Sick of Words and Their Meanings.

Andrew Sullivan is a silly man.  He once insisted that opponents of the the Invasion, who he labeled 

"[t]he decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead . . .may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" (part one, part two).  Then, he wrote this:   "[W]e might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself - a   paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will   surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead."

The  internal links no longer work for me, and one can understand why.  If  you or I had written something that monumentally silly, stupid, and mean  spirited the desire to scrub it would be irresistible.  Sullivan has  since equivocated and sort of recanted.  He continues his campaign to prove that Sarah Palin is actually a character in East Enders, and yet people  link to Sullivan without pointing out that this man is profoundly silly.

Remember the debate on torture? Sullivan, shockingly, was right on that one. What I have in mind here, however, is the argument the pro-torture camp used.  It went something like this: what is torture anyhow? Torture opponents, which is to say reasonable and decent human beings, got bogged down in this semantic turn. Today, because of Obama's go ahead to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen actively engaged in fighting against US troops, Sullivan launched an attack on the use of assassinate as the proper term when the state in engages in assassination.  He would rather use the phrase "killed in wartime" which is his "plain English word." Obviously killed in wartime isn't a word; it's a phrase.  And, more importantly, its a phrase that obscures reality.  Does the President have the legal right to assassinate American citizens actively fighting against US troops?  I have no idea, but there is something queasy-making about the idea, and Sullivan's desire to obscure this reality lies behind the move to turn the debate over the legality and moral consequence of giving or approving this Presidential power into a discussion of the appropriateness of the word assassination.

Sullivan also writes, concerning the tactical, operational, and political problems, errors and grotesqueness growing out the current war on terrorism and other related nouns that:

I have  had only a few days to chew on these complicated eddies some more, but  have ended up closer to where I started than I first thought I would in  the full blast of criticism.)

I'm not sure you can chew on a eddy, and if you have to create an obfuscatory phrase to justify a policy of assassination, it's more likely than not that you're wrong.  Again. And, as by the way, you don't unleash "warfare" whose awesome power does this and that.  You mobilize your military and then send young, middle-aged, and old men and women to go kill people knowing full well that some horrible things will happen and if you failed to chew these eddies when you cheer led the Invasion, then you're not really not being serious.

UPDATE:
Link fixed.

UPDATE
Link really fixed

Hating on Progress

There is only so much oil in the world.  One method of moving forward is to create a reliable transportation system that eschews cars. Republicans reject trains because? Shut up, that's why. The way we do things is unsustainable.  We need to do something different.  But we won't because?  Shut up, that's why.  What are Republicans positive policies?  They have none, other than cut taxes, services, etc.  It is really beyond belief.

And So To Bed

From Mat Tabai

"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.

Party on Party of Freedom from the Federal Government.

Videos: Two Brilliant, One Tragic.

Which is which?







Take a Poll. For other vote on how angry is Megyn Kelly on a scale of 1-10.

Jonah Goldberg is Consistant

Today Goldberg wrote

Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the 1994 Republican platform: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.”

It's a line of which he is proud.

A Serious Politician

In Yglesias' view this

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) announced yesterday that she will be blocking the nomination of Jack Lew to direct the Office of Management and Budget until the Obama administration lifts its moratorium on offshore drilling. “I find it stunning that the administration was aware that their actions might eliminate nearly 23,000 jobs in an already faltering economy, and proceeded anyway,” she said.

means Landrieu is a serious legislator.  Others might think differently

Aha

Via John Cole