Presidential

Tonigh, Obama will give a speech. Lots of Republicans won't be there. Below is a list. DeMint (professional crackpot) gives the best or, in any event, most revealing, explanation. He told the Obama just exactly what to and Obama didn't do therefore, DeMint won't be there. Why, it's almost as if Obama thinks he is a co-equal who won a national election the temerity he shows by failing to take a Southern white gentleman's advice.

These folks aren't showing up:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.): The Hill says he wanted the president to present the plan in writing before giving the speech and that he wants to draw attention to people who make jobs instead of talking about them. He’ll meet with Boeing officials and employees.

● Rep. Joe Walsh (R., Ill.): The Tea Party–allied representative will host a forum on small businesses. He said he doesn’t want to be a “prop,” reports the Chicago Tribune.

● Sen. David Vitter (R., La): He’s having a Saints–Packers watch party at home with friends, and he’s emphasized that his decision is based on his football fanaticism rather than his political views. But he told Fox that he expects the speech to be “more political than substantive.”

● Rep. Paul Broun (R., Ga.): He plans to watch from his office so he can tweet about it –– representatives aren’t supposed to use their Blackberries in the chamber. He did the same thing during the State of the Union address.

● Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas): Spokesman Gary Howard said yesterday that he doesn’t plan to attend the speech. Paul has made a habit of skipping primetime presidential speeches, including State of the Union addresses, dismissing them as “a bunch of fluff.”

● Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.): He probably won’t be there, but not for political reasons –– Yahoo reports that his mother is ill.

There's a Riot Goin On

Recently, Frances Fox Piven wrote a brief essay for "The Nation" in which she seeks an explanation for the lack of "mass protests" here in these USA by the un- and under- employed, as well as by those who everyday losing out because of  ne0-Liberal policies. Stanley Kurtz, well-known buffalohead, read this as an incendiary call for the violent overthrow of these United States, or something like that.  Glenn Beck, as is his wont, decided that this was more proof, should proof be needed, that the Left is planning a revolution, which led to some ugly rhetoric and, it seems, death threats against Piven. Barbara Ehrenreich then wrote an Op-Ed piece in which she blamed the lack of an organized response to the worsening political and economic situation on the rise of Beck's army of extremist who see criticism of a failed economic system as a form of treason.

Conor Friedersdorf weighed in by mocking Ehrenreich for worrying about Beck inspired lunatics because

[s]ay what you will about Glenn Beck, but it's odd to criticize him for lessening the grass-roots mojo of Americans: he's the guy who filled the national mall with his fans, a huge backer of Tea Party rallies all over the United States, and the inspiration for the Jon Stewart counter-rally for that matter. What a weird moment to write a long piece about how Americans aren't taking to the streets anymore.

Her concern about gun owners threatening protesters is ludicrous

Given the membership of the NRA and the profile of Tea Party demonstrators, it sure seems to me like gun owners are more likely to engage in politics in addition to buying guns, not less likely because they feel as if they've already said their piece by arming up.

I hope you get this, worrying about Beck's influence on politically active gun nuts is wrong because gun nuts who are politically active are so because of Beck's paranoid rantings.

He then insists that

What nonsense. An American street protestor today, whether on the right or left, is significantly safer from physical violence than the Civil Rights era protestors or the kids at Kent State or the San Francisco dockworkers or Salinas lettuce strikers of the Great Depression.

Indeed

Along the way he opines that

[d]ecades later, it's easy to romanticize protests where American laborers took to the streets in times of economic turmoil. But as I well know from reading up on Depression-era labor strikes in California alone, those events were often driven by the desperation of people without anything resembling the safety net Americans enjoy today, and they often turned violent, sometimes due to rabble rousing protestors, other times because of overzealous riot police. Street protests themselves signal a failure of politics and policy, not a triumph.

I leave it to your judgment to discern if Ehrenreich are romanticizing earlier protests or lamenting their absence because, if nothing  else, they give un- or under- represented  groups a voice in the debate.  I will, just note in passing, that in a situation where the official unemployment rate is 9.something and throwing in the discouraged, no longer counted, and under employed gives a number considerably higher; to say nothing of continued tax breaks for the very rich, promises of further cuts to the already tattered safety net, several wars declared and other, might be taken, by someone in touch with reality, as evidence of politics and policies that have failed or are failing.

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.

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.

When Doing Something Doesn't Mean You'd Do Something

Megan McArdle:

I get paid for speaking sometimes.  You cannot assume that because I speak to my alumni groups for free, I must therefore be willing to speak whether or not there is money involved.

You mustn't assume that.  You might assume that because she did something in the past she might do in the future.  Which is to say, you might assume that she speaks sometimes for free because she once spoke for free.  You might also wonder why anyone would pay her. The whole thing is highlarryious because each paragraph makes as much sense as these sentences.

Street Signs

Like many other news outlets, Milwaukee's WTMK reports on a "new" rule regarding street signs. Lots of people are upset by this "new" rule requiring changes in street signs and characterize it as frivolous because it deals with font size and capitalization. The rules were changed in 2003, the changes aren't merely cosmetic, the changes do not need to be completed until 2018, and the changes in letter can be phased in over time.

In other words, it is not the case that some faceless bureaucrat woke up this morning with a bad hangover and sent a sternly-worded letter to everyone in America, who is responsible for street signage, and told them to change everything now with no explanation.

The Manuel that appears to guide this stuff is here.  It's worth thinking for a moment of the advantages arising from a Uniform Vehicle Code and a uniform set of traffic signs for people who move about the country in the service of industry, commerce, and seeing their relatives back home, as opposed to crouching in the basement in fear of the police ripping you outdated street sign from your cold dead hands.

Robert Foster and Newt Gingrich Have Trouble reading

Today one misunderstood the difference between reporting and putting:

Turning to a little political shop talk, I ask Gingrich about many Republicans’ concern that a senior official in the Obama administration may have, as the New York Times puts it, “improperly accessed the tax records of Koch Industries, an oil company whose owners are major conservative donors.” Gingrich says such an action by a White House official would be “very much like the Nixon White House: If you cross these guys, they try to hurt you. They have brought a Chicago-machine mentality to the White House for the first time in American history, and it’s very, very dangerous.”

From his own link to the NY Times:

Leading Republicans are suggesting that a senior official in the Obama administration may have improperly accessed the tax records of Koch Industries, an oil company whose owners are major conservative donors.

See what he did there?  The New York Times, apparently, is identical with "leading Republicans."
Where did the nefarious Obama Administration get the super secret information? It's not exactly new information, they got it from, among others, Koch Industries' Webpage.

As a bonus matter:

House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) slammed Gingrich’s document on Wednesday, calling it a “subliminal message” and an “unfortunate course to go down,” before adding that the government gets “the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance — the biggest bang for the buck.” Gingrich tells NRO that Pelosi “doesn’t understand anything about how free markets, entrepreneurship, and small businesses operate.”
“She thinks that this is all bad luck,” he says. “With regards to her comment that food stamps are actually an effective way to stimulate the economy, well, I don’t know any economist who would agree with that. It shows you how inaccurate they are about the very nature of the American economy.” Gingrich contends that Democrats’ economic policies are worse than those of Herbert Hoover.

Real economists:

The industry research firm Moody's Economy.com tracked the potential impact of each stimulus dollar, looking at tax rebates, tax incentives for business, food stamps and expanding unemployment benefits.
The report found that "some provide a lot of bang for the buck to the economy. Others ... don't," said economist Mark Zandi.
In findings echoed by other economists and studies, he said the study shows the fastest way to infuse money into the economy is through expanding the food-stamp program. For every dollar spent on that program $1.73 is generated throughout the economy, he said.

And so on.

Free Riders

Everybody in the known universe has weighed in on the case of

Gene Cranick, a rurual homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground.

And, as is often the case, various morons have tried to defend fire departments not putting out fires because of a failure to pay 75 dollars on the grounds of glibertarian nonsense, I'd just like to remind the world, who might think we Americans have lost our minds, that a truly great American once argued that

Suppose my neighbor's home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don't say to him before that operation, "Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it." What is the transaction that goes on? I don't want $15--I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

He then went on to win WWII over the objections of right wing nut jobs who hated democracy. Were he alive today and were he confronted with the stupidity of a fire department on the scene refusing to put out a fire and, it seems, allowing dogs and a cat to die, his response is easy to imagine. That anyone anywhere defends the fire department's failure to act is a condemnation of their commitment to real America.

UPDATE:
Read the whole of the link for FDR. It really very good.

Now What?

It is a fact that

Terrorism experts have puzzled over al-Qaeda's apparent unwillingness after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to use car bombs, improvised explosives and small arms to conduct assaults in the United States. The group appeared fixated on orchestrating another dramatic mass-casualty event, such as the simultaneous downing of several commercial airliners.

And it is apparently a fact according to noted terrorism expert Michael Leiter that

"al-Qaeda in Pakistan is at one of its weakest points organizationally," but he noted that "regional affiliates and allies can compensate for the potentially decreased willingness of al-Qaeda in Pakistan - the deadliest supplier of such training and guidance - to accept and train new recruits."

So al-Qadeda is fixated on large-scale events and its "deadliest" branch is at its weakest therefore we need to be on the alert because

Al-Qaeda and its allies are likely to attempt small-scale, less sophisticated terrorist attacks in the United States, senior Obama administration officials said Wednesday, noting that it's extremely difficult to detect such threats in advance.

Like the Times Square Bomber. 

The deadliest terrorists are on the decline, yeah, the leading terrorist group is fixated on the dramatic, therefore we must fear incompetent amateurs.  What an odd thing to say.