Two dogs is more than twice one dog.

This ought to make you want to bang your head off your desk:

As the Senate convened a rare Saturday session, 10 Democratic senators continued intensive talks on the public option, with the goal of agreeing on a framework that can garner 60 votes. They are considering proposals that could win the support of one Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe on Maine.

“As long as both sides are willing to give a little, we can meet in the middle,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “It may not be exactly what I’d like and exactly what they’d like, but we’ll meet in the middle somewhere.

You know, as much as our national political chattering classes are enamored with the baby Jesus, I find it amazing that none of them ever managed to hear the story of King Solomon. For the life of me, I don’t understand the workings of a mind that says “That is a terrible idea, but if we do it halfway, it becomes better!” As Tim has noted before, a weak public option is worse than no public option at all, and a carelessly constructed public option will just become a dumping ground for high-risk patients that will require billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up. A couple years ago I said that I thought health care reform was inevitable, the only question would be how bad we would make it and how quickly we would bankrupt ourselves with it. I thought at the time I was being too cynical, but the moderates in both parties are proving me wrong.

As such, we now charge forward in the spirit of bipartisanship, with every Senator apparently eager to rush home to show off their half of the bloody baby. At least Ben Nelson will be able to suckle at the insurance company teat for the next ten years or so of his life. A real patriot, that guy.

I have no idea whether or not Charlie Crist is gay, mostly because I don’t care. But, given that a lot of people do seem to think he’s gay, I have to wonder if the teabaggers will do something like this to him:

The NRCC has been quick to attack Tennessee state Sen. Roy Herron, who has emerged as the Democratic candidate for the seating of retiring Blue Dog Rep. John Tanner—and along the way, they seem to be using some rather interesting rhetoric.

Herron is a former minister and an attorney, and he has taught at both the divinity and law schools at Vanderbilt, his alma mater. He has been married for 22 years, and has three sons. He has also written several books, including Tennessee Political Humor, How Can a Christian Be in Politics?, and God And Politics. However, the NRCC says Herron isn’t being honest about his social liberalism.

Over the course of the past week, the NRCC has mounted a series of attacks on Herron that taken together could suggest they’re trying to say that Herron is gay or effeminate. The NRCC denies that’s their line of attack, and the Herron camp hasn’t publicly raised the issue (see late update below), but take a look at what the NRCC has been saying.

Am I wrong to think that, sooner or later, Rubio will pull this trick out of his teabag? And if the teabaggers challenge Lindsay Graham for acting sanely on a few issues (say, climate change), will he get hit with this too?

At some point, hitting below the belt has to seem like a very tempting option for Hoffman crowd.

Via Sullivan, apparently Slate held a write like Sarah Palin contest, and we missed it. Some of the entries are truly excellent:

“The campaign path once led me into the homey kitchen of June Asbel, where the aroma of toasted almonds and nutmeg mixed with a sense of American perseverance and optimism.”

I am sure you all can do better. I’m going to think about my entry for a while, but you all can start in the comments.

I went to a fascinating wine tasting yesterday at the nearby New York Wine and Culinary Center. The wines were all Long Island merlots. I wasn’t expecting to like them all that much because (a) I don’t like New World merlot much in general and (b) I don’t like Long Island (a few Billy Joel songs notwithstanding). So I was surprised that…I loved the wines! They don’t taste like other New World merlot at all—to me, they tasted liked Bordeaux only much more herbal, a bit more acidic, and a bit less fruity and tannic. The wines were from the wineries that form the Merliance: seven wineries on Long Island that make merlot as their flagship wines. These are Wolffer, Clovis Point, Pellegrini, Raphael, Sherwood House, Castello di Borghese, and McCall.

Having never had these wines before, I wasn’t able to get a great sense of the differences between the different estates: vintage variation was more striking. The 2007 vintage was fantastic, the 2004, 2005, and 2006 vintages more variable (2005 has the best reputation, 2006 the worst, but I actually like 2006 the best of the three within this limited sample size). The vineyards are primarily in the North Fork of Long Island, though Wolffer is on the South Fork.

These wines, in general, are lower in alcohol than California bordeaux blends and also more food-friendly. They also have a fascinating spice/herbal quality that I’m embarrassed to describe for fear of sounding too much like Paul Giamatti, so I’ll just quote Appellation America (by subscription only, unfortunately):

“Heady violets, rich plum, huckleberry and Darjeeling tea aromas are accented by complex and exotic aromas of lemongrass, cilantro, ginseng, bay, Seville orange, and white pepper, which develop an amazing bouquet of cedar, sandalwood, and tobacco with age.” A bit much, ya think? Yet this complexity itself is the common thread of the region.

These wines aren’t cheap—most have suggested retail between $20 and $30, though I find them a bit cheaper at my local shop. But I think the 2007s, as good as they were, are an excellent deal. For purposes of comparison, I tasted a lot of red wines in Oregon last weekend and the only reds I liked better than the 2007 McCall and Wolffer were much pricier.

This tasting was a real revelation, one of the most surprising I’ve ever been to.

We have our first snow of the year, so clearly global warming is a hoax.

When I flip through the channel guide on my tv, the infomercials are labeled as such. How is this different from infomercials?

But Beck has recently come under fire from liberals alleging a conflict of interest. The criticism spiked after he used one of his trademark blackboard illustrations to provide tips for weathering “the three scenarios that we could be facing: recession, depression or collapse.” In the case of a total collapse of the economic system, he recommended that his viewers construct “fruit cellars” and rely on what he called “the three G system. It’s God, gold and guns.”

[.....]

Peter Epstein, president of Merit Financial Services, which advertises on Beck’s show, says gold retailers expect favorable coverage from commentators on whose shows they pay to advertise. “You pay anybody on any network and they say what you pay them to say,” said Epstein. “They’re bought and sold.”

Apparently conservative Democrats are a lot like Republicans in many more ways than we knew:

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana.

According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, formally separated in April. The Senator has since divorced his wife.

Hanes ended her employment with Baucus in the spring of this year.

It just never stops. Is Baucus one of the “family values” creeps, too?

As fucked up our own criminal justice system is, this seems incomprehensibly insane to me:

An Italian jury has found American student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito guilty in the stabbing death of British exchange student Meredith Kercher.

Knox was sentenced to 26 years in prison and Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years.

Timothy Egan ably details what an absurd case this was.

This is something I can’t explain and perhaps it’s irrational: I realize that all kinds of terrible crimes occur all over the world all the time, but it always seems worse to me when the crime is perpetrated by a state. Especially when it’s the type of western, democratic, capitalist state that it is supposed to represent the last word in human civilization.

Thank God the Italians don’t have the death penalty.

Jeebus, you people fill open threads fast sometimes.

Apparently commenter Renato is polling us on the top ten films of the decade, since it is near the end of 2009. Place your picks below, and if I have energy, we will do a poll in the next couple of weeks.

*** Update ***

Camera battery is dead, but here is an old Tunch pic to soothe the afficionados:

I’ll have some more tomorrow, plus I am dogsitting Tammy’s Samantha, so there should be some fun pics there, too.

*** Update #2 ***

Please, no Monk finale spoilers, I forgot to watch last weeks and won’t catch up on both until tomorrow.

Been a long week for a number of reasons, none of which I want to go into. At any rate, planning on settling into a long night of sitting in the chair with a dog on my lap, reading and watching the last Monk episode. Pad thai is on the menu.

Oh, btw- I love craigs list. Bought a couple month old lazy-boy in mint condition for a hundred and fifty bucks (because I’m not married and I don’t have to color coordinate everything because that’s how I roll). They were given a new chair and did not have room for the old one, so sold it for dirt cheap. I think Lily likes it more than me, though. I have to put my drink down before I sit now, though, because Lily starts to jump up onto my lap before my butt even hits the seat. At any rate, she has figured out that wedged in between my thigh and the arm rest allows her to stay snug and warm and she can then rest her head on my lap. I’m cool with that.

Via Sully, this from Reihan:

Remember that the bitterest opponents of the Clinton-era U.S. interventions in Kosovo and Haiti were conservatives like Tom DeLay, who condemned the Clinton administration for treating “foreign policy as social work,” in Michael Mandelbaum’s evocative phrase. The post-9/11 moment represented a departure from this conservative suspicion of nation-building, as Jacksonian sentiments were yoked to the ambitious project of building democracies in the Muslim world. But now that Obama, a man most conservatives dislike and distrust, is the steward of that effort, those conservative instincts are making a comeback. Jason Chaffetz represents the beginning of a wave—and it’s not obvious that Obama can do anything to stop it.

Instincts my ass. What do Clinton and Obama have in common that separates them from Bush?

I already told you what is going to happen. There will be a growing right flank that opposes the escalation in Afghanistan that will become more vocal in the next couple of months. And then, after the “surge,” when Obama starts to draw down forces in Afghanistan, this right flank will become noticeably quieter and then start to yell “defeatist” and “soft on national security” and “Obama wants to lose” along with the rank and file.

We all know what is going on here. Chaffetz might be an outlier, and may honestly believe in bringing home the troops, but anyone who thinks there is a growing legitimate “dove” movement in the GOP is smoking crack rock.

While many were blithely discussing Afghanistan and the economy, one Tennessee mayor launched a brave assault in defense of Christmas:

According to The Commercial Appeal, Arlington Mayor Russell Wiseman posted the statements on his Facebook page and said the president is Muslim. Obama is Christian.

“We sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose,” he wrote, according to the paper.

His Facebook page can only be accessed by people he has approved as friends. Arlington is a city of about 7,600 residents about 25 miles northeast of Memphis.

In the extensive posting, he also attacked the president’s supporters, saying “...you obama people need to move to a muslim country…oh wait, that’s America….pitiful.”

I didn’t know the wingers liked Peanuts so much. I thought some of the characters were rumored to be teh ghey.

I haven’t been following Crashergate that closely, so I only recently became aware of the grave threat that Desiree Rogers poses to our civilization. About half-way through this article (GOS via TNC), it hit me, she’s black, right?

The 50-year-old Rogers arrived in Washington this year to great fanfare, no small amount of it of her own making. She entered the East Wing in a whirlwind of media exposure. She was featured in the glossy pages of Vogue—beating the first lady’s appearance in the fashion bible by a month. For a profile in WSJ, the Wall Street Journal’s slick magazine, stylists outfitted Rogers in luxury fashions from Prada and Jil Sander and she posed in the first lady’s garden tossing a flirtatious smile over her shoulder.

Early in her tenure, Rogers made a trip to New York City during February’s fashion week. She sat in the front row of runway shows such as Donna Karan and smiled for the flock of photographers who descended on the striking Obama gatekeeper with her pixie cut, stylish wardrobe and high-altitude heels. She dabbled in a world of hipsters and art scene know-it-alls in her attempt to bring a contemporary gleam to the White House. And she seemed to thrive on all the attention. She has come across as a big-picture manager, not one focused on details.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that WaPo would never write about a white person this way, because they certainly wrote about the Clintons this way. It’s also true that they wouldn’t write about, say, Condi Rice, this way (what with all the figure skating and concert-piano playing and Stanford provosting and whatnot).

But what this article is really saying is that Desiree Rogers isn’t the right kind of person. That’s what Socksgate and Travelgate and all that other bullshit was about too—the Clintons weren’t the right kind of people. It’s what all the bullshit about Michelle Obama’s iPod and bare arms is about too.

I hate to go on and on about this, but it’s pretty remarkable that the media insisted the Clintons being investigated for using White House postage to send letters form from their cat and that the Obama White House be investigated because two weirdos crashed a White House party, but that the Bush White House should never be investigated for torture, politicizing the DOJ, falsifying intelligence, and (not that that I think this one is important but it is similar to the kinds of trivialities that are deemed important when they happen under Clinton or Obama) having a male prostitute show up to lob softball questions at Wthie House briefings.

It’s just plain weird.

I’m really sick and tired of this man:

But Nelson later told reporters that his amendment would not be ready for a vote until after the weekend, postponing a floor showdown over abortion rights.

The defeat of his amendment would be politically significant because Nelson has pledged to vote with Republicans to filibuster the health bill if it did not include the Stupak language.

“I’ve said at the end of the day if it doesn’t have Stupak language on abortion in it I won’t vote to move it off the floor,” Nelson told reporters.

Look, I understand the need for a big tent and all that, but you simply can not have members of your caucus threatening to filibuster a bill that everyone else in your party supports and not suffer repercussions. You just can’t. Maybe he is just grandstanding, and will say this, then very publicly agonize over it, and vote for the bill without the Stupak legislation. I understand the games these guys need to play in states like Nebraska.

But if Nelson does filibuster the health care bill because the Stupak language is voted down by the majority of his party, at the very least he needs to lose his prized chairmanship. At the very least. You simply can not have members of your caucus siding with the minority to filibuster your signature legislation. There is a time when it is better to have someone outside the “Big Tent” pissing in, and if Nelson filibusters, it is his time to be kicked outside.