I’m not quite sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like this, and my gut instinct is that Cheney and the GOP have once again overplayed their hand. They’ve been running around screaming about amateurs and “not taking this seriously,” and then you get sober, competent, and very confidence-inspiring performances from Obama, Napolitano, and Brennan. It reminds me of the GOP screaming “radical” the whole election and then the American public tunes into the debates and sees this boring, normal, smart black guy who is not the least bit threatening.

And what is most shocking to me, at least, is that the reporters seem to be asking really solid questions. I loved cranky old Helen trying to get to the nut of it all- “What motivates them?” She was, of course, ignored.

Underrated political humorist Mark “Tongue So Firmly in Cheek As to Protrude from the Vulgar Bodily Orifice” Ambinder reaches a level of deadpan genius that Steven Wright would envy:

John McCain has released the first two ads of his 2010 Senate reelection campaign, and he’s got some sharp words for President Obama, possibly the sharpest he’s offered yet.

“President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America. I stand in his way every day. If I get a bruise or two knocking some sense into heads in Washington, so be it…”

A narrator calls McCain “Arizona’s last line of defense” against Obama’s agenda and says McCain leads the charge against “ridiculously unaffordable ideas like government-run health care.”
...
McCain has been critical of Obama’s agenda, as conservatives Republicans are wont to be. But he hasn’t really sought out public forums to level those attacks since Obama entered the White House…

How many times has ‘President McCain’ appeared on what Calvin Trillin called the “Sabbath Day Gasbag” TV circuit since November 2008?

Can someone explain to me why a tax on health insurance policies over $26,000 annually is the new hill to die on? For some perspective, in West Virginia, the Per Capita Income in 2001 was $22,000. Isn’t this cadillac tax just a sort of correction to the tax emption that employers get?

Explain what I am missing (and yes, I do understand that many unions negotiated for good benefits in exchange for lower wages. That does suck.). In general, I hardly find this something that I would expect to enrage liberals/progressives. Is it just because Obama flip-flopped on this issue and it gives everyone another opportunity to get their sad face on? Or is there more to this I do not understand.

Wonkette really makes me laugh sometimes, but this made me throw up in my mouth a little:

A staff blog — possible names include “Caller ID” and “The Daily Trawler” — will indulge in more humor, some of it written by long-time conservative blogger Jim Treacher (real name Sean Medlock) who moved to Washington from Indianapolis after Carlson gave him a call. And an iPhone app is on the way.

“Tucker is one of the most talented journalists I know,” said Ana Marie Cox….

The competition is stiff for right-wing blog start-up money:

“We were very lucky to get the amount of money we did [$3 million] based, basically, on a PowerPoint.”

You probably know that when someone has something bad to say about Republicans, it’s because that someone has a book to sell. What you may not know is that when someone can’t think of anything good to say about Republicans, it’s because that someone does not have a book to sell (via Steve Benen).

Why not take try to take some credit for the economic expansion of the 90s? They had both Houses for most of it.

Bono has always annoyed me anyway, but I’d be equally irritated if Elvis Costello or Shane MacGowan wrote something like this in the New York Times:

Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.

Pirated MP3 files are equivalent to kiddie porn!

There’s also lots of problems with this on the facts. First off, the newspaper business isn’t in trouble becausing people are swapping its .html files, it’s in trouble because they don’t make as much money from online ads as they did from print ads. Then there’s this (from Ars Technica):

What we see, in fact, is box office receipts rising to record-setting levels over each of the last three years, even as bandwidth exploded and P2P hubs became even simpler to use. This isn’t a complete picture of the industry, but this one data point alone puts the lie to the idea that people simply won’t pay money for experiences and objects that they value.

When it comes to music, there are other key questions: Why are live concert revenues way up? What role has the shift to digital singles rather than full album sales played in the major label revenue decline? If piracy is such a problem that deputizing ISPs is needed, how is it that labels like EMI are actually growing their revenues?

[....]

The music industry did attempt to “rally America” to defend its economic practices, and America wanted nothing to do with the mass lawsuits that the industry eventually had to halt. Is Bono seriously suggesting that the far more invasive practice of turning ISPs into wiretappers would somehow find public traction as a great idea necessary to defend Hollywood?

Bono’s idea to make Jonny Ive or Steve Jobs the “style fascist” of GM isn’t much better, IMHO.

I don’t think having celebrities write regular op-eds for major newspapers is a good idea. I don’t even think it works at the Huffington Post.

I got nothing.

This has been the top headline on the WaPo homepage for the past two hours:

Does anyone really think the Democrats will lose the Senate? They would have to lose 11 Senate seats. Even Politico says Dems are likely to maintain majorities in the House and Senate.

And the Post article the headline goes with doesn’t say Dems are likely to lose the Senate.

What’s going on here? Just sloppy editing?

But it does. Charles Lane at Kaplan:

Yet in July, the federal minimum wage went up as planned, at the cost of 300,000 jobs, according to one economist’s estimate.

As it happens, the employment-reducing effect of minimum wage laws is abundantly documented. Those who take issue with my suggestion are taking issue with that evidence.

The literature is thoroughly compiled and reviewed in “Minimum Wages and Employment,” a 184-page article published three years ago by economists David Neumark and William L. Wascher in Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, a peer-reviewed journal.

The guy who wrote the editorial in the Wall Street Journal in the first link is one of the co-authors to the second. Can’t Lane find more anti-minimum wage economists? And, for God’s sake, “peer-reviewed journal”, like that was some kind of a trump card?

Think Progress pointed out:

almost all of the economic research on the subject shows that the minimum wage has little to no effect on employment. The most well-known researchers on the subject — David Card and Alan Krueger — examined a minimum wage increase in New Jersey, and found that “employment actually expanded in New Jersey relative to Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage was constant.”

And here’s Paul Krugman saying the same thing.

So Lane’s critics present a huge body of evidence undermining his claims and he trots out one guy from UC Irvine and one peer-reviewed article and pretends that refutes it all?

This is so pathetic that I can’t even wrap my head around it.

I try not to hate. I try. But I can’t succeed with Charles Lane.

Update. I hate to get so worked up as this, but it’s just absurd! Lane finds two articles (one of which is just a WSJ piece), with one guy authoring or co-authoring each, and thinks this is something definitive. An idiot part-time blogger like me can find links to five, including the classic study on the subject (EDIT: which is not accepted by some economists, especially conservative ones) and a piece from a Nobel Prize winner, saying the opposite in ten minutes.

How long did he spend on this rebuttal?

Update update. The point here is not that Lane is an asshole for suggesting we lower minimum wage. Nor is to cast aspersion on the work of David Neumark, the economist whose work he cites.

The point here is that Neumark is an economist, who (rightly or wrongly) has made a career of criticizing minimum wage laws (his conclusions, based on my skim, are not simplistic). It’s simply nuts to hold up his work as the consensus of the entire field, especially since critics of Lane’s original article held up a large body of work by various authors who hold different positions on the issue.

You’ve been good, and we’ve been slacking on the pics, so here you go:

The story:

You would never guess that this beyond handsome cat with one blue eye and one blond eye came into our lives at roughly six weeks of age when we discovered him cowering under our back deck with his feral mother. His eyes were glued shut because of a discharge, he was riddled with fleas, all skin and bones and pretty much not long for the world.

We had one other rescue cat at the time. Kiko was a deceivingly gentle looking little puffball. She was quite territorial and despite her small size was a ferocious hunter who would drag home prey twice her size—or maybe just the creature’s head—as an offering. Kiko could have killed Kimba in a heartbeat, but he brought out her nurturing side and he was soon doing quite well, thank you.

Today Kimba is seven years old. He’s a couple cards short of a full deck, but loves us unconditionally. Last winter, we had one other rescue cat, Chin, who is mute and basically toothless, when Kimba started making a fuss. We investigated and there was a semi-feral cat of about 10 months staring in through the sliders below the deck. This cat kept coming back each evening for the food and water we left outside for him and he too seemed like he might not be long for the world because nighttime temps in the mountains were dipping down to zero and beyond. We eventually trapped this clawless kitty, whom we named Taj, a loveable lug who today also is prospering.

So there you have it: A cat with no teeth, a cat with no claws and a cat with no brains.

Enjoy.

BTW, since this is an open thread, I had one of the best salads I have ever made, and it was kind of an accident. I’m going out of town for business Friday morning, so I was sort of just trying to clear out the fridge so nothing would get wasted before I get back and do a grocery on Sunday, and used the following items:

some red lettuce
an avocado
the rest of a bin of bean sprouts
a half a papaya
a couple cherry tomatoes
a little bit remaining in a block of colby/monterey jack cheese
a half a small container of crab meat leftover from crab cakes
a taco shell

Threw it all in a bowl, added a little olive oil, some salt and pepper, a 1/2 a lime’s worth of juice, and the rest of a container of salsa verde.

It was awesome. Also, don’t forget our own Rus has his radio show tonight on Radio Kaos. That is always worth a listen.

Last week we learned that Obama, in what can be described only as AMAZING foresight, nominated Dawn Johnsen at the beginning of the year to appease progressives, and then killed her nomination just to show those progressives who is boss. Or to secure Senate votes for HCR. Or because he is actually George Bush II and doesn’t want her there, but wants credit for nominating her. Or because he secretly hates progressives and figured this was a good way to hurt them. Depending on what your flavor of conspiracy kool-aid is, it is one of those or maybe a combination of all of them. At any rate, it was, we were informed, a major betrayal to the people who elected him (funny enough, the people who are always telling us “they” elected Obama are always the ones angriest with him):

Barack Obama and Harry Reid owe an explanation to both Dawn Johnsen, and the voters who worked so hard to elect them, as to why they intentionally left Johnsen’s critical nomination out in the cold so long, and then killed it outright. The main media in the United States owe their readers the duty to ask the questions and demand answers. That much, at a minimum, is owed to the citizens.

Apparently he had so much fun stabbing the left wing in the back he is going to do it again:

Two sources with knowledge of the situation told HuffPost that they expected the re-nominations to be announced soon. But administration officials emphasized that no decisions have been made as of yet. Senate Democratic aides, meanwhile, said they were in the dark about where those nominations stood. The president can not officially re-submit a nominee until the Senate reconvenes on January 20, unless he is pursuing a recess appointment.

In the daily briefing on Tuesday, Gibbs said he did not “know what decisions have been made about nominees that have, as a result of being—having passed a year, need to be re-nominated.”

According to sources, however, the names of those people whose nominations were held up during the past year and are likely to be re-nominated include:

Dawn Johnsen, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel
Christopher Schroeder, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy
Mary Smith, Assistant Attorney General for the Tax Division
Craig Becker, National Labor Relations Board
Louis Butler, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Wisconsin
Edward Chen, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of California
David Teeples, Army brigadier general

Over here at Balloon Juice, where we are all Obots, alternate theories prevail- such as Obama really wanted her confirmed, but was occupied or misread the level of Republican perfidy in the Senate. Those theories, which do not absolve Obama but also do not automatically assume the worst of Rahm Obama and take on the paranoid belief that Obama hates progressives, so they should probably be dismissed.

And before I leave, let me present you the obvious spin for the people who were peddling this nonsense last week- “Of course he wants her re-nominated! He saw how important our voices were when we screamed in outrage last week.” Which, of course, is more nonsense, as Obama has been holding strong with liberals all year.

And no, I am not writing this to just pick on progressives or to troll my website. I want my reality-based community back. Where did you all go? Or, to paraphrase commenter Cleek (who, btw, has an excellent blog YOU SHOULD VISIT!), “Show me on the doll where Rahm touched you.” Please come back. I liked working WITH you.

I have no idea what is in the water or what they are drinking in the Village, but I seriously want some of whatever Mara is having:

LOLWUT?

Quoted without comment:

SCHULTZ: Senator, you’ve been fighting hard for the prescription drug reimportation amendment. You had 30 Democrats vote against you on this recently. President Obama, when he was in the Senate, he was a co-sponsor of that with you. When he got to the White House, they were silent. In fact, there was a lot of talk that they were talking to Democratic senators not to vote for it. Does that leave a bad taste in your mouth and is that something that you would remember on the way out?

DORGAN: Well, try as you might, I’m not going to tell you I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to get that amendment passed. That’s $100 billion in savings to the American people. We’re going to get that passed this year. And I tell you, it didn’t get passed in health care for a lot of reasons and a lot of strange bedfellows but I’m going to get it passed this year in the United States Senate and save the American people $100 billion on their pharmaceutical bill because we shouldn’t be paying the highest prices in the world for brand name prescription drugs. That’s outrageous, in my judgment.

Can we stop with the Obama/Rahm betrayed him crap at the Great Orange Satan and elsewhere?

Ann Coulter:

“No one credible has asserted that… No they’ll be able to see a container… It was spread throughout the diaper. Unless the bomb is inserted under the foreskin, and by the way, I don’t see a clear angle on the anus. That’s a pretty easy hiding place for this.”

Peter Orszag, player.