I just got an email from a guy named Dudley Sharp supporting Rick Perry’s decision to suspend the panel that was looking into the prosecution of Cameron Todd Willingham. The piece is pretty incoherent—there are no factual statements of any kind and it opens with an extended rant against the media that has almost nothing to do with this particular case.

Regardless of whether or not one supports the death penalty, the fact is that the prosecution’s case against Willingham was largely based on arguments that the fire in his house was caused by arson (rather than by, say, a space heater). These arguments were riddled with errors, and arson expert Craig Beyler concluded that the fire was probably caused by a space heater.

No criminal justice system is perfect, and, similarly, no expert’s judgement is perfect. But it is difficult for me to believe that a reasonable person could now be convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Willingham was guilty. It is, perhaps, not surprising that there are so many people out there who claim otherwise simply because they like the idea of putting the supposedly guilty to death. But it is shameful that these people appear on television so frequently.

I think I am going to be eating beef vegetable soup for about two more days. I suppose there are worse things to eat. I froze two big containers, but I still have a bunch left.

Lots of pictures came in today, but this was my favorite:

Another exciting night playing games and walking the dog. Really loving the storyline of Dragon Age. First game in a long time I remember actually caring about the story.

Also, since it is rapidly becoming Christmas time, the best and easiest way to support this website is if you are going to order through Amazon, click the Amazon link up above and to the right before you go there and shop. Some months we earn up to 50-60 bucks through referral fees, which is cool.

Jack Kingston, R-Ga, on the Democratic health care bill:

“This bill is a wrecking ball to the entire economy,” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia. “ We need targeted specific reforms to help people who have fallen through the health care cracks.”

Ezra Klein, on the Republican bill unveiled just the other day:

The Republican alternative will have helped 3 million people secure coverage, which is barely keeping up with population growth. Compare that to the Democratic bill, which covers 36 million more people and cuts the uninsured population to 4 percent.

But maybe, you say, the Republican bill does a really good job cutting costs. According to CBO, the GOP’s alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process.

Shut up, Rep. Kingston. If all we need to do is help those who have slipped through the cracks, then why the hell couldn’t the Republicans do that in their “alternative?” Why does anyone take these people seriously?

You know, I don’t know if the Democrat’s plan is an objectively good bill, and I have my doubts. I have no idea if it will work as planned and be an objectively good thing in the long run. But at least they are trying.

Ron Beasley, swallowtail.

Shawn, butterfly.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Hope your team wins.

What does it cost to get $2.4 billion in unemployment benefits extension?

$24 billion:

President Obama is scheduled today to put his signature to HR 3548, the unemployment extension bill that’s been struggling to make its way out of Congress for over a month. Thousands of unemployed Americans will applaud this move by Congress and the White House. Despite the protracted process of getting the bill through the Senate after an initial version was passed in the House, this is much-needed legislation that will help unemployed Americans whose benefits have or will run out in all 50 states.

***

Also included in this bill is an extension of the homebuyer tax credit to April 2010. The bill totals $24 billion in economic stimulus through these programs.

More here:

The House voted 403-12 today to approve Senate amendments to H.R. 3548, the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2009, and sent the measure to
President Obama for his signature. The bill extends unemployment insurance benefits but also includes a provision added in the Senate that will expand businesses` ability to “carry back” net operating losses suffered during the current recession in order to claim a refund from taxes paid in previous years.

You see- you aren’t allowed to just pass a bill extending unemployment benefits at the cost of $2.4 billion dollars, because that would be socialism. It takes another $21.6 billion to grease the palms of the people who own the “moderates” and the “fiscal conservatives,” and once you get the cost up to $24 billion, you have achieved “capitalism.”

Please tell me I am interpreting this wrong. I would love to be wrong about this. I really would. I’m sure no bad can come from artificially propping up the housing market with tax credits.

Beautiful day here, and despite being pessimistic this morning, I’m in a great mood. Good day for cleaning, football, some video games, and soup. A few quick notes:

1.) My email finally overwhelmed me. I had several thousand messages in my account, many of which are unanswered, in no small part because you idiots keep signing me up for crap I can not or will not read (like the daily updates from Michelle Bachmann and David Vitter). Please stop it. I don’t care for updates from Phyllis Schlafley. I really don’t. At any rate, I was so overwhelmed I just deleted everything, including the trash, so if you sent me an email and I did not answer, I never will unless you send it again.

2.) When I upgraded to Windows 7, I lost all my pet pictures. In other words, feel free to send pics of your pets so I can post them, as I have none.

3.) A little bit of barley goes a long way. I had a ginormous pot of beef soup the other day, and at the end put about a half to a cup of barley in. Holy sweet jeebus does that stuff expand and suck up fluid. It gave it the soup great texture, but I had to add more broth and stock. How come no one has made paper towels out of barley? Couldn’t you dump barley on oil slicks and soak it up? Again, sweet jeebus.

Have at it.

This will never work:

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for a new “social contract” with the world’s banks to make them more responsible to society.

Mr Brown told a G20 meeting in Scotland it was not acceptable that banking success was reaped by the few but failure was “borne by all of us”.

He called for a fund for future bank bailouts to be considered, possibly paid for by a tax on transactions.

Brown seems to fail to understand a few things. First, contracts, social and otherwise, are for the little people. That is why the bankruptcy bill was passed a few years back at the behest of the industry- to keep the proles in line and to guarantee the banks can bleed you dry- while trillions in unmentioned loans and guarantees and bailout bucks are thrown to the banks when they shit the bed. They screw up, we give them trillions, they lavish themselves with bonuses. It is the circle of life in our own global corruptocracy.

Second, privatizing the profit and socializing the costs was not an accident, it was the plan. Go read McClatchy’s recent series on this.

Third, the fund will not work, because the banks will just buy off enough Senators and congressmen to waive the rules as they did for fees during the last decade. And should they actually be required to put some money in a fund, not only will the charges be passed on to us so we can get hit both ways with higher banking fees and taxes spent on propping these robbers up, but then once the money is in the “fund,” you can;t just have it sitting there, can you? You will have to invest it in something! And then you can write unregulated CDS on that, and then you can write some more CDS on the CDS, and you see where this is going, with the inevitable next round of hoocoodanode. Goldman and a few others, with their tentacles deep into the higher reaches of government, will no doubt survive and prosper, and we will be treated to months of sycophants and useful idiots explaining we just don’t truly understand how smart the Goldman guys are. “Best of the best! They know what they are doing!” They sure do…

Nothing short of breaking up all the large banks, executing the credit ratings agencies, and then a strict and ruthless enforcement regime will help, and there simply is no willpower for that. Not only is there no willpower for this, as both parties are bought and paid for in full, but if there was any movement on this front, wingnut teabaggers would scream about socialism and tyranny, Reason magazine would scream about government involvement in the private sector and the free flow of capital and the glory of the invisible hand, moderate Democrats everywhere would worry about such public involvement, Joe Lieberman would spend months posturing in front of cameras with a furrowed brow, and whoever was tasked with enforcement would be found in bed with a hooker or whatever else is required to destroy them.

In short, we’re just screwed. Learn your place, deal with it, and learn how to grow food. Watching the way the big money boys have shaped the debate, whipping people who would be helped into a froth about socialism, it just seems so clear to me now after spending the last two decades in a haze. “Sorry unemployment is at 10 percent and you are losing your health insurance while I give myself a couple million dollar bonus, but socialism and Hitler and abortion on demand and death tax oh my God two gay men want the same rights as you! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE! SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE!”

Such a joke.

/dirtyfuckinghippy

I hate to bring this up on a Friday night or, honestly, to go here at all, but we live in a country where carrying around pictures of the Dachau death camp to “protest” health care reform makes you an authentic representative of real America.

I wish there was a more pleasant way to say this. There isn’t.

Update. I recommend this clip, not for Tom Tancredo walking off, but because it’s a rare nationally televised example of a journalist doing what a journalist is supposed to do.

Hard core dork tonight- Monk, White Collar, and a lot of Dragon Age, which I will tell you is by far the best RPG ever made by Bioware. Even better than KOTOR.

Look, I know unemployment is over 10%, there was a shooting in Texas and another in Florida, the Republicans just staged a hatefest on the Capitol steps, and Afghanistan is still an issue, and Health Care reform is moving forward slowly, but what happened to all the hard hitting journalism we are used to?

There are serious questions that need to be answered. How many women were at Obama’s basketball game today? Did he sneak a smoke? What do Michelle Obama’s arms look like today? Aren’t there any anonymous sources out there who will tell a reporter that the White House hates “teh left?”

Inquiring minds, folks. Do your damned jobs.

Josh Marshall has said that the reason for the bizarre disconnect between national media and reality is simply that “Washington is wired for control”, that years of Republican political dominance has made it so that most of the important non-elected players see the world through Republican eyes. It’s certainly true that Official Washington’s perspective is essentially a Republican perspective. But I wonder if part of that both heed the siren’s call of simplistic quasi-philosophical, non-empirical “solutions”.

Bobo’s latest is a good example: Democrats are doomed independents believe that government is doing too much. The other night’s election results were not caused by voters’ dislike of Corzine (which I can tell you is palpable) or Deeds (I know less about this), or even by anything specific that Obama did or even by the fact that the economy is awful, they were caused by regular, middle-class Americans’ elaborate, deeply felt philosophical beliefs. Who knew that the angry, God-fearing, Applebee’s-salad-bar-visiting Joe Sixpacks who populate Bobo’s fantasy world were more school of Athens than school of hard knocks?

I think there’s a fair amount of projection going on here. It’s tough to slog your way through CBO reports, or even Ezra Klein blog posts, and get a feeling for the efficacy of the various health care reform proposals. It was tough to read through Army War College reports on the difficulties of finding a good strategy for the invasion/occupation of Iraq (this is why no conservatives and not many reporters did so). It’s very easy to state that you have a philosophy of free markets and freedom. It’s probably even easier to write a ditty about Mr. Bentham and Mr. Hume that alludes vaguely to such a philosophy without ever stating it explicitly.

Of course, it’s also a lot easier to talk about Reagan and soshulism than it is to craft a serious health care proposal. And this is where Republican interests and media interests intersect most clearly. No one wants to do the dirty work of writing or reading complicated legislation, let alone working out the compromises that allows such legislation to be passed. It’s much more fun to scream “Bear DNA”, “porkulus”, “Chicago-style politics”, “best health care system in the world’, “he’s doing too much”. If you can do this and get re-elected, you’re a politician. If you can do this while ruminating about Hume and Burke, then you’re a very serious person.

The lead story at memeorandum is Robert George’s condemnation of Obama’s insufficiently weepy statement after the Fort Hood shooting yesterday:

But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a “shout-out” to “Dr. Joe Medicine Crow—that Congressional Medal of Honor winner.” Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?

Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That’s the least that should occur.

Here is some of his statement:

Now, I have to say, though, that beyond that, I plan to make some broader remarks about the challenges that lay ahead for Native Americans, as well as collaboration with our administration, but as some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. We don’t yet know all the details at this moment; we will share them as we get them. What we do know is that a number of American soldiers have been killed, and even more have been wounded in a horrific outburst of violence.

My immediate thoughts and prayers are with the wounded and with the families of the fallen, and with those who live and serve at Fort Hood. These are men and women who have made the selfless and courageous decision to risk and at times give their lives to protect the rest of us on a daily basis. It’s difficult enough when we lose these brave Americans in battles overseas. It is horrifying that they should come under fire at an Army base on American soil.

Why, yes, that was just light banter! I’d go so far to say light-hearted and jocular, although maybe fanciful and mischievous might be how I would describe it, Robert! I haven’t laughed like that since the Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry pissed on an image of Christ.

Serenity now. Although I would like to inform the wingnuts that Bill Ayers actually wrote Obama’s remarks yesterday.

This is, as always, brilliant:

The thing you need to keep in mind is that the lunatic he is mocking, Glenn Beck, is one of the driving forces behind the politics of the current GOP. No, the glibertarians at Reason won’t admit this is what they have been enabling, because they have their heads so far up their asses from years of false equivalences and chants of “BOTH PARTIES ARE BAD!” Plus, everyone knows that when teabaggers and Glenn Beck followers run around worked up over bullshit packing heat, it is their GOD GIVEN RIGHT A CITIZEN and nothing bad could happen. The threat of right-wing violence is radically overstated. Just ask the cops in Pittsburgh, who met an armed Glenn Beck fan.

And of course the media will not admit it. First and foremost, Fox news is their sister organization, right? Glenn Beck is one of them, and they surround us. Our political pundits and beltway betters can’t talk about the fact that Hoffman, the wingnut carpetbagger in the NY-23 special election, was a Glenn Beck follower. No, our talking heads on the cable networks are too busy talking about the rebirth of conservatism because Republicans LOST an election in NY for the first time in 15 decades and won a governor’s seat in… VIRGINIA.

Seriously. According to the “analysis” from the last few days, I’m supposed to think that a Republican winning in Virginia is the sign of the end for Democrats. Thank goodness the Republicans didn’t win a governor’s seat in Alabama, or some in the media would be calling for Obama’s impeachment.

I have agita.

General Winfield Stuck, The odd couple.

Yutsano, honeybee.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.