How could this be:

Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace the Guantánamo Bay prison.

As a result, officials now believe that they are unlikely to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and transfer its population of terrorism suspects until 2011 at the earliest — a far slower timeline for achieving one of President Obama’s signature national security policies than they had previously hinted.

While Mr. Obama has acknowledged that he would miss the Jan. 22 deadline for closing the prison that he set shortly after taking office, the administration appeared to take a major step forward last week when he directed subordinates to move “as expeditiously as possible” to acquire the Thomson Correctional Center, a nearly vacant maximum-security Illinois prison, and to retrofit it to receive Guantánamo detainees.

I’ve been told, repeatedly, that all Obama needs to do is say he wants something, and the House and Senate will give it to him. If only he would use the bully pulpit, I am sure the 90 some Senators who gave him the finger on this issue this summer will turn around and vote the way he wants on what he wants. And if that doesn’t work, there is always reconciliation.

At some point, people are going to realize that the problem is not this administration, but the Senate. There is a reason the House and Senate leadership have not introduced a bill regarding DADT and DOMA. I wonder what it is?

And yes, it is maddening. There is a whole list of things Obama has not done that I would really like for him to do, and many of them are inexcusable and rest wholly on his shoulders.

I honestly don’t understand this at all (from Krugman):

In January 2005, National City’s chief economist had delivered a prescient warning to the Fed’s board of governors: An increasingly overvalued housing market posed a threat to the broader economy, not to mention his own bank and others deeply involved in writing mortgages.

The message wasn’t well received. One board member expressed particular skepticism — Ben Bernanke.

“Where do you think it will be the worst?” Bernanke asked, according to people who attended the meeting, one in a series of sessions the Fed holds with economists.

“I would have to say California,” said the economist, Richard Dekaser.

“They have been saying that about California since I bought my first house in 1979,” Bernanke replied.

This time the warnings were correct …

Krugman points out the obvious: that California did in fact go through a major housing bust in the mid-late 90s. This reminds me a bit of Greenspan’s belief that the average national housing price would never decline in the United States, despite the fact that the housing index in Japan had gone down 60%.

I understand that economics is complicated and that things like housing prices are very difficult to predict. But why ignore actual data that is staring you in the face? I just don’t understand this at all.

I emailed my friend at a hedge fund (who sometimes takes a more sympathetic view of such things) and asked him how bad he thought Bernanke had screwed up on this. He answered:

horribly. i remember living in california during that time and seeing the huge asset bubble collapse. what an idiot.

Idiotic, borderline racist comparisons, they’re not just for HuffPost anymore! (via)

And for all the heated rhetoric being thrown at him [President Obama] these days—soc**list, sellout, soporific, yadda yadda yadda—I don’t think anyone has accused him of a racial approach to politics. People want to know what he’s doing about unemployment and health care and climate change. In a very real sense, he seems to have transcended race.

(I was going to make a Tiger Woods analogy here, but at the moment that seems like a decidedly bad idea.)

It’s probably mostly just that Tiger is too shiny of an object for Kurtz to resist, but still.

I would like all of you to take some time in the comments and tell everyone around you how they have let you down. How this will differ from any other thread is beyond me.

A primer of the most wonderful time of the year:

Have at it.

Turned on the intertube and checked out memeorandum, and what do I see:

Which means we will get another whole day of left-wing self-flagellation in the form of “Obama admitted he loves the bankers more than he loves _.”

In my quest to be a more serious denizen of the blogosphere, I recently began reading TAPPED and Kevin Drum more regularly. Much to my chagrin, both refer to Megan McArdle constantly. Why?

I understand that she makes occasional good points about things like free trade, but there must be other conservative bloggers who do this who don’t say stupid things like this...and who can generally express their thoughts in under a thousand words. Why do people like Kevin Drum and Tim Fernholz take her blog seriously?

Update. This is indeed probably how the process works:

1) Megan gets a ridiculous contrarian thought
2) Megan writes 800 word minimum post about said thought
3) Sully writes one sentence link, must include some form of the word “fisk” at least 50% of the time
4) Tyler Cowen links to it
5) after 3 and 4 liberal bloggers simply cannot ignore the obvious fallacies, rip the piece to shreds
6) Megan defends her piece by any means necessary up to and including striking her critics with lumber
7) critics again fail to recognize that she is not arguing in good faith and provide yet more links to Atlantic.com

Kevin Drum tweeted this last night, and I just remembered it thanks to Bob Cesca, but this seven part review of why the Phantom Menace sucked is just awesome:

You can see the other six parts here. May the force be with you.

And if you cringed every time he pronounced protaganist as “Pro-tuh-gone-ist,” you are probably an effete liberal who likes arugula and dijon mustard.

I have some time tonight, so I am going through the 1700 messages in gmail and filtering out all the pics from the spam, and here are a few views I love. The first has no elevated feet (I never really campaigned on elevated feet) despite the clear rules, but I love it anyway:

This one has the appropriate level of holiday timeliness:

And because I know if I post two pictures of dogs but no felines, the cat lovers will freak on my tender soul, this offering:

And finally, since this website is where 4chan meets Cute Overload, here is RedKitten’s offering:

You do know the ultimate goal is to get Sullivan to send us a pic of his feet and his beagles?

The party switch of Parker Griffith is giving the Politico vapers. And it probably pisses Pelosi and Hoyer off. And Democrats should by all means contest races in Alabama. But white southerners are batshit crazy wingers, by and large, and there’s just no way around that. Regional polarization is the wave of the future.

For many people, holidays involve lots of sparkling wine and lots of less-than-discerning relatives. But you’ve got to drink the same stuff they do, so you want something cheap and decent. I bought a case of Segura Viudas Brut Reserva (it’s a big family gathering on Friday) and just opened the first one. It’s really pretty good, not yeasty and complex like real champagne, but with nice fruit and acid and nothing offensive.

Only seven bucks and the best under ten dollar sparkler I’ve ever had.

This may be the most awesomest moment in C-SPAN history. What you are about to watch is a tearful teabagger, noting that James Inhofe missed a health care reform vote sick, calling in to C-SPAN worried that his prayer group from Waycross, Georgia may have killed Inhofe by mistake after answering Cornyn’s Coburn’s call to pray for someone to miss a vote the other day:

I’m in tears.

And it is obvious to me that what really motivates these teabaggers is anti-corporate resentment. We should totally join with these guys to kill the bill. There is no doubt they will help us get a better bill.

*** Update ***

It could be, as noted below, a hoax. This does have a performance art sort of feel. But then again, so does standing in a town hall screaming “KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!”

I have no idea what the hell Obama is talking about here.

It has been a long time since I worked in radio, and I used to have some great Sennheiser headphones, but while these Bose Quietcomfort are a little pricey, they are hands down the best earphones I have ever had. I’m going to buy these babies for next summer.

Michelle Bachmann, welfare queen:

Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

I’d be worried this would make Glenn Beck cry, but everything makes him cry.

(via one of you commenters but I can not remember where)

The NY Times:

Members of both parties say the dispute over health care has created bad blood, left both Democrats and Republicans suspicious of the opposition’s motives, and shattered some of the institution’s traditional collegiality.

At the same time, Democrats say the apparently unbridgeable health care divide has convinced them that Republicans are dedicated solely to blocking legislative proposals for political purposes. Several said they now realized that they would have to rely strictly on their own caucus to advance such defining issues as climate change in 2010.

“We have crossed the mark of over 100 filibusters and acts of procedural obstruction in less than one year,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, said on the floor Sunday. “Never since the founding of the Republic, not even in the bitter sentiments preceding Civil War, was such a thing ever seen in this body.”

And with rats like Stupak, you can’t even rely on your entire caucus, although he has not been stirring up any shit the last two days, so I am wondering if he got the horse head in the bed and took the message.

(Via the GOS)