Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

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Archives for 2008

Dog Bites Man

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I can’t wait for the day when stories like this drive Hugh Hewitt into paroxysms of righteous outrage again.

Edgar A. Domenech says he thought Justice Department officials would welcome information about mismanagement at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Instead, the 23-year ATF veteran says, Justice officials ignored his complaints and later retaliated against him by demoting him, denying him a bonus and attempting to give him a poor job review.

And again and again. I emphasize this kind of story because there really is a best practices for running a functional government. People do a more competent job under the threat of transparency and adversarial oversight. Take that away and you eliminate the disincentive for slack, graft and letting mistakes of every magnitude slide uncorrected. To the degree that whistleblowers are actively protected, shitty managers and government programs that fail for whatever reason can be exposed and corrected. Strict ethics rules enforced by zealous and independent oversight keep away the stink that almost always goes along with political power. If these things disappear it hardly matters who is in charge; shitty management will follow like water flows downhill. Tax money will disappear down unaccountable holes, important programs will stop working. National security will be less secure. Idiots who can’t do their job will be appointed to important positions. Said idiots, justifiably fearing exposure of their crappy management, inevitably commit increasingly stupid mistakes in an effort to cover up earlier mistakes.

The country works better under Democrats because as a whole they have a better grip on best practices. That’s it. If you think I’m wrong, I encourage you to revisit the unlivable hell that was the Eisenhower administration. Despite their loopy policy agenda Republican leadership doesn’t have to run the country into the ground, it’s just a historical accident that Republican presidents since Eisenhower have had a crappy notion of how to make government work. Bushies just represent the ultimate defeat of competence after a decades-long, losing battle with ideological purity.

FAIL

I wonder whether a shamed and defeated GOP can defy the purity trolls in their the base and give some capable young John Cole types a chance to build a national party again. Sounds tough, after all first they’ll have to stop driving those guys to the Democrats, but it’s either that or try taking power back by some means other than electoral politics.

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Turkey And Kurdistan: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

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Two points stand out to me about the brewing situation in Iraq’s once-peaceful northern frontier.

* Regarding Kurdish guerillas, Turkey’s army is like a genie that is easier let out of a bottle than stuffed back in. Once they have political authorization to deal with the guerillas, and as long as the PKK provokes them, the Turkish army will go on violating Iraq’s border more or less at will.
* The PKK will not stop provoking the Turks. They are doctrinaire communist revolutionaries, which means that they think a lot like our neocons. Remember the hysterical freakout when their man Khalilzad accidentally breathed the same oxygen as a hated Iranian enemy? I imagine the PKK throws the same poop-flinging hatefest whenever a functionary suggests interacting with Turks in a way that doesn’t involve someone wearing his blood on the outside.

Actually, there is a third point.

* America cannot do a thing about the situation. We can’t get in Turkey’s way because we both belong to NATO. We can’t threaten the Kurds because their region is the linchpin for any longterm plan for US forces in Iraq. Even if we could intervene, effectively ending the tension would mean reassigning a substantial force from somewhere else in Iraq. Air power might do some good if we had solid intelligence on PKK hideouts, which we don’t, and if we could act without pissing off Iraqi Kurds, which we can’t. In other words whatever grumpy noises American envoys make to Ankara don’t mean much when everyone knows that we are watching the scrap from the sidelines.

So after sounding a dour note the other day it didn’t surprise me that much to hear that Turkey pulled out again soon after. Now that the genie’s out of the bottle it’s only a matter of time before Turkish forces invite themselves back. And by ‘a matter of time’ I mean five days.

Up next: Kurds will increasingly resist Turkish incursions, the PKK will aggravate the situation with more violence. Turkish reprisals will bolster support for PKK, which will increase their ability to pester the Turks. Israel-Palestine forecast with a small chance of Chechnya.

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Late Night Open Thread

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Looks like a revote:

Howard Dean will not bend the party rules to grandfather in the disputed delegates from Michigan and Florida, the Democratic party chairman said in a statement today.

Instead, he put the state parties on notice: either they can wait and allow the credentials committee to decide whether to seat their delegates, or submit to a re-vote sanctioned under DNC rules. “We look forward to receiving their proposals should they decide to submit new delegate selection plans and will review those plans at that time,” he said in the statement.

“Everyone seems to be asking what the DNC will do,” a Democrat close to Dean said. “But the question is: what will the state parties do.”

That works.

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Nobody Could Have Predicted

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That this would happen:

The FBI improperly used national security letters in 2006 to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations, Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday.

A report will show subpoenas were improperly used to get personal data, FBI chief Robert Mueller says.

Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the privacy breach by FBI agents and lawyers occurred a year before the bureau enacted sweeping new reforms to prevent future lapses.

Details on the abuses will be outlined in the coming days in a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The report is a follow-up to an audit by the inspector general a year ago that found the FBI demanded personal data on people from banks, telephone and Internet providers and credit bureaus without official authorization and in non-emergency circumstances between 2003 and 2005.

Mueller, noting senators’ concerns about Americans’ civil and privacy rights, said the new report “will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March.” The similarities, he said, are because the time period of the two studies “predates the reforms we now have in place.”

But don’t you worry- everything is fixed good now with our reforms, yesirree bob!

You know, if there was any evidence that she would begin criminal investigations the moment she became President, I would vote for Hillary in a second. My big fear, after watching the folks in her campaign, is that they will embrace their newfound authoritah.

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Well, Of Course

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Via Sullivan, James Fallows:

The same people — same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites – that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.

Well, of course. These little wars we are fighting with conventional weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq- those pay the bills for the defense contractors and their friends for now. But the real money, as anyone will tell you, is in the long wars. They need hostile relations with China to keep the big money and the big contracts and the weapons research flowing. When the Iraq insurgency finally burns itself out or we finally get the willpower to withdraw, they will need a hot zone in China to keep justifying 500+ billion a year in your money going to the machines of war.

Think big, think longterm. The entrenched interests are, and there is money to be made.

And yes, I realize I am starting to sound like Noam Chomsky Eisenhower.

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Groundhog Days

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So Hillary wins by ten in Ohio (54-44), ekes out a 3% win in Texas (51-48), and the delegate lead doesn’t change one bit, but somehow we are supposed to believe this has radically changed the race. It hasn’t, but such is the narrative of spin.

Meanwhile, Republicans celebrate, and the Clinton campaign has learned that dumpster diving and going negative pays off.

I already hate being a Democrat. The other party is united around a doddering old warmonger who they swore just a few weeks ago they would never vote for, and the Democrats are busy tearing the party apart from the inside out so that we can continue the 28 year old Bush/Clinton dynasty.

*** Update ***

And I forgot the worst thing- I am in the Pennsylvania television markets. I am going to have to suffer through weeks of Clinton commericals lying about Obama.

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Hey Kids! Get Off My Lawn!

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That lovely home gracious enough to donate their space for what should have been a dreary caucus (2004 had around 50 attendees) was overrun this evening in a shockingly subdued fashion by hundreds of very patient caucusgoers.

The caucus was scheduled to begin at 7:15, but there was a slight delay as overwhelmed volunteers tried to sign everyone in. Around 8:30, I finally weaved through the line. These poor souls were still in line as I left:

In fact, the line still stretched around the block:

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