On the heels of the NY-23 special House election, in which Conservative Party insurgent Doug Hoffman overtook moderate GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava, only to lose to Democrat Bill Owens, NRSC chairman John Cornyn (R-TX) has announced that the GOP's national Senate committee will not be spending money in contested primaries.
"There's no incentive for us to weigh in," Cornyn told ABC News. "We have to look at our resources."
When backed into a corner by reporters, the centrist is known to give vague, uncomfortable answers, eye flitting about looking for escape routes.
2010 will be a base election. The party best able to turn out its core voters has the best chance of winning. If Democrats want to see a repeat of Virginia at the national level next year, then they should cave to Blue Dogs and the media nabobs and water down reform efforts (whether in energy, health care, financial services, or immigration).
The further Right Deeds moved, the further his poll numbers collapsed. The correlation is clear, even if the Blue Dogs argue the opposite.
Nirvana's 1992 performance at England's Reading Festival is impossible to separate from its historical significance, which is this: Nirvana was at the time ascending to biggest-band-in-the-world status, and their 90-minute, 25-song set at Reading officially put them there.
This was August '92, a year after "Nevermind" reset the expectations and aesthetics of modern pop music. This was a headlining slot at Reading, one of the longest-running, traditionally career-making music festivals in the world. And this was Nirvana at its artistic peak.
All factors conspired for a Zeitgeist-defining moment. Seventeen years later, "Live at Reading" — an oft-bootlegged concert film released for the first time in 5.1 Surround Sound, recently remastered under the supervision of Kurt Cobain's estate and the remaining members of the band — proves Nirvana not only lived up to the opportunity, they smashed it to slivers and walked away grinning.
Des Moines, Iowa: Thanks for joining us Rep. Grayson. You've admirably taken on Republican chicanery in recent months, but I'd to know if you will ever test the Obama administration on state secrets privileges, indefinite detention and other egregious executive powers the office of the president is vested with in our modern era. It's not about partisanship; it's curtailing the power of the president. He's not a king. This is not a monarchy. You, Mr. Grayson, seem to be a voice that could stand up to his own party on this issue. Thanks and best of luck.
Rep. Alan Grayson: The closest thing that we have to a king in this country is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He handed over $500 billion of our money to foreigners, without even discussing it with the President or any member of Congress. That, my friend, is a problem.
AN IMAGINATIVE work of journalism or a stunt with a travel budget attached? Crime reporters for the Independent in London and the Baltimore Sun are going to switch places and report for each other's paper. The inspiration, as anyone with more than a basic-cable package could guess, was "The Wire": the Brit wants to know how accurately the show depicts the city. "The Wire" was far and away the best television programme ever created, and as someone who grew up in Maryland, I'm in favour of all things Charm City. As a reporter, however, I'm leery. I worry that what we'll get are two streams of reporting that will prove rather banal to anyone who knows either Baltimore or London. And so far, so zzzzzz: we have an American discovering that London is statistically safer than Baltimore, and a Brit discovering the opposite. I worry, too, that a mission to find out whether Baltimore is "like" a television show will result in checklist reporting (this is similar, that's not, etc). It also ignores what made "The Wire" great: not so much verisimilitude—if that's what you're after, just put cameras on corners—but old-fashioned narrrative control that enabled inventiveness and great storytelling. I expect that in two weeks the British reporter will find Baltimore much messier and duller than "The Wire". That's because real life is messier and duller than television.
And if this isn't a golden opportunity to drastically scale back our commitment, what would be? A clear reversal of course by Obama would be a sign that he can make a decision that the Beltway establishment does not have the strength to make; that he really is a change agent; that preventing Iraq from imploding again is now a more serious worry than propping up an unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul ... and losing more decisively to the Taliban in the end.
-On the economy: "I believe that the economy is under siege," Limbaugh said, adding that "anybody with any economic literary would not do one thing that this administration's done."
-On President Obama: "I think he's got an out-of-this-world ego"; "He's immature, inexperienced, in over his head"; and he "actively sought the defeat of the U.S. military." Oh, and "we've never seen this kind of radical leadership at such a high level of power in the country."
-On Obama's visit to Dover to honor fallen soldiers returning home: "It was a photo op precisely because he's having big-time trouble on this whole Afghanistan dithering situation."
-On health care reform: "This is not about insuring the uninsured. This is not about health care. This is about stealing one-sixth of the U.S. private sector." That, Limbaugh said, is "the easiest, fastest way for them to be able to regulate every aspect of human behavior."
-On Vice President Joe Biden: "Pompous, a bit of a windbag and wrong" -- and "a walking comedy of errors."
-On Sarah Palin: "I do have profound respect for Sarah Palin."
President Obama signed legislation Thursday that blocks the release of photos that depict the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. The new law is expected to thwart any chance the Supreme Court will hear the case over whether the photos should be disclosed to the public.
The Homeland Security Appropriations bill Obama signed grants the Department of Defense authority to withhold the photos.
Now that the bill is signed into law, it likely makes the long-fought battle over the torture photos moot. The Supreme Court twice this month postponed whether it would hear the government's appeal to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act suit that sought access to the photos, pending the enactment of the law. Solicitor General Elena Kagan sent a letter today apprising the Supreme Court of the legislation and stating the government would file a supplemental brief regarding its effect likely before the Court's conference Nov. 6.
Baseball is the only sport I am capable of tolerating, because of its historicity and its fundamental weirdness and slowness. And its fondness for large, sedentary men. It is essentially a vehicle for nostalgia, which is the most toxic of impulses.
[...]
Well, I don't hate sports -- I completely appreciate the passion people feel for sports, and indeed, as I say in the new book, there's a lot more in common with your average baseball stats nerd as there is with a guy swinging a foam sword around than there is not. There's a lot of geekery surrounding sports that I actually get and appreciate.
And I appreciate that it's market driven, but what I don't need is for sports to dominate every single part of the culture, including even high education. It has a disproportionate representation in the culture, but let the invisible hand of commerce guide us -- the invisible hand is apparently always adjusting its jock strap and not rolling a twelve-sided die. But that will change.
The Pitch: In what way?
I think that we are necessarily moving toward a geek culture. The health of our society is going to rely on information technology. It's going to rely on a familiarity with math and science and technology. Geekery in general is founded on questioning and proof via analysis of the actual world and not the world as we wish it to be. By contrast, jockdom -- not sports -- jock culture proceeds from a certainty you create in your mind: 'My town is the best because the incredibly wealthy owners decided to keep the team for now.' Or, 'My political team is the best because it was my dad's and they best stoke my primitive fears,' as opposed to 'They have the best policies for me and my family.'
Jockdom is very noble. It's not deliberative. It's certainly the best way to win wars. It's the best way to motivate teams of people to fulfill a goal -- not just war, but getting things done. The most important way to motivate a factory floor. But as you know, we're not as much of a manufacturing society as we were before. China and other big industrial nations are rewarding their nerds and technicians rather than creating a culture that makes fun of them -- it would be wise for us to embrace the book-smart as much as our culture has traditionally embraced the street-smart, the jock-smart. I'm not saying nerds must have their revenge; I'm just saying the time for wedgies is at an end.
"I just find it fascinating that my many friends who claim to be against Washington having too much power, they claim to be in favor of the 10th Amendment giving states back their rights, they claim to favor local control and local authority, now they suddenly get local control and local authority in upstate New York, they don’t like the outcome. [...] So I say to my many conservative friends who suddenly decided that whether they’re from Minnesota or Alaska or Texas, they know more than the upstate New York Republicans? I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s a good precedent. [...]
And so this idea that we’re suddenly going to establish litmus tests, and all across the country, we’re going to purge the party of anybody who doesn’t agree with us 100 percent — that guarantees Obama’s reelection. That guarantees Pelosi is Speaker for life. I mean, I think that is a very destructive model for the Republican Party," - Newt Gingrich, on Palin and others supporting Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.
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Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.
At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.
Note to the White House:
Stop crying about Fox News. We all get it, they're bogus. But, A) you're playing right into their hands, mostly because B) just about all of the comments about Fox I've heard made by the WH have come off highly impetuous, indignant and, yes, whiny. You're not succeeding in really calling them out. Does it suck to watch your friends be slandered by a bunch of hacks? I would bet so. But, come on, you're the White House for fuck's sake; you're the most powerful entity in the world. Let Glenn Beck and friends dig their own grave.
But no journalistic operation is better prepared to sing the tragedy of its own martyrdom than Fox News. To all the usual journalistic instincts it adds its grand narrative of Middle America's disrespectful treatment by the liberal elite. Persecution fantasy is Fox News's lifeblood; give it the faintest whiff of the real thing and look out for a gale-force hissy fit.
As the Obama administration has discovered by now. A few weeks ago, after Fox had scored a number of points against administration figures and policies, administration spokesmen decided it was time to start fighting back. Communications Director Anita Dunn called the network "a wing of the Republican Party," while Obama himself reportedly dismissed it for following "a talk radio format."
The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."
