Yes, They Do

Gotta agree with the sentiment, even if I'm not a Sox fan (hat tip: Craig Calcaterra).

A Brave New World

In the new media world, a law professor's prank sparks a huge fake retirement story.  I'd guess that the identity of the news outlet doing the reporting will (rightly) take a hit, and the folks who ran with the story will probably be more circumspect in trusting news published by news reporting organizations that don't have an established reputation for telling it like it is.  Of course, this won't excuse the media from ignoring the next rumor published by the National Enquirer.

On another front, you gotta love the potential for mass chaos.  If I were a physics professor, I'd open class by announcing that me and my colleagues would be announcing later that morning that we had successfully completed work on a time machine.  I would then look at two people sitting in the back row and say, "I don't want to give away a lot about the future, but you two should NOT get married."

I Would Only Protest If They Cut Off Beer Sales

I'm personally of the opinion that college students who protest anything are wasting the most valuable years of their lives doing something useless, when they should be spending their time drinking beer and doing other things (the phrase "doing other things" is designed as cover for when my daughter reads this).  You're only young once, but having so much free time is a gift that you should not discard for the silly goal of screaming about budget cuts. Megan McArdle expounds nicely on this...

But while I'm sympathetic to students finding it harder to attend college, I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress. When administrators point this out, the students reiterate how hard it all is, as if doing so will spur the administration to shake the money tree harder until extra cash falls from the skies.


I mean, they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?

I'm fine with protesting the core business model, although I think it's probably a waste of time. What I think these folks are missing is that the universities, even the public ones, have to operate on a budget. Particularly when I read quotes like this from a Maryland student...

Last night I talked with student organizer Bob Hayes, who said students are upset that they are paying more in tuition but getting less from the university and having trouble finding a job. "We feel disconnected from our education," Hayes said. "We're being run by a Fortune 500 company instead of by a university."

I think Hayes is missing a point -- the university isn't your Mom and Dad. It's a legitimate complaint that you're getting less bang for your buck as a consumer of an education -- the point of getting a college education is to get a better job as a result of all of your investment of time and money. If your complaint is that you're not getting an adeqquate bargain, you should want the school to run more like a successful business. Successful businesses aim to make profits, but they do so by satisfying their customers.  I realize Maryland is a public university with an educational mission, but the nature of the university's business structure may be part of the problem.  They don't have the same freedom to cut costs for certain things (like tenured faculty) that other businesses do, so they may have to focus their cuts in areas where the pain is felt by students instead.

What Hayes and others who are dissatisfied with the budget cuts to services they need should do is spend time illustrating why these cuts imperil the university's customers, and at the same time suggest ways the university can deal with the constraints of having less revenue (or public funding, as the case may be). Protesting does little to accomplish that -- it's not like most taxpayers who are struggling to pay their bills give a rat's ass about college students dealing with higher tuition or lesser services.

Meanwhile, Instapundit gives us the image at the right. Is our children learning?

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

The free market works (hat tip: Gizmodo and Instapundit).

Go Phils!

When I was a kid, the Eagles hired Buddy Ryan, who promptly announced that "You've got a winner in town."  I wish he'd been able to prove all his boasts true, but maybe we Philadelphia fans finally have our wish, in the skipper of the Phillies...

The Phillies' manager left New York in November unsatisfied, and is hungry to compete against the Yankees no matter what the setting.


...A few days earlier, Manuel was even more clear about his ultimate desire for 2010. A visitor to his office suggested that a Phils-Seattle World Series - meaning a likely Game 1 duel of Halladay against castaway ace Cliff Lee - would be an entertaining matchup.


"Nah," Manuel said, with a quick and dismissive shake of his head. "I want the Yankees."

What's great about this team is that they won a title and promptly decided that they want to get some real historical acclaim. The title lifted a monkey off everyone's backs, but they really do see themselves as a great team. And they want to beat the best and prove it to everyone.

We haven't seen that from a Philly sports team in a long time. The Eagles have talked the talk for years, but appear satisfied with winning lots of games and maybe having the chips fall their way some year. By contrast, the Phils plan to win another title. Got to love that attitude.

So let's get another shot at the Yankees.  And this time, let's kick their ass.

The Health Care Follies Continue

Well, put on your seatbelts, folks. It's on like Donkey Kong...

President Obama outlined his final version of a health care bill Wednesday and urged Congress to bring the plan to a conclusive vote within the next few weeks.
The president said his nearly $1 trillion proposal is a compromise plan that combines the best ideas of both Democrats and Republicans. He asked Congress to "finish its work" and end what has become a yearlong vitriolic legislative showdown over his top domestic priority.


"Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it," he said. "Now is the time to make a decision about how to finally reform health care so that it works, not just for the insurance companies, but for America's families and America's businesses."


He also came out in support of a controversial legislative maneuver known as reconciliation, which would allow changes to the health care bill to be passed by the Senate with only 51 votes -- a bare legislative majority.


The bill "deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote" that was used to pass President George W. Bush's signature tax cuts and welfare reform in the 1990s, Obama said at the White House.


"At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem, but our ability to solve any problem," he said. "The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future. They are waiting for us to act."


He said he doesn't "know how this plays politically," but knows that "it's right."

Politically, Mr. President, it plays about as well as a wet fart on a first date. But let's get to the response and the reality in any case. Dan Riehl's hopping mad response is what I'd expect will be the response of the conservative base if this travesty passes. But to me, it's more important to examine what the Democratic arguments are for passing the bill and understand why they are mostly, if not all, BS.

1. "It's been a year of debate on the issue, and it's time to act; the staus quo sucks, and we can't let it go on like this." This is the Obama public position substantively, that we can't wait anymore, so it's time to do something. Of course, under the same logic, if your house is suffering from a radon problem, it might make sense to go with the solution where you burn it down for the insurance money.

2. "The Dems will lose at the ballot box in November anyway, so sacrificing a few moderate Democratic seats in exchange for accomplishing the Holy Grail of the Democratic Party is okay." This fails on two counts -- first, the moderates who might lose their jobs probably don't like being the sacrificial lambs for the Democratic Holy Grail -- noble political deaths aren't a concept politicians favor if there's a decent alternative. Second, the moderates may not be as wedded to idea getting comprehensive health care reform as a committed liberal.

3. "The bill will be popular once it passes, because individual pieces of it are popular." Yes, because people love big changes, particularly when it forces them to make changes to their own plans that the President promised wouldn't happen (remember the "If you like your plan, you get to keep it" line?  That will show up in a few campaign ads if this passes).  This misses two more key points.  First, there's a committed number of people who are passionately opposed to the bill, numbering around 40%.  They will keep opposing it unless the bill suddenly creates leprechauns who drop off pots of gold at their house.  Second, the public has to get over the outrage of being told to take its medicine by politicians despite vocally and viscerally registering their discontent with Democratic obsession with this issue while the economy's in the crapper.  My guess is that this won't happen before November.

4.  "Reconciliation is just a process maneuver.  People will forget about the process as soon as the bill is passed."  This assumes the right will let it go, and that Independants will be allowed to forget about it.  By November, if the substance of the bill is still unpopular, the reconciliation method used to pass it will be toxic as hell. Remember these quotes from the now-President regarding what one needs to pass reform...

Change to Win Convention 9/25/07


The bottom line is that our healthcare plans are similar, the question once again is, who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk. That is not just a fifty plus one majority.


Obama Interview with the Concord Monitor 10/9/07


You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of fifty plus one pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of fifty plus one. Then you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One, there are a lot of nice perks, but you can’t deliver on healthcare. We are not going to pass universal health care with a fifty plus one strategy.


Center for American Progress Conference 7/12/06


Those big-ticket items: fixing our health care system. You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives, and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion, is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove where we identify our core base, we throw ’em red meat, we get a fifty plus one victory. See, Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus because he doesn’t believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizeable majority.

I think using reconciliation in the weird way Dems plan to use it (have the House pass the Senate bill, then pass a reconciliation bill, then have the Senate pass a new bill via reconciliation) points out that this is an abuse of the process designed merely to get around not having enough votes. Put simply, the process is rigged now because of the loss of one Senate vote (thank you again, Scott Brown), which shows how precarious the reform deal was.  Liberals want to sell this as a done deal, saved by the President, but conservatives will have plenty of traction selling this as an underhanded, dirty deal, put together by the utterly corrupt Congress.  Even stuff that only looks bad and almost certainly isn't (like nominating the brother of a  House Dem with a swing vote to an appellate court) will get tossed around as part of a "culture of corruption" themre.  And if it were a done deal, they'd be voting by now, as even honest liberals acknowledge.  Which means they're still twisting arms.... which means more chances that there will be corrupt deals.

5.  "This bill may not have everything, like the public option, but there's enough there that makes it worth it.  And it will eventually lead to nationalized healthcare."  Perhaps the worst argument, and one that is aimed at liberals who might be hesitant to support it.  I'm in no position to tell liberals if this is what they want, but I'd caution them against accepting a half-baked proposition that is extremely unpopular.  The logic underlying the debate has been that once the bill passes, we have a new entitlement, and entitlements are impossible to kill.  Perhaps that has been true throughout history, but almost all large entitlement programs had popular support.  This one does not.  What happens if the unintended consequences of going halfway to nationalized healthcare makes the system worse and costlier (as I believe it will)?  Would the public later buy an argument for full  nationalization?  A public option?  Anything involving government?  If the liberal base doesn't buy the argument (and they don't like a bill with a mandate and no public option), they may not materialize at the ballot box this fall... which means a GOP tidal wave may become a tsunami.

6.  "We need to do this, or Obama's Presidency is toast."  This is perhaps the best political argument in favor of passing the bill (and maybe the best argument, which says much for the substance of the bill), except that the lie to this statement is recent history, in the form of the last Democratic President.  Clinton survived the death of his health care reform package politically.  Obama can as well, but the real question is whether his Presidency would extend beyond one term if he passes it.  I think the White House, liberal bloggers, and Democratic strategists are underestimating the public anger about what will happen if the bill passes through the clown show process being put in place, after a year's worth of bad press in what should ahve been a favorable climate.

If the bill does fail, Obama can lean on the Clinton example... although Slick Willie was much more capable of a rally.  The Comeback Kid had done it before -- we don't know whether Obama will cope well with political adversity.  Thus far, he certainly has not done so.

Now, the real question is simple -- does Pelosi have the votes in the House?  The Senate story is simple -- 51 votes is all that's needed, and they can lose up to nine Dems (assuming that Biden can break a tie on a reconciliation bill, which I assume he can... then again, I'd have to wonder if Biden would screw up and vote the wrong way), which seems hard to do in the Senate.  The GOP can delay via amendments, but they can do little else, although a public input amendment process driven by the blogosphere would be entertaining as hell.  Besides, the GOP would then be delaying things that would in part fix bad portions of the already passed piece of crap.  But the House is a different story. Tim Noah does some counting...

The answer begins with the fact that since Nov. 7, when the bill passed the House quite narrowly, 220-215, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost three votes. John Murtha, D-Pa., died; Robert Wexler, D-Fla., resigned to become president of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation; and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, resigned to run for governor. Balanced against these yeas is one nay, Nathan Deal, R-Ga., who just resigned effective March 8 to run for governor. That narrows health reform's victory margin from five votes to three (217-214). If President Obama is serious about acting within six weeks, then the final House vote will come before special elections to replace Wexler (April 13), Murtha (May 18), and Abercrombie (May 22), and probably before any elections to replace Deal, too (though no date has yet been set). Even if the Democrats wait till late May, there's a pretty good chance the special elections will keep the victory margin at three votes (219-216), because Murtha's district tilts slightly Republican; McCain eked out a narrow victory there in 2008. (The other seats are unlikely to change party, judging from the Cook Political Report's partisan voting index.)


We will assume, then, that Pelosi starts with a victory margin of three.


Take away from that three Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich, and Joseph Cao, R-La. Stupak is the author of a House amendment on abortion that has the imprimatur of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Both Stupak and the bishops say they won't support the Senate bill's language on abortion. Neither will Cao, the sole House Republican to vote for health reform on the first go-round. Why not resolve the dispute by putting the Stupak amendment into the reconciliation bill? Because Senate rules won't allow it. To be included in a reconciliation bill, a measure must have some impact on the federal budget.


...Take away Stupak and Cao and the House health-reform bill lacks a majority if the vote is held before the special elections (215-216). It also lacks a majority if the vote is held after the special elections and Murtha's seat goes Republican (217-218). Health reform retains a one-vote margin of victory only if Murtha's seat stays Democratic (218-217). But before you whip out your checkbook and give all your money to Pennsylvania's Democratic party, read on, because health reform's troubles don't end here.


Stupak and Cao aren't the only pro-lifers in the House who will change their vote from yea to nay if health reform doesn't include the Stupak amendment. Stupak says he counts 15 to 20 Democrats who will do so. (Previously, he said there were 40.) Most calculate the Stupak bloc at about one dozen. A Feb. 24 memo by House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., identifies, in addition to Stupak and Cao, 10 House Democrats who may bolt over abortion. In January Nate Silver of the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com calculated only 10 likely Stupak bloc bolters, but six of Silver's 10 (including three of those he deemed most likely) weren't on Cantor's list at all. So lets call it 12.


Take away a dozen votes and the House health-reform bill fails by a 25-vote margin before the special elections (203-228). If the vote is after the special elections and Murtha's seat goes Republican, it also fails by 25 votes (205-230). If Murtha's seat stays Democratic, it fails by 23 votes (206-229).


Pelosi needs to pick up a baker's dozen votes to pass health reform. Where will she get them?

This is really simple math. Pelosi needs to get to 216 votes.   She had 220 last time.  Three votes are gone, and a fourth (Cao) has said he will switch.  Either Pelosi placates the Stupak faction on abortion language (which is possible) or she flips one member who voted no last time for each member of Stupak's coalition.  While losing no one else.

Noah goes on to note that there are Dems who might flip, including committed liberals like Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa.  But Kucinich is smart enough and principled enough to actually think argument #5 is a load of BS.  And Massa now has other issues, which may or may not play into getting his vote. The AP had a rundown of nine potential members of what Jim Geraghty termed "Pelosi's Suicide Squad"...

The Associated Press did a head-count and concluded that “at least 10 of the 39 Democrats — or their spokesmen — either declined to state their positions or said they were undecided about the revised legislation, making them likely targets for intense wooing by Pelosi and Obama. Three of them — Brian Baird of Washington, Bart Gordon of Tennessee and John Tanner of Tennessee — are not seeking reelection this fall. The others are Rick Boucher of Virginia, Suzanne Kosmas of Florida, Frank Kratovil of Maryland, Michael McMahon of New York, Walt Minnick of Idaho, Scott Murphy of New York and Glenn Nye of Virginia. Several lawmakers’ offices did not reply to the AP queries.” After the AP article appeared, Minnick quickly issued a statement that he wasn’t willing to vote “yes.”

Those are the nine members who will likely face the most pressure in the next two weeks, along with the Stupak group. Of course, some of the nine are already folding, and some other yes votes now look like they're flopping to no.

So what's the bottom line?  Megan McArdle is astute as ever when she notes that conservatives/libertarians and liberals seem to be on different planets on the likelihood of this passing, but she's also right in noting that there is no middle ground.  To that end, I think conservatives have been cautious on pronouncing the thing as dead, in part because they know the last rites need to be administered by Democrats, and relying on them to be prudent is tough.  Liberals have a different motivation -- if you keep saying the deal is done, people might believe you, and the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes true. Or they might be telling the truth. Maybe the best thing about all of this is the final line in Peter Suderman's piece...

On the other hand, at least it's almost over. (Maybe!)

Hope and change. Catch it.

Please Don't Make Me Say I Miss Anything From The 1970's

I don't think things are as bad as the third picture.  And technically, I'm able to blot out most of the late 1970's due to the fact that I was under the age of six. 

But the fact that I had to pause for a half-second on deciding whether the third picture has a point says something, and it ain't good.  And worse, President Obama still has at least three more years to prove me wrong.

Reasons I Might Move TO New Jersey

You have to admire a Governor with the cojones to follow through on his promises...

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now.


I heard someone in the legislature say two days ago that they wanted no fare hike in New Jersey Transit, no cuts in service, and no cuts in subsidy. And I was thinking to myself, man I should have made this guy treasurer. [Laughter] Because if you can pull that one off, you're obviously magic.


This is the type of awful political rhetoric that people sent me to this city to stop.


I would love to be able to do that, but I can't. I would love to tell you that municipal aid will stay level, but it's not. And it's not because we don't have the money. So you need to prepare. You need to prepare for what's coming down the line because we have no choice but to do these things.


And so we need to get honest with each other. In this instance, the political class,for which unfortunately all of us are a member of, the political class is lagging behind the public on this. The public is ready to hear that tough choices have to be made. They're not going to like it. Don't confuse the two. But they are ready to hear the truth.


In fact, they find it refreshing to hear the truth.


They are tired of hearing, don't worry I can spare you from the pain, because they have been hearing that for a decade, as we have borrowed and spent and taxed our way into oblivion.


We have done every quick fix in the book that you can do. And now we are left, literally holding the bag.


Leadership should be about making tough decisions. I'm not hear to tell you that anything you are going to have to do as mayors, council people will be easy. But I firmly believe after spending the last year traveling around the state of New Jersey, talking to regular citizens, that this is what they are expecting us to do.


...We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.


And so the path to reform and success is clear. We know what it is. We just have to have the courage to go there. What we are doing is showing people that government can work again for them, not for us. Government has worked for the political class for much too long.


There's no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.


We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.


I firmly believe we will land and we will be fine. It does not mean it will not be a scary ride on the way down. And it does not mean there won't be moments of fear and moments of apprehension.


But for certain, the troops of the decades of overspending and overborrowing and overtaxing have gained on us. So the ruination of New Jersey's economy, and of the quality of life we want all our citizens to have, is certain if we do not take this course.


It's time for us to hold hands and jump off the cliff. It's time for us to do the difficult things that need to be done and to stop playing the petty politics of yesterday, of lying to the people telling them they do not have to pay for it because someone else will.


We are going to make the leap because that's what people elected me to do. We are going to make the leap because it is the responsible thing to do. We are going to make the leap and we are going to do it together because that is what leadership demands for us. That is what the responsibility of the offices we hold requires of us.

As Moe Lane notes, that is from the Governor of New Jersey.   Maybe hope and change does exist.

Album Cover Nostalgia

A new recurring series inspired by the Lord of Truth. We all remember certain album covers fondly -- here's one more.


You have to admire Pink Floyd. This cover is simple and to the point. Probably impossible today, because no company exec would agree top something this minimalist, but it was pretty much brilliant for an iconic album.

Although maybe someone will one day try to place Scorpions CDs in blank covers like this. That way, someone might mistakenly buy one.

Giving Us The Gas

Oh, yes, this will be popular...

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.


To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.


The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if gas prices hit $7 a gallon, the administration won't need to worry about the populace being irate over healthcare. They'll be trying to avoid people with pitchforks instead.

TV Nostalgia

A new series, inspired by loyal reader ST. These are the moments of television past that YouTube was designed to bring back to us.

I love The Simpsons.  Seinfeld was a cultural phenomenan.  South Park is one of the best pieces of satire ever.  Friends was the recipient of tons of media attention because it had so many young beautiful people.  The Cosby Show was a landmark.

But the most underrated show of the last 25 years is Cheers.  It wasn't underrated when it was on television, but it's slowly been forgotten, even though it was #1 in the ratings for most of the last few years of its 11 season run.  The show deserves credit for going out on top, too.

And it's only appropriate to link to the last 20 minutes of the show's run if we're going to do the nostalgia appropriately.  Cliff's shoes theory still holds water, by the way; plus, I'm pretty sure Woody's City Council election theme was hope and change.  And for the record, I miss the place where everybody knows your name.

Things We Can Do Without

Megan McArdle discusses why we're unlikely to see the Postal Service disappear soon enough, even though it's an anchronism and a budget drain. Personally, if we can save $23 billion a year in spending, I'll gladly forego the need to send and receive Christmas cards. Shouldn't we be sending those via email anyway?

Maybe He Should Have More Beer Summits

Allahpundit explains why the President shouldn't moderate his alcohol intake, whatever the doctors might say...

Four hackish thoughts off the top of my head about the president imbibing. (1) It’s probably the only way he can understand Biden. (2) Now we know where that famous mellow temperament comes from. (3) If I had to deal with Reid and Pelosi every day, I’d go straight to heroin. (4) They should put the intervention on C-SPAN.

Unfortunately, the President probably needed to cut back on the hard stuff, after cutting a deal with Ben Nelson to only drink wine from Nebraska.

I actually feel for the President on this stuff. The focus on his inability to quit smoking is pretty much ridiculous -- did we really expect a guy who was still trying to quit the habit to do so when he got dropped into one of the most pressure-packed jobs on the planet?

This Is Why You Watch Old Episodes of Your Favorite Shows

So I'm watching an old episode of South Park last night from 2004. It's their classic parody of the 2004 Presidential campaign, entitled Douche and Turd. By way of background, here's the Wikipedia summary...

During a pep rally at the South Park Elementary School, a group of local PETA eco-terrorists protests the use of a cow as a mascot (for "the 47th time"). The school agrees to pick a new mascot, and the students are told to vote for said new mascot. Embarrassed by the bland choices, the kids decide to fill in a joke candidate but disagree as to whether it should be a "giant douche" or a "turd sandwich." Kyle rallies his friends to fill in the giant douche, and Cartman gathers support for the turd sandwich. Cartman wins Butters' support (by slanting the question when asking Butters which of the two choices was funnier). The result is the two joke candidates get the most votes and the students must choose between the two in an election.

Which leads to the following scene. Make note of the campaign theme Cartman uses for the Turd Sandwich (about 1:30 or so into the clip), and keep in mind they did this in 2004, four years prior to Obama's victory in 2008.



Who knew Parker and Stone were inspirations for President Obama's campaign team?

Hopefully The Last Word On John Edwards

Michael Calderone at Politico asks whether the press is doing a decent job vetting Presidential candidates, in light of the John Edwards revelations...

Over the past few weeks, the world has learned quite enough about John Edwards – from the lies he told in trying to cover up an adulterous affair to the compulsive vanity that left some people close to him questioning his judgment and even his grip on reality.

Democrats who seriously considered making Edwards the party’s 2008 presidential nominee could be forgiven for asking: Now you tell us?

The revelations about Edwards, contained in two best-selling books, have undermined one of the favorite conceits of political journalism, that the intensive scrutiny given candidates by reporters during a presidential campaign is an excellent filter to determine who is fit for the White House.

While the media “usually does well” in vetting candidates, said presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “Edwards is a good case” in which it didn’t.

And that failure is worrisome in a changed political world where politicians - be they Barack Obama or Sarah Palin - can burst upon the national stage and seemingly overnight become candidates for higher office.

The media, according to Beschloss, now has “a much bigger responsibility than it used to.” In the past, he said, the political establishment “would usually have known the candidate for a long time, and if there were big problems, they probably would have known about those, and tried to make sure those people wouldn’t be nominated.”

Calderone's story briefly hits upon the fact that conservatives tend to think the failure to vet is ideological, but spends most of the story trying to figure out where the blame should go for the failure to get the story. As you might guess, I think he's burying the real problem for the press -- many in the mainstream media did not want to cover the Edwards story. By contrast, Sarah Palin's vetting by the media in 2008 was insane. Loyal reader ST recently sent me this post by Andrew Sullivan, a mea culpa by Sullivan for failing to cover Edwards as aggressively as Palin...

I've been thinking about what seems to me a double standard in my treatment of vice-presidential frauds, with respect to Sarah Palin and John Edwards, and trying to figure out where I went wrong. No, I'm not backtracking on Palin: all I regret is not being able to expose her for real yet. But I'm a blogger not an investigative reporter; my job as I see it, is to make sense of the facts on the table and disseminate them, not to do the vital legwork to get new facts. And there's also the obvious fact that Palin was a total unknown and we had only two months to figure out who she was, especially since she wasn't vetted by McCain in any serious way. But Edwards came closer to power than Palin did in the end - Bush's second victory was nowhere near as decisive as Obama's. And we know now what a narcissistic creep and liar he was. I don't believe that politicians should be saints, but I do believe that character matters, which is why my favorite presidents remain Reagan and Obama.

So why did I let it go? My first reason is my leeriness of investigating people's sex lives. I had my own ransacked a decade ago and it was a brutalizing experience. The exposure of such intimate thing coarsens our discourse, violates human dignity and should, in my view, be done only if massive hypocrisy is on the table and the person is more than just a minor public figure. That's why I've long opposed outing people.

So I steered clear out of this sensitivity. I barely covered the Tiger Woods stuff for those reasons, and even came to defend Clinton in the end because of the callousness and fanaticism of Ken Starr. But there was something else at work here in the case of Edwards, I suspect.

It just seemed too awful for me to believe. I mean his wife, whom I took to be a very decent person, had terminal cancer. Although adultery is extremely common - especially among people disturbed enough to seek political office - I dismissed it too easily. I mean his wife was confronting death on a daily basis. I just couldn't believe a husband could do that to his wife then. I also felt protective toward Elizabeth, feeling that investigating this would be deeply hurtful to a woman faced with mortality. Maybe my own brushes with mortality affected me in this as well.

In all this, of course, I was wrong. It really was that bad, and if Game Change is to be believed (and I think it broadly is), it was even worse. My mistake as a journalist was in making an assumption of a baseline of decency in public officials that it is not my job to make. My job is to assume nothing and to trust nothing until verified. One doesn't have to pry; but when rumors emerge, we should not be deferent with public officials. We should ask questions.

ST asked whether I felt vindicated by Sullivan's statement. I think I feel heartened that Sullivan sees one of the issues that I did, that anyone who wanted to pick apart Palin for having deficiencies in her character might have done well to say the same about Edwards, where the flaws are (in my eyes) more readily apparent. Now, Sullivan probably doesn't agree that Edwards is as unprepared for the Presidency as Sarah Palin (or, for that matter, the current President). But it's pretty clear that Palin was subjected to lots of questions about her preparedness, whereas few in the media ever spent time wondering why a former trial lawyer with less than one term in the Senate was actually qualified to be VP for John Kerry. But I'll settle for people realizing that Edwards' vetting was inadequate.

At the same time, I don't think it's Sullivan's job to issue the mea culpa. As he noted, he's a blogger, not an investigative reporter, or someone who's reporting on the Presidential race. He traffics in rumors about Sarah Palin and chose not to do so about John Edwards, but bloggers tend to blog about what interests them, and Sullivan's unhealthy obsession with Palin (which tends toward the publication of thoroughly unsubstantiated rumors) hurts his credibility. He doesn't need to traffic in such stories about Edwards, just to prove that he's even-handed. What reporters need to do is follow actual stories to determine their veracity. As a blogger, Sullivan does more reporting about the news than gathering it -- here, he's been ill-served by the news gatherers he trusted. Perhaps the best lesson might be to learn to trust the National Enquirer, of all things, since they reported the story and got it right.

The bigger issue is why the media did not cover this story. There is a decent argument to be made that the failure to cover the story stemmed from factors other than political bias -- Sullivan makes a more decent case for it in his blog post, and I think those factors played a role in the decision not to report the story. But on balance, I think it's also likely that bias played a role in the failure to report the story. Recall that in the same campaign season when the media was ignoring the Enquirer's work on Edwards, the New York Times published a hit piece on John McCain alleging that he had an improper relationship with a lobbyist. And in 2004, the mainstream media ignored the Swift Boat Veterans until John Kerry was forced to take on their accusations. And don't get me started on Dan Rather.

I think the conservative distrust of the mainstream media is fueled by such episodes. I have trouble believing that a GOP Presidential candidate would ever make it through the campaign without getting vetted adequately by the media; by contrast, I'm pretty sure most Democrats will cruise unless opposition within their own party tries to sink them. The downside for Democrats in this double standard is that their candidates may not be adequately prepped for dealing with adversity from adverse stories (see Kerry in 2004) or for dealing with adversity once in the office (see, well, now).

As to John Edwards... I don't know that the media failed the populace in 2004 by failing to figure out he was a narcissistic douchebag, or at least figure it out and report it -- I suspected it in 2004 from afar, and I'm guessing at least some journalists saw stuff that confirmed what I believed (that he was a phony). But they failed in 2008 -- and if they can't admit that it was at least in part due to bias, it's why they will continue to fail in the future.

What Annoying Song Is Stuck In My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

This is a defining song for this category -- I hate this song, have always hated it, and will hate it for the rest of time (it's somewhere behind Styx' Come Sail Away in my top ten of most annoying songs ever). It's not that it's particularly awful; it's bad, but most of the hatred stems from listening to it far too often in college. Hell, even the Scorpions produced better music than this crap. Hearing ten seconds of it yesterday was awful -- my ears are still recovering.



You're welcome.

Mom Always Said If You Don't Have Something Nice To Say...

Sometimes, you just have to shake your head...

Freed from his life sentence, the Lockerbie bomber was sent home by the Scots on compassionate grounds because he had 'just three months' to live.

But six months later, Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi is still living - and doing it in the lap of luxury.

Yesterday, his elderly father even held out the prospect of him beating the prostate cancer that doctors said would kill him by last Christmas.

I'm sure the Brits will excuse this by telling everyone that eventually, he will die.

So You Say You Want A Revolution

Apparently, this editorialist at the Philadelphia Inquirer really wants Obama to imitate FDR...

This may come as a surprise to some people, but the U.S. Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court.

...So if nine justices is not writ in stone, the embattled President Obama should deal with this hostile conservative/reactionary court by adding three members.

The court's recent controversial decision equating corporations with individuals turned an already overly money-influenced campaign system into a veritable free-for-all of propaganda for corporate and vested interests. It was met with criticism by most legal scholars, praised only by corporate mouthpieces.

Even Barack "Can't We All Get Along?" Obama criticized the decision in his State of the Union speech. A lot of good that will do. The court has four hard-liners who are against what Obama strives for, and a so-called swing voter, Anthony Kennedy, who votes with them in the big cases.

As the court stands, it is reminiscent of the stonewall President Franklin Roosevelt faced in opposition to his New Deal legislation. Four entrenched reactionary justices, known as the "Four Horsemen," were not only anti-New Deal, but some demonstrated a personal dislike for FDR.

... In response, Roosevelt sought to appoint an additional justice for each incumbent justice who reached the age of 70 and refused retirement, with a maximum size of 15 justices. The phrase "packing the court" became the pejorative that turned the public against FDR's plan.

Trust me when I say this -- even Obama's not this tone-deaf politically. They may pass a healthcare reform bill via reconciliation (and reap a whirlwind of sheer electoral pain that may portend real "change"), but doing something like this might make politics permanently disfunctional in this country. And if FDR couldn't sell it, we doubt Obama could, based on his sale of his agenda thus far. Leave it to my hometown paper to publish an idea this dumb.

The Health Care Follies Continue

Andy McCarthy worries that the Democrats will ignore public opinion and enact Obamacare...

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Consequently, the next six weeks, like the next ten months, are going to be worse than we think. We're wired to think that everyone plays by the usual rules of politics — i.e., if the tide starts to change, the side against whom it has turned modifies its positions in order to stay viable in the next election. But what will happen here will be the opposite. You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftists who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that's what everybody in their position does. But they won't. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back. The only question is whether there are enough Democrats who are conventional politicians and who care about being reelected, such that they will deny the leadership the numbers it needs. But I don't think we should take much heart in this possibility. Those Democrats may well come to think they are going to lose anyway — that's why so many of them are abandoning ship now. If that's the case, their incentive will be to vote with the leadership.

Ed Morrissey thinks this worry is overblown...

They didn’t gain the majority by elected over 300 cardboard cutouts of Nancy Pelosi as Representatives and Senators. While Andy is spot-on about Pelosi and her clique being descendants of the New Left radicals of the 1960s (as is Barack Obama), that’s not true for a large portion of their caucus, especially those representing red districts and red states. Not only is political suicide much more likely for them than it is for Pelosi, Anthony Weiner, Jarrold Nadler, et al, they’re temperamentally different from the leadership clique as well.

That doesn’t mean that they can’t get bulldozed into compliance, but it does make it a more difficult proposition for Pelosi to hold her caucus together. We’re already seeing signs of it splintering, and as this effort gets closer to the midterm elections, that will increase proportionately. Blue Dogs are already unhappy with the direction of ObamaCare — and so are progressives, but for diametrically opposed reasons. The summit may have helped to pull recalcitrant moderates in line, but Democrats got punked at the televised spectacle and have no fig leaf to wear to support a radical mechanism in pushing through a radical bill.

I don't want to rely on the Democrats acting logically at this point, although I think Morrissey's point is actually pretty strong. At this point, I tend to think moderate Democrats don't want to to have to take a vote on health care reform. They just wish the damn thing would go away and die, so that their political careers don't. Many on the left are making the counter-argument that it would be worse not to pass a bill at this point, which if true is absolutely hilarious to me. I'm not sure how that works -- passing what the majority of the public perceive as a crappy bill and what the left perceives as insufficient will somehow keep Democrats from losing as badly? I found this little quote from Juan Williams of NPR, appearing on Fox News Sunday, illuminating...

But not coming from the -- the difference here is that Rahm Emanuel is a hardball political player. And his attitude towards the health care reform deal, towards cap-and-trade and these other things that have not come to pass, is, Don't worry about public opinion. We've got a Democratic majority on the Hill. We'll focus on the Democratic majority. We'll focus on the process and we will get it done.

And the big failure on health care, as we've just discussed in the previous panel, is the American people aren't eating the dog food. So if that's the case, you've got to go out there and sell, and you've got to do it effectively.

Williams is clearly discussing the issue from the perspective of whether Rahm Emanuel gets to fall on his sword if health care fails. But it's more telling that Williams, who is a committed liberal, analogizes the Democrats health care reform package to dog food. And how you can't get the public to eat dog food. It reminds us of the Simpsons episode where Bart gives up his dog, Santa's Little Helper, in exchange for a brilliant superdog named Laddie. Bart soon realizes he wants his old dog back and gives Laddie away as well, but bursts into tears telling his family that he wants to get back Santa's Little Helper. Homer comforts Bart and tries to encourage his son to take action instead of crying...

Homer: "Well, crying isn't gonna bring him back, unless your tears smell like dog food. So you can either sit there crying and eating can after can of dog food until your tears smell enough like dog food to make your dog come back -- or you can go out there and find your dog."

Bart: (drying tears) "You're right! I'll do it." (sprints out of the kitchen)

Homer: (upset) "Rats. I almost had him eating dog food!"

Back to the issue at hand. I think the Beltway opinion on this reflects the point that plenty of Democrats don't want to deal with this issue any more. I think President knew that, and tried the summit in an attempt to change the narrative, if not shift the momentum entirely (and yes, I'm aware of the fact that if use the word "gamechange", it would tie the record for most overused political cliches in one paragraph). That didn't succeed; even though the health care plan got more support than it has since November in the Rasmussen poll, it's still sucking wind with very passionate opponents at 43% versus passionate supporters at 22%. Yet the Democratic leadership is putting on a public face of insistence that they will move this bill through to signature. And the Dems even picked up a vote today, with the resignation of a GOP Congressman making it necessary for Pelosi to only net 216 votes instead of 217.

The real question is whether that public face is a bluff, or reflects the real determination that they can and will get something done. I believe the arm-twisting has started in private and public, and will continue all month until the Dems can get a deal. What's working against a deal is the fact that everyone is also setting the table to be able to blame someone else if it falls through -- the Senate will blame the House, the House will blame the Senate, the President will blame both houses, and all three will blame the GOP. At the same time, more people in the middle are supporting the idea of starting over. Here's Warren Buffett...



There's the opening for the President, if he wants to take it. Perhaps that's why we're seeing some movement toward a smaller bill now...

President Obama will soon propose a health care bill that will be "much smaller" than the House bill but "big enough" to put the country on a "path" toward health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday.

"In a matter of days, we will have a proposal," Pelosi said, pointing to Obama's forthcoming bill.

"It will be a much smaller proposal than we had in the House bill because that's where we can gain consensus. But it will be big enough to put us on a path of affordable, quality health care for all Americans that holds insurance companies accountable."

A senior administration official told Fox Obama's proposal will be introduced Wednesday.

Melody Barnes, a top Obama domestic policy adviser, did not dispute Pelosi's characterization of the new plan as smaller in scope -- and quite possibly in cost -- than either the House or Senate health care bills.

The real question is whather such a smaller bill is actually a real effort at moderation or a political prop designed to get moderate Dems on board. My guess is the latter, because I doubt Pelosi would stay in line if it wasn't sufficient to the left. This thing isn't dead yet -- I get the feeling that we need to sweat out everyone of the 247 days between now and November 3rd before we can feel like Obamacare has gone by the wayside.

Album Cover Nostalgia

A new recurring series inspired by the Lord of Truth. We all remember certain album covers fondly -- here's one more.

There's not a lot to say about this album, except it's one of my favorites. The artwork's simple, but I think the music more than makes up for it. Plus, any band that tries to name itself after Mookie Blaylock and then names their debut album after him... well, that makes them cool before you get to the music. And the music, quite simply, rocked.

And I'd normally mock the Scorpions here, but comparing them to Pearl Jam would be like comparing a run-of-the-mill Little Leaguer to a MLB All Star. Actually, let me take that back, because that may be taking it too far. In reality, it would be like comparing a tee-ball player to a MLB Hall of Famer.

Of course, the Scorpions probably stink at tee-ball as well.

What Annoying Song Is Stuck In My Head Today?

If I need to suffer with a song stuck in my head, why shouldn't you have to do the same? Sometimes they're good, most times they're bad... but no matter what, they make you suffer. So I like to share the suffering whenever it happens.

I don't really find this song annoying, and I also don't think it's one that gets stuck in other people's heads. Just mine, and I'm not sure why. I also know there's another version of the song with Chad Kroeger on lead, but I'm more likely to use Nickleback some other time for this feature, so might as well use Alex Band here. Plus, you have to love a song where the video looks like it was filmed for less than $500 using the people who showed up in a park that day.



You're welcome.