I assume this is going forward with coordination with Gov. Lynch's office. If so, the Democrats might reach that often-discussed milestone - 60 seats in the Senate.
One of the reasons I've found it nearly impossible to watch the news of late. These numbers are bad. But I think the point at the end is even more disturbing because it is so true - the anchors are continually parroting inane, wrong and and extreme talking points (that seem to come either from a Republican "think" tank, or badly cribbed notes for a student barely passing a high school Free Enterprise class.)
Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, Jr. Why? Check out who the possible future presidential candidate was praising as epitomizing the best of Utah:
Huntsman praised several guests in the gallery who he said epitomized the best of the state, including University of Utah quarterback Brian Johnson and kicker Louie Sakoda, and High School Musical star Lucas Gabreel.
Yep, none other than Sharpay's brother Ryan. Sure, he appears to have been praising him for reasons tied to Utah's economy, but it's nice to see someone appreciate Ryan.
Which two Democratic senators voted for confirming John Ashcroft as Attorney General but against confirming Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary? The answer is below.
Robert Byrd and Russ Feingold.
He's calling him a huge liar. Which given similar calls would seem to open the door even wider to a primary challenge from Andrew Cuomo. Won't it be odd if Paterson bad-mouthing a Kennedy leads to the ex-husband of a Kennedy becoming governor?
But all I can remember is Kristin Scott Thomas looking hotter than possibly any woman has looked before in the history of planet Earth.
I officially don't get it. It had a laugh or two. I always like J.K. Simmons, and Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins were good. I think I have a basic grasp of what the Coens were going for. But how in the world is this movie ending up on Top 10 of the year lists? I'd put it more in B-/C+ territory.
Actually that makes a lot of sense, though it isn't something I'd thought about. Mayor, governor, senator, the Secretary of Interior, he seems scandal-free, capable, well-liked, and his principles are those of a very conservative Republican, but his appearance and personal style aren't of the sort that would scare off moderates.
And as long as I'm noting a 2012 possibility, yesterday I saw John McCain talking up the junior senator from Arizona, Jon Kyl. He could be a serious candidate as well.
So which respected, inoffensive Republican senator may be primaried? Isakson? Grassley? Bennett?
While Charlie Cook's point is a good one, the Republicans don't have a monopoly on making divisive choices when it comes to 2010 Senate races. The appointees from Illinois and (the likely appointee from) New York show leading Democrats can lack political acumen as well.
Except when it will.
I should note that I think a blanket ban of this sort is silly and in some cases counterproductive (much like I view that gimmick about freezing the pay of the White House staff). But if you are going to have an iron-clad rule - ummm, isn't it supposed to apply broadly?
So it looks like last night Gov. Paterson kicked Caroline Kennedy to the curb. Who will the new nominee be then? Halperin has a list of possibilities. I'm betting it'll be Kirsten Gillibrand. Off Halperin's list, I'd rather it was Brian Higgins or Steve Israel or maybe Byron Brown (I don't know anything about Randi Weingarten). I'll be most annoyed if it's Andrew Cuomo.
They are coming in right now - and Kate Winslet is nominated for Best Actress for The Reader, not Revolutionary Road! So she obviously isn't a double nominee this year. Remember she won the Supporting prize at The Golden Globes for The Reader. Daldry's The Reader also snagged Best Director and Best Picture nominations.
...or did the air smell a bit sweeter just past noon today?
And I swear the sky got a bit sunnier, too.
This sounds silly and expensive.
Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word - nationalization. The truth is that Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already wards of the state, utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.
Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal - and that we're about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job.
I find the phrasing Bush partisans use on this issue to be bizarre to begin with - what, attacks on US citizens beyond US borders are something that doesn't involve the US government? But even if one wants to only count terrorist attacks agasint Americans on US soil as the real terrorist attacks, they didn't stop on 9/11.
Marcy Wheeler notes it was a lot of union members. Also related to that crash - do we really want Cost Benefit Analysis applied to matters like airline safety?
WVU's hiring of Bob Huggins stunk of the hire-my-college-roomie syndrome you see too much at the top level in West Virginia, and that's before one gets into the ethical iffyness of some of his teams over the years. So I'm not inclined to be a fan. But even given my low expectations - yeesh. USF had no business coming back from what seemed like 30 down (no, it wasn't that much - but they were far behind WVU), and if they hadn't had a string of poor possessions in the last 3 minutes, WVU could very well have lost. I miss John Beilein.
The New York Times gasbag (or if you prefer, terrible writer known for selling simplistic, sometimes incoherent, ideas) gets knocked around rather deliciously.
This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.
Indeed. But the best part is the end of the column where he unpacks Friedman's "analysis".
In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out: "I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years." ...
Obviously this sounds like a flippant analysis, but that's more or less exactly what Friedman is up to here. If you're going to draw a line that measures the level of "freedom" across the entire world and on that line plot just four randomly-selected points in time over the course of 30 years -and one of your top four "freedom points" in a 30-year period of human history is the privatization of a Nigerian oil field - well, what the fuck? What can't you argue, if that’s how you’re going to make your point? He could have graphed a line in the opposite direction by replacing Berlin with Tiananmen Square, substituting Iraqi elections for Iran’s call for Israel’s destruction (incidentally, when in the last half-century or so have Islamic extremists not called for Israel’s destruction?), junking Iran's 1997 call for dialogue for the U.S. sanctions against Iran in '95, and so on. It’s crazy, a game of Scrabble where the words don’t have to connect on the board, or a mathematician coming up with the equation A B -3X = Swedish girls like chocolate.
Read the whole thing to see Friedman's 4 points - and the other relationships they can predict.
The New York Times gasbag (or if you prefer, terrible writer known for selling simplistic, sometimes incoherent, ideas) gets knocked around rather deliciously.
This is Friedman's life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee's signs.
Indeed. But the best part is the end of the column where he unpacks Friedman's "analysis".
In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out: "I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years." ...
Obviously this sounds like a flippant analysis, but that's more or less exactly what Friedman is up to here. If you're going to draw a line that measures the level of "freedom" across the entire world and on that line plot just four randomly-selected points in time over the course of 30 years -and one of your top four "freedom points" in a 30-year period of human history is the privatization of a Nigerian oil field - well, what the fuck? What can't you argue, if that’s how you're going to make your point? He could have graphed a line in the opposite direction by replacing Berlin with Tiananmen Square, substituting Iraqi elections for Iran's call for Israel's destruction (incidentally, when in the last half-century or so have Islamic extremists not called for Israel's destruction?), junking Iran's 1997 call for dialogue for the U.S. sanctions against Iran in '95, and so on. It's crazy, a game of Scrabble where the words don't have to connect on the board, or a mathematician coming up with the equation A B -3X = Swedish girls like chocolate.
Read the whole thing to see Friedman's 4 points - and the other relationships they can predict.
That's lower - 10% lower - than the number recorded for any other president in the history of the poll.
Hilzoy thinks Obama has to do it:
It seems to me that these facts imply that if Barack Obama, or his administration, believe that there are reasonable grounds to believe that members of the Bush administration have committed torture, then they are legally obligated to investigate; and that if that investigation shows that acts of torture were committed, to submit those cases for prosecution, if the officials who committed or sanctioned those acts are found on US territory. If they are on the territory of some other party to the Convention, then it has that obligation. Under the Convention, as I read it, this is not discretionary. And under the Constitution, obeying the laws, which include treaties, is not discretionary either.
UPDATE: The Lithwick and Sands article Hilzoy is drawing from:
The former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and general counsel for the Department of the Army has spoken. Her clear words have been picked up around the world. And that takes the prospects of accountability and criminal investigation onto another level. For the Obama administration, the door to the do-nothing option is now closed. That is why today may come to be seen as the turning point.
Clearly, it was Ricardo Montalban. I am firmly convinced that without him, the Star Trek would franchise would have died:
Some people have a sick sense of humor. I think that's the only possible explanation for the guild nominations for Mamma Mia! by the editors and the costume designers.
Sounds like it's as deep and insightful as Crash.
And so when I tell you that Gran Torino is one of the most offensive films this year, I'm of course referring to the saltiness of its dialogue. But only in part. Because as odious and indefensible as Walt’s vernacular is on its own, the most repulsive thing about Gran Torino is its structure, which is thin, repetitive, amateurish and, oh yeah, entirely hypocritical ...
But in the meantime Gran Torino teaches us some other things. It teaches us that slurs are okay, even if you mean them, so long as you’re charming. It teaches us that the Hmong might be good people, but that if they want to get anything done (fix appliances, clean up a yard, end a gang war) they need whitey to help. And it teaches us that Clint Eastwood can get away with bloody well anything.
Well no wonder whitey likes its so much (big box office numbers for this one). I lost interest when I first saw the preview and couldn't stop thinking of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man.
Will be playing at Sundance. Can it be worse than what was done to The Rules of Attraction?
Ritholtz gets shrill.
Its long overdue. From the efficient-market theories, to the concept of man as rational profit maximizers, much of the edifice that is was the Chicago school of economics is based on a foundation that is false, disproven or otherwise questionable.
I first encountered the Chicago theory in law school. The Chicagoists somehow read into law a market efficiency component that was never there. I recoiled against it - not because of the libertarianism, which I embraced. Rather, it seemed a backdoor way to circumvent democracy, and force into the legal system rules that were never debated, voted on, or agreed to by a representative government. I found the extremist legal theories of Judges like Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook intellectually repulsive. They were undemocratic, anti-representative government. When I told a professor that the law and economics movement was an attempt at a political coup, he laughed and said, try to stop it ...
If there is one silver lining in the entire collapse, its that this group of intellectual charlatans have been revealed as utterly wanting.
No doubt many find this frustrating. But it could well be a good thing in terms of securing the country's best interests.
"Look, I think [Hillary Clinton] is loyal to a fault," he commented by e-mail. "She takes care of her own people, even when that is to her detriment, as was obvious during the campaign. Biden to a lesser extent, but there it is obvious that he would bring his own people from his Foreign Relations Committee staff into the government to advise him."
"As for Obama, as great as he is, loyalty is not his primary consideration in personnel selection," he continued. "He wants to pick the best and brightest, and he doesn't particularly care whether or not you were there with him from the very beginning. How else do you explain the Jim Jones pick for NSC?"
Given the disasters that stemmed from George W. Bush prioritizing loyalty above all else, this is another reason to greet his exit with cheers. And probably another reason we should be happy Obama, and not Clinton, was elected to succeed him.
This is just too good. Rick Warren's been meddling in the Episcopal Church. He apparently thinks it's too gay-friendly, so he's been doing what he can to break it. Well guess who the president-elect has invited to deliver the invocation at the kick-off of inaugural weekend? A gay Episcopalian bishop. Nice.
So I was listening to it more than watching it. What made a mark (in between Slumdog's expected string of prizes)? Sally Hawkins' and Colin Farrell's wins (even though Brendan Gleeson was better in In Bruges) and their sweet speeches, Mickey Rourke thanking his dogs, and, most of all, Kate Winslet's double win, for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Everything about her was lovely. Oh, and course I was pleased by Laura Dern's win for Recount and Alec Baldwin's for 30 Rock. Finally, Zachary Quinto really knows how to dress.
And wouldn't it be great if every awards show dispensed with a host?
Will it happen? Will the Steelers beat the Ravens? Will the Eagles beat the Cardinals?
According to several news reports the senior senator from Ohio will announce tomorrow that he's not going to run for reelection in 2010. He'll be the fourth Republican incumber to announce that (following senators from Florida, Kansas and Missouri), and President-elect Obama hasn't even been sworn in yet. This doesn't bode well for Republicans as they try to regroup after two of the worst election cycles they've seen in decades. Apparently Lt. Governor Lee Fisher and Rep. Tim Ryan are the leading Democratic prospects, but I hope Rep. Betty Sutton jumps into the race.
I think this film was unfairly maligned. I can see many people, lots and lots and lots of them, including film critics, not liking this. It's a disturbing story about unpleasant people. But that said, it's very well made. The performances by Julianne Moore and Stephen Dillane are both strong, and even though it was made on a fairly low budget it looks gorgeous. The director, who made Swoon back in the early 1990's, does good work. It's visually interesting. The score's lovely. All in all, as a piece of craft, it's well done. Now, true, it's about people who you aren't likely to like, and who do some terrible and unpleasant things. So I hesitate to recommend it. But I think it's a good movie, though I understand why some wouldn't like it.
Stephen Walt smacks Peter Feaver upside the head (his language is more polite than that, but that's the effect).
And over 90% of Republicans are voting against the bill. Sure, they'll whine about the rule and those scary, scary trial lawyers - but damn do they remain stupid politically. Apparently they want 2010 to look like 2006 and 2008.
TPM Election Central has a report. Anyone know anything about Shapiro, Torsella or Wiessmann?
I had no idea it was being remade. And that strikes me as a terrible idea. But if it gets more people to watch the original, well, I guess I can get behind that.
The best predictor of Best Picture nominees has announced its top 5 - the 5 movies that have appeared to be the favorites for the Best Picture nominations for some time now.
I realize that Blago is either the dumbest or the most corrupt politician (or both!) in America these days. I follow that much.
What I don't get is why the US Senate is refusing to seat Burris. Follow me here:
1. Blago is the governor.
1A) He might not be for long, but he is now.
2. The laws in Illinois say that the Governor gets to pick someone to serve out a seat if a Senator leaves.
3. Obama (a sitting Senator) left.
4. Blago choose someone (Burris).
What am I missing here? I understand that everyone is worked up over Blago, and that Burris has said some odd things, but in what legal way is Burris not a Senator? I understand the politics here (Blago = BAD!), but this is stupid.
Between refusing Burris, Feinstein hosing Panetta, and wavering on Franken, the Democrats in the Senate seem to be trying to showcase why Americans like to vote Republican.
This makes a lot of sense to me.
He knows Washington. He knows the White House, and he knows how to serve the President, who is the CIA's main client. Lets not underestimate this kind of experience - most are looking for supply-side, Intel product production experience. Panetta has consumer, client-based experience. He knows what needs to come out of the agency, and can press the agency to produce a higher quality product that is at is useful to for the President. He also knows the budget and the Hill, so he can get the agency the money it needs and build a positive relationship with Congress.
If he stands up for his people, rewards good work, and puts together a good management team, he can do well. Recall that one former DCI, George Bush, had no intel experience when he took over, and he seems to have done quite well for himself, as they named the building after him.
There's going to be another film adaptation of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. This one will star Keira K.
That is one bad movie. It's funny here and there, and there are certainly worse things in the world than looking at Eva Mendes, but I think giving it a C- grade would be generous.
But hey, I got to see both Casablancas brothers in the previews, and at least that brought a smile to my face.
Yeah, suuuure the traditional media and CNN are friendly to Democrats. I think I've heard more reporters (not economists mind you) worrying about the deficit and federal spending over the course of this morning than I heard over the entirity of the Bush administration. This isn't to say they are tax-cut friendly (Krugman is very concerned about the size of those) - they appear to be cringing about both tax cuts and spending. Because the anchor just did the math and noted ... we're going to be spending more money than we are taking in!
One really wonders 1) where these people were while Bush exploded the deficit the last 8 years, and 2) if they understand even the slightest thing about the current economic situation.
Craddick has been an enormously influential figure in Texas politics. He's represented Midland in the Texas House since 1969. In 2003 he became Speaker of the House, the first Republican Speaker of the Texas House, and has ruled over that body with an iron hand. But that day has ended. He is no longer seeking reelection to the Speakership. It remains to be seen if he can block a coalition of his opponents from taking power - but regardless he will not reign in Austin as he has.
Some of the most striking acting turns of 2008 are celebrated here - both those you'd expect and some you really wouldn't, but which are great nonetheless.
So I've got the Miami-Baltimore game on, and in one commercial break there's the Giants QB advocating a fitness initiative. And then in a following commercial break, there he is with his brother and the Williams sisters doing an ad for Oreos. It's a cute ad, but he might want to have a chat with his press agent about presenting a more consistent public face.
Him? Color me skeptical. But given how good the writing is - and that it should get even better with Moffat taking over the show - even if he's not one of the best Doctors, the show will likely remain worth tuning in for.
The alway controversial Speaker of the Texas House has a new challenger - an unexpected one. Maybe Democrats shouldn't support him, but unseating Craddick has been top goal of many for years.
One presumes he wouldn't favor taking things this far, but since he does seem to think thoughtless violence is the way to solve the problems of teenagers ...
It's very well made. I merits the accolades it's gotten. It's an impressive achievement. But, that said, it's difficult to like.
Though I will say that even though it may be hard to warm to, I thought the performances by Hoffman and Watson were superb and I find it very odd that two actors who are so widely admired haven't gotten more awards consideration for their top-notch work in a film of such high quality.
An unexpected choice, and surely one that'll annoy the "but s/he's never won an election! and he's being appointed, not elected!" set that's howling over the possibility of Caroline Kennedy's appointment in New York.
UPDATE: Here's a profile of his work with the Denver schools.
It's so very predictable, USC is crushing the best of what the Big 10 has to offer. It appears to be 30 minutes away from its 24th overall Rose Bowl win, and it's third in a row. Notwithstanding Iowa's big win today over Spurrier's Gamecocks, the Big 10 is looking terrible this bowl season.
His own words, his supporters' words, his masoleum, pushing for the execution of an innocent man - it seems like every day there's some new story out there that will make it easier to marginalize and mock Roland Burris.