it begins

this morning i heard on the radio that the UN security council was talking about launching the military offensive to retake northern mali sometime around next september. i guess the konna incident made things seem more urgent and france decided that it didn't want to wait.

the weird thing is that i spent a bit of time in sevare back when i visited mali in 2001. this is the sevare airport that is being used by french troops. yes, hat's pretty much the entire airport. there wasn't even much of a building.

outing myself

my real name (as written by jack lew) is this:

i, for one, am looking forward to the new dollar bills.

which media matters

i have been wondering why dick armey gave so much good dirt to media matters this week. media matters is a "progressive" organization dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media." why would armey give so much good stuff to an outfit like that instead of a more sympathetic media source?

the answer, it turns out, is that dick is an idiot:

Dick Armey had no idea he was speaking to the left-wing Media Matters organization during an interview last week, he told The Daily Caller Tuesday. Instead, Armey thought he was chatting with the conservative Media Research Center.
...

But in a Tuesday phone interview with TheDC, Armey insisted that even though Strupp properly identified himself, it wasn’t until “somebody busted my chops on Facebook” that he realized he spoke to a left-wing group.


“I wouldn’t know Media Matters from a hole in the wall,” the 72-year-old told TheDC. “That was a major, big screw up on my part. I thought they were somebody else.”

When asked who he thought Media Matters was, Armey replied, “Who’s the guy with the red beard that always does the show where he points out how biased the press is?”

“Oh… the Media Research Center? Brent Bozell?” TheDC suggested. Bozell appears weekly on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to spotlight liberal media bias in a segment called “Media Mash.”

“Yeah, I thought it was Brent Bozell,” Armey replied. “What I thought I had was I’d get them interested in the absolute screw job I got from The Washington Post.”

the media research center is pretty much the opposite of media matters. as co-chairman of freedom works, part of armey's job was managing the media and being the public face for that organization. he certainly should have known the difference between media matters and the media research center. it's hard for me to imagine a stupider mistake. but thanks to his stupidity, we got a glimpse into how his tea party astroturf organization really worked.

(via susie)

the homophobic inauguration speaker problem

louis giglio, the pastor originally scheduled to give the benediction at obama's second inauguration, has been removed from the program after thinkprogress dug up his anti-gay record. four years ago, rick warren, another pastor with a history of anti-gay statements, gave the invocation at obama's first inauguration. (despite the hubbub back then, he was never removed from the program).

why does this keep happening? i realize that a lot of prominent religious people have taken pretty anti-gay positions in the past. but surely the obama administration (who i don't believe is actually anti-gay), could find god-people to give speeches at the inauguration that wouldn't run into this problem. these days there are plenty of christian denominations that don't hate gay people. why not get one of them. if nothing else, there's always tripp. why not go with him?

the highest ranking article of clothing in the world

i'm no expert in venezuelan constitutional law, but i wonder if after tomorrow there won't be a plausible argument that the sash is the president of that country.

search your feelings, you know it to be true

is anyone surprised that the guy who was the CEO of the company that it committed the biggest case of medicare fraud in u.s. history would lie about the cost of the PPACA's medicaid expansion?

GOPers rarely break 50%

gallup finds that democrats have regained the lead in party identification, but this chart shows that's what has been the norm for most of the last 20 years:

which is pretty hard to square with the prevailing wisdom over the past two decades that this is a "center-right" leaning country.

(via memeorandum)

almost everyone nominated to a cabinet post gets it

this is really surprising, at least to me. i really thought that the senate had a better record at blocking cabinet nominees. but if the odds for blocking are really this bad, why are presidents so skittish when they float a nominee idea and find some senate opposition? the stats that kapur cites mention that only 12 cabinet nominees were "withdrawn before coming to a Senate vote" but that doesn't count all the times that a name is floated in the press by an administration and then dropped before any formal nomination is made. that seems to happen a lot more often (e.g. susan rice just last month). you'd think presidents would notice the record and would realize that once they formally nominate someone, odds are heavily in favor of the nominee. why should they even listen to the pre-nomination buzz? odds are the opposition will melt away once the nomination becomes official (e.g. chuck hagel right now)

on the other hand, maybe the fact that presidents are so likely to shoot down their own trial balloons is what makes their nomination success record so good. if the people who reach the formal nomination have all been effectively pre-screened during the preceding trial balloon stage, maybe that explains the record. if that's the case then trial ballooning a nominees itself is a useful screening mechanism and should not be ignored by a president.

they missed two

doesn't anyone remember the time last summer when we talked about platinum coins magically resolving the debt ceiling crisis? apparently, benji sarlin and michael lester don't. they made a list of the nine potential faces for the trillion dollar coin but missed two faces what were suggested way back when the blogosphere first floated the idea: george w. bush and alfred e. neumann. they are both better than eight of the nine faces that sarlin and lester came up with. (i am giving them ronald reagan. that would be a good one)

how pressTV gets all the links

it's amusing to see rightwing blogs regularly link to an iranian government funded propaganda channel. (for example). here is how it works:

press TV reports that obama is going to nominate chuck hagel as defense secretary and characterizes him "anti-israeli", thus creating the impression that things are going well for the iranian regime.

conservative bloggers (and rags like the free beacon) link to the press TV report as evidence that hagel (and by extension, president obama) is anti-israeli.

it's worth noting that if a liberal blogger did something similar, these very same conservative bloggers would be jumping up and down, claiming this proves that liberals are on the same side as the islamic republic of iran.

you never know what you're gonna get

what is the point of those samplers box of chocolates? you know, like the whitman sampler, et al. while occasionally i have found a sampler that is not terrible, most are pretty bad. and even when it comes to the good ones (some companies do produce samplers that i kinda like), i would always prefer a non-sampler version of that company's chocolates.

i get a bunch of these things by distant relatives during the holidays--from people who don't know me that well but are vaguely aware that i like chocolate. i always end up eating them, because: (1) it is chocolate,  (2) my 2011 resolution has expired when it comes to candy at home (it is still in force with regard to candy in my office, that was the great compromise of 2012), and (3) without a resolution to stop it i will eventually at least start eating any chocolate that is in my presence. meanwhile, once i take that first bite, the sampler format makes me even more likely to eat all the way through. because there's that element of surprise and i'm never sure what each one will be, i keep eating on the vain hope that the next one will be better than the last. then i get to the end and realize i just gobbled down a whole box of chocolate that i didn't enjoy at all. it would be better if i was just given a whole bar of bad chocolate. then i could take one bite and throw it out.

does anyone actually like these samplers? and by "like" i don't mean "willing to choose eating over not eating them" but rather does anyone actually prefer a sampler over any other chocolate format?

platinum baby, platinum!

while this blog lacks the might of atrios, i hereby endorse this petition. go sign it. i posted about this a few times last july, but this is basically how the platinum coin trick would work.

signing the petition can't hurt. after all, it got us a death star.¹

UPDATE: via memeorandum i see that kevin drum says the coin trick is not legal. drum argues that even though the trick could be done under a literal reading of the statute, it is not legal because that legal provision wasn't intended to be used to allow the executive branch to unilaterally head off a debt ceiling crisis. that is a plausible legal argument, but i don't think it is a clear winner for the reasons outlined by lizardbreath. statutory provisions are regularly used in ways that are different from their original intended purpose. unless there is some ambiguity about what the statute means, a court usually won't look into the purpose or policy reasons behind the law.

and the bottom line is that no court is going to rule against the president if he goes with the coin plan. let's play the scenario through: the administration orders the minting of a $1 trillion coin. the coin is deposited in the fed and $1 trillion of debt disappears. the GOP is furious and goes to court to have the move declared illegal. is a judge really going to invalidate the coin and order the u.s. government into default? (because by then the debt ceiling deadline would probably have passed) keep in mind that because of section 4 of the 14th amendment, a default of the u.s. government is arguably unconstitutional. i just can't see that happening, though i could imagine the republicans trying to argue in the political sphere that the move was illegal and would be grounds for impeachment. but impeaching a president for avoiding an economic disaster is not going to go anywhere.

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1- longtime readers will not that i already used that joke last month. luckily, i don't have very many (readers, not jokes. okay, maybe jokes too)