Last Call

Check this one from the Rumpies.

So who's more pathetic, the guy who claimed he stopped a terrorist dry run on AirTran Flight 297 when he wasn't even on the flight, or the professional Wingnut blogger who's so bereft of the ability to either fact-check or to exercise critical thinking that she bought the entire fake story hook line and sinker?




And this is the Stupid I am Versus.

EPIC FAIL.

Too Clever By Half Isn't Clever Enough

Digby details how Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown pulled some quality legislative jujitsu on GOP Sens. David Vitter and Tom Coburn over the Republicans' amendment to make sure Congress will be forced into using whatever public option bill passes as their own health care plan.  Coburn and Vitter figured they could burn the Dems by making them look like hypocrites if they said no.

Only one problem for Coburn and Vitter:  they just effectively signed onto supporting the public option, and the Dems are lining up to co-sponsor the amendment.  Coburn and Vitter will look like assholes if they kill their own amendment, and then...then it got really bad for the GOP:



Oops.  Game, Set, and Match.  Enjoy that amendment, boys.  Have even more fun explaining this to the Teabaggers.  I'm sure they'll want to know why you think the public option should pass.  After all, what's the point of the amendment if you don't want it to pass?

In fact, that should be pointed out for every Republican amendment that supports the public option like this.

Seven Things I Really Hate About Joe F'ckin Lieberman

Joe F'ckin Lieberman keeps changing his reasons for opposing the public option the way people change their Netflix queue, and as Steve Benen notes, he's up to reason number seven now just since summer.

In June, Lieberman said, "I don't favor a public option because I think there's plenty of competition in the private insurance market." That didn't make sense, and it was quickly dropped from his talking points.
In July, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public is going to end up paying for it." No one could figure out exactly what that meant, and the senator moved on to other arguments.

In August, he said we'd have to wait "until the economy's out of recession," which is incoherent, since a public option, even if passed this year, still wouldn't kick in for quite a while.

In September, Lieberman said he opposes a public option because "the public doesn't support it." A wide variety of credible polling proved otherwise.

In October, Lieberman said the public option would mean "trouble ... for the national debt," by creating "a whole new government entitlement program." Soon after, Jon Chait explained that this "literally makes no sense whatsoever."

In November, Lieberman said creating a public plan along the lines of Medicare is antithetical to "the way we've responded to the market in America in the past." This, too, was quickly debunked.

And here we are in December, and the independent senator has a new explanation, which he explained to the Wall Street Journal:

Why is he adamant? Mr. Lieberman says that while he is not "a conspiratorial person," he believes the public option is intended as a way for the government to take over health care. "I've been working for health-care reform in different ways since I arrived here," he says. "It was always about how do we make the system more efficient and less costly, and how do we expand coverage to people who can't afford it, and how do we adopt some consumer protections from the insurance companies . . . So where did this public option come from?" It was barely a blip, he says, in last year's presidential campaign.

"I started to ask some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, privately, and two of them said 'some in our caucus, and some outside in interest groups, after the president won such a great victory and there were more Democrats in the Senate and the House, said this is the moment to go for single payer.'" So, I joke, the senator is, in fact, as big a "conspiracy theorist" as me. He laughingly rejoins: "But I have evidence!"

Really, Joe? At this point, just admit you're on the payroll for Connecticut's insurance companies and that you're going to kill the bill so we can move on.  Not a damn one of your reasons makes any sense, and you just want your cut.

I'd admit that now before Obama gets sick of you, because on that day you're in serious trouble.

Agree To Disagree

Now that Obama has gone full in on THE AFGHANISURGE and given the GOP what they wanted, the exact same Republican hawks will now immediately turn on the war for the sole reason that Obama's running it. Reihan Salam lays out the game plan over at The Daily Beast:

Thus far, President Obama has primarily been worried about his left flank as he sends more troops to Afghanistan. He should be just as worried about his friends on the right. I fully expect that over the next year Republicans will begin to abandon the president en masse over Afghanistan.

Obama’s saving grace on Afghanistan has been that conservatives, from the Republican leadership in Congress to Sarah Palin to leading foreign-policy thinkers like Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, have backed a troop surge and have been mostly willing to back the White House on this particular issue. But now Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican known for his independent streak, has made a conservative case for withdrawal. And my guess is that by the 2010 congressional elections, dozens of Republican candidates will be doing the same across the country.

Last month, a CBS News poll found that just 23 percent of Democrats believe that an increase in the number of U.S. troops will improve the situation, and some of the party’s 2010 candidates are already on record as opponents of the surge, including Arlen Specter and would-be Ted Kennedy successor Martha Coakley. Throughout the long presidential campaign, Barack Obama called for winding down the American presence in Iraq to focus on the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, so there is no sense the president is pulling a foreign policy bait-and-switch. But among Democrats, and particularly left-of-center Democrats, there is a pervasive sense that the Obama administration has proved too cautious and centrist on domestic issues. That means there is less willingness to give the president the benefit of the doubt on waging an expensive counterinsurgency, particularly as many of the left’s domestic priorities could well be sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.

(More after the jump...)

The Machiavellian Prince Holds Court

Erik Prince is back in the news. In this morning's must-read, Jeremy Scahill talks to Scott Horton and takes stock of Prince's revelation that the Blackwater founder was a paid CIA agent, and wonders what's not being said.

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels--not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story's author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince's forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world's most famous mercenary's insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. "The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges," says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. "He absolutely would not do these things otherwise."

(More after the jump...)

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• American student Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend have been found guilty of the fatal stabbing of Knox's roommate.
• The FDIC is considering mortgage principal cuts to help homeowners on the $45 billion in mortgage loans the agency now owns.
• A survey of U.S. workers shows that as many as half of them may try to change jobs in 2010 unless employers restore benefits and hours.
• Tim Geithner strongly disputes Goldman Sachs' claim that it didn't need bailout help in 2008, saying all banks would have failed.
• A new Senate bill goes after early termination fees from wireless contracts, prompted by Verizon's doubling of fees in 2009.