Last Call

Olbermann's deciding to take on Glenn Beck. Somebody has to, of course. But after Van Jones, all this is doing is making things worse.

On the other hand, we've pretty clearly established that not going after Glenn Beck makes things worse, too. Good luck Keith...you're gonna need it.

Hungry For Answers

More and more working Americans are turning to food stamps to help them through tough times, and again, these are Americans with jobs who are resorting to food stamps, according to the Financial Times.

While the increase in take-up is often attributed to the sharp rise in unemployment – which on Friday hit 9.7 per cent – the Financial Times has learnt that some 40 per cent of the families now on food stamps have “earned income”, up from 25 per cent two years ago.

The agriculture department, which runs the programme, attributes this rise to workers having their hours cut back.

“I’m sort of stunned, it seems like a dire warning . . . that even the jobs people are retaining in this recession aren’t at the wage level and hours level that they need to provide for their families,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

The pace of outright job losses in the US has started to recede, prompting hopes that the labour market could be stabilising. Official figures on Friday showed that non-farm payrolls dropped by a better than expected 216,000 in August, but still marked the 20th consecutive month that the US economy has shed jobs.

Less attention has been paid to those still in the workforce, whose incomes are also being squeezed. The average working week is now about 33 hours, the lowest on record, while the number forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time work has risen more than 50 per cent in the past year to a record 8.8m. Wages and benefits have decelerated.

The food stamp data suggest that “the labour market problems are more significant than you would expect, given just the unemployment rate”, said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. “For me it suggests the consumer is not going to rebound or contribute to economic growth for the next year, as the consumer would in a traditional economic recovery.”

Understand some 80% of America's entire economy is consumer based. If the American consumer is so tapped out that they are having to turn to food stamps because the average American is now working only 33 hours a week, there's something badly wrong with our economy right now. Who will lift us out of this mess? How can hard-working Americans work hard when they are asked increasingly to make do with 40 hours worth of work and getting paid for only 33? American workers continue to be the most productive in the world.

Think of how many things you do for your job off the clock. Millions of us check work email at home or on the road. We're expected to take care of work increasingly on weekends or nights. At the same time, companies are shedding employee benefits left and right in an effort to stay profitable. So again, if companies are now expecting workers that are left to start doing even more work in even less hourly time and do more work off the clock without being paid for it, how does that help our consumer driven economy?

The answer is simple: it doesn't.

What recovery?

[UPDATE 7:12 PM] California's effective unemployment/underemployment rate is 40% at this point.

A report released Sunday says two of five working-age Californians do not have a job, underscoring the challenges in one of the toughest job markets in decades. A new study has found that the last time employment levels among this group were this low was February 1977.

The study was done by the California Budget Project, a Sacramento-based nonprofit research group that advocates for lower- and middle-income families. The report said that California now has about the same number of jobs as it did nine years ago, when the state was home to 3.3 million fewer working-age people.

As bad as things are now, they're actually going to be worse next year. Count on it.

A False Alarm

Felix Salmon posits that this morning's NY Time article about securitizing life insurance the way subprime mortgages were bundled together and traded is actually much ado about nothing.

The NYT has an excellent article on the life settlement industry, explaining its pros and cons in a balanced and clear-eyed manner. If you’re interested in such things, you should read it: it was written by Charles Duhigg, and published in December 2006. He mentioned that Wall Street was getting interested in such things:

Trading in life insurance policies held by wealthy seniors has quietly become a big business. Hedge funds, financial institutions like Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank, and investors like Warren E. Buffett are spending billions to buy life insurance policies from the elderly…

This nascent market illustrates one way that investors are hoping to make money from a large and wealthy generation of Americans as they reach retirement age.

Today, Jenny Anderson covers most of the same ground but adds little in the way of actual news. What she does add is a much more ominous tone:

Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge…

If a small fraction of policy holders do sell them, some in the industry predict the market could reach $500 billion…

Some financial firms are moving to outpace their rivals. Credit Suisse, for example, is in effect building a financial assembly line to buy large numbers of life insurance policies, package and resell them — just as Wall Street firms did with subprime securities.

If Wall Street is really “racing ahead”, it’s been doing so for well over a decade now, and doesn’t seem to have got very far. There have been people on Wall Street trying to securitize and trade life settlements for as long as I can remember, and nothing much ever seems to happen. Is anything different now? Not really: Anderson has managed to find exactly one securitization of life settlements, and even that one she only mentions in passing:

Standard & Poor’s, which rated a similar deal called Dignity Partners in the 1990s, declined to comment on its plans.

In fact, Dignity Partners launched in March 1995, and was the grand total of $35 million in size. “Could” the market “reach $500 billion”, as “some in the industry predict”? Well, anything’s possible. But so far it’s managed to go from $35 million to zero over the course of the past 14 years. Wake me up when something happens: for the time being there’s nothing at all.

None of the big three ratings agencies is involved right now: the closest thing to a news hook in Anderson’s story is that DBRS, which she describes as “a little known rating agency in lower Manhattan”, is thinking about applying ratings to these things. Is there any evidence that investors are going to trust DBRS on this one, in the event that anything gets off the ground? No.

The real problem is still regulating the existing derivatives market, still orbiting in the hundreds of trillions of dollars category, far outpacing anything here. Salmon is right: for once, the financial sector's seemingly evil ways mean squat, there's no way for the financials to make money off of trading insurance when the actuarial nerds over at the actual insurance companies are already squeezing out a much profit as possible for the numbers. Insurance is supposed to be low risk and stable for a reason, there's just not any way to leverage something like this into a highly speculative market when the entire industry is built on predictability. The banks aren't going to outsmart the insurance companies here, if there was billions of dollars to be made off a market like this, the insurance companies would already be doing it. The banks have been trying to do so for decades now, and with no luck.

Like A Troubled Bridge Over Water

Turns out the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge may be closed for a lot longer than just this weekend.

During inspection of the east span of the bridge, workers found a crack in one of the eyebars on the side of the structure, said Bart Ney, spokesman for the California Department of Transportation.

"It's a significant crack -- significant enough to have closed the bridge on its own," he said in a news conference aired on the agency's Web site Saturday night.

Ney said the crack has to be repaired immediately and acknowledged that the work may stretch past Tuesday when the bridge was scheduled to reopen.

"I want to assure everyone that this repair will be made and we will return the Bay Bridge safer than when we took it out," he said.

Nice. Wonder how much that'll cost the state...or how much the cuts caused the crack to be missed until now.

Or how many other bridges have cracks. Remember Minneapolis 2 years ago?

Mr. Jones And Me

Chalk one up for the Wingers, Obama's "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones has resigned his post after it was discovered Jones signed a 9/11 truther web petition in 2004.

Jones, who denied agreeing with the petition and issued an apology last week, said he was a victim of health-care reform opponents.

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones said in the statement. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

"But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future," Jones said.

The Jones controversy centers on a 2004 petition he signed on a Web site that said: "A call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11 attacks to occur."

An administration source told CNN that Jones did not carefully review the language on the petition.

The truth is Van Jones didn't go down because of health care reform, but because the activist group he founded, Color of Change, went after Glenn Beck's advertisers on FOX News. It didn't matter that Jones left the group two years ago. The Wingers set out to destroy him, found their avenue of attack, and got their pound of flesh.

The bad guys won here, certainly. You go after the hate merchants like Glenn Beck or El Rushbo, you'd better bring an ironclad defense and your top game, otherwise you end up like Van Jones. That's how the game is played. They're not above destroying a man's career or life over something like an advertising boycott, especially if the person is related to the Obama administration.

As you can imagine, the usual suspects are crowing over their victory. With Jones folding within a couple of weeks, Dave Weigel goes over the next group of heads that the Wingers are looking to collect:

As he makes a real impact in pushing conservative fringe attacks on Obama administration officials into the mainstream, Glenn Beck’s Twitter feed has become a must-read. In a message from last night, Beck told his followers to “FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER.” They are, respectively, the nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC, and the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. Browner was also administrator of the EPA for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Beck’s ostensible purpose here is to expose the “czars” who’ve been appointed by the president. Sunstein stands out like a sore thumb, as he’s been tied up by holds and filibusters for months, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) only filed for cloture on his nomination at the start of August.

While Sunstein definitely will be attacked, my money's on the next target being Mark Lloyd, as he's the guy that represents the most paranoid threat that the Wingers have: that Obama is going to shut down right wing talk radio.

You smell that? It's 1994 and the chum's in the water. The sharks are circling. The Obama Derangement level just kicked up a notch.

[UPDATE 11:25 AM] As Digby sums up:

Wow. "Extremist views and coarse rhetoric" have no place in the public debate? Some people don't seem to have gotten the memo.

I certainly hope this makes it quite clear that consistency is not something Obama should count upon from his enemies. Indeed, I fully expect that the next time the Republicans take office they will launch several investigations of the previous Democratic administration (assuming they haven't already taken over congress, in which case they will begin while he's still in office.) They do not observe the self-imposed rules the Democrats put upon themselves. That should be obvious by now.

As for Jones, he says he signed that Truther petition without really reading it and thought he was signing something that merely requested further investigation. Who cares? We have people in the congress right now who assert that the president is an illegal alien and that the Democrats are going to euthanize old people. it's hard for me to give a damn about some stupid petition from a few years ago.

Doesn't matter. Attack Democrats for doing what you have done yourselves. The Republican attack plan hasn't changed since Newt Gingrich.

Beam In Thy Own Eye

Turns out that Florida GOP chair Jim Greer, who has ruthlessly attacked Obama's planned speech to schoolchildren, went across Florida's schools to speak to schoolchildren himself.

It was Greer who, in a striking tantrum, issued a statement condemning the president for, among other things, trying to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda." He added that Obama "has turned to American's children to spread his liberal lies." Greer's hysterical press release said the very idea of a political figure taking a political message to school children is "infuriating" and "an invasive abuse of power."

Obviously, for sane people, the claim itself is ridiculous. What we didn't know at the time was that it was also remarkably hypocritical. The Orlando Sentinel's Scott Maxwell had an important column today.

There once was a political operative who loved to tell crowds he had a simple way of explaining to children the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

"Republicans get up and go to work," he would tell his son. "Democrats get up and go down to the mailbox to get their checks."

This man not only talked to his son about Republican values, he went into public-school classrooms and talked about them as well.

That man is Jim Greer -- the same Jim Greer who, as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, just threw a nationwide hissy fit, claiming that the classroom is no place for politics and Barack Obama's "indoctrination."

One Seminole County mother, Barbara Wells, remembers the day Greer spoke to her son's sixth-grade class. "My son said he made some sort of Hillary Clinton joke," she recalled.

But you know what? Wells didn't pitch a fit. She didn't call up the local TV station to scream about Republican indoctrination. Instead, she advised her son: "Whatever you are told in life, remember there are two sides to every story."

Greer argued on Thursday, "Before anybody talks to my children from a political perspective, I want to know what they have to say." Of course, the administration is letting school districts know exactly what the president will say the day before his remarks. And how about Greer? Did he run his pro-Republican message by parents and school officials before he talked to school kids?

"That was different," Greer said.

Actually, it's not. The president of the United States wants to encourage children to work hard and do well in school. This caused Greer to have some kind of breakdown and accuse Obama of "indoctrination." But it's Greer who's taken partisan messages directly to school classrooms.

And this piece of work is the head of Florida's state Republican Party. Other Florida Republicans were contacted, and not a one of them was willing to go on record as calling Jim Greer out.

But that's how Republicans roll: viciously attack and smear Democrats for anything that you've done yourself.

Speechifying For The Win

Politico has done some legwork on President Obama's address to Congress and the nation on health care on Wednesday and has the following intel:

The contents of the speech were still being debated over the weekend. But here is what POLITICO gleaned from conversations with top aides:

1) Obama will lay out a specific “President’s Plan,” even if he doesn’t call it that. He will make clear what’s on the table, and what he thinks warrants further debate, such as how to pay for the overhaul.

2) He will not confront or scold the left. “This is a case for bold action, not a stick in the eye to our supporters,” said an official involved in speech preparation. “That’s not how President Obama thinks. The politics of triangulation don’t live in this White House.”

3) He will make an overture to Republicans. “He will lay out his vision for health reform – taking the best ideas from both parties, make the case for why as a nation we must act now, and dispel the myths and confusion that are affecting public opinion,” the aide said.

4) He will make it clear that it’s better to get something done than nothing done. White House aides are reminding fellow Democrats that the party lost Congress in 1994 by failing to do any health reforms at all after Congress balked at the original plan by President Bill Clinton. “The lesson of 1994 is not that tackling health reform is politically perilous. It’s that failing to act could be devastating,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House deputy communications director.

5) Obama will try to reassure the left about his commitment to a public option, or government insurance plan. Aides said they are rethinking what he will say about this. He wants to thread the needle of voicing support for a public option, without promising to kill health reform to get it. But liberal congressional leaders were unyielding in their support for it on a conference call he held from Camp David yesterday, and he's going to meet with them at the White House early next week.

Point one was necessary four months ago, but it's good to see it now. The lesson was that Clinton's plan was set in stone and Congress used it as an excuse to revolt. The lesson now is that leaving Congress to its own devices is just an excuse for them to waste time. Lesson learned: Republicans and some Democrats simply aren't going to let a plan pass.

Point two is also necessary, you dance with the girl you brought. Obama owes progressives not just for the Presidency, but for the primaries as well. I'd argue that he's triangulating by saying he's not triangulating, but the realism here is that Obama will have to make compromises. On this however he's learned that 4 months of good faith negotiations with Republicans has led to repeated kicks to the jibblies and some brutal personal attacks.

Point three? Showmanship. Republicans are irrelevant. They have made themselves irrelevant by saying no to every single compromise, every single overture, every single trial balloon, every single back channel query. They do not want health care reform the Dems can take credit for. He's doing this out of playing the Village game, but that game too needs to be played.

Point four is also vital. Democrats in Congress need to be made to understand that if nothing passes, it will be the Democrats who are blamed, not the Republicans. Honestly, what are voters going to do to the Republican Party should health care reform not pass, kick them out of office? The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, but Obama also needs to understand that compromising for the sake of compromise is pointless, the Republicans will fight any and every plan as unacceptable. The White House finally gets this.

Point five is the most vital, frankly. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party will not let Obama kill the public option outright. As I've said before, the number one problem with health care costs is profit motive. The insurance industry makes money when they collect premiums and deny payment, the medical industry makes money by charging for drugs and procedures that may or may not be needed, and the doctors make money by getting payments from the insurance and drug companies. That has to end for our system to be fixed. A public option is one part of that fix, but an absolutely necessary one. Democrats will force Obama's hand on this.

So now the President has a game plan for Wednesday, and we'll see if he delivers.

The Punch Felt Round The Sports World

Oregon football star RB LeGarrette Blount is gone for the season after his famous opening weekend sucker punch on Boise State's Byron Hout.

In their home opener, the 14th-ranked Broncos ran over the 16th-ranked Ducks, as Kellen Moore threw for 197 yards and a touchdown to cap a 19-8 Boise State win Thursday night.

But all didn't end quietly. As the Broncos started celebrating their victory, defensive lineman Hout yelled in Blount's face and provokingly tapped him on the shoulder. Broncos head coach Chris Petersen responded immediately, but before he could pull his player away, Blount snapped and punched Hout in the jaw.

Hout did indeed provoke Blount, and frankly Blount blindsided the guy as a result, but I absolutely agree with the punishment here. Blount's a loose cannon and there's no place for him in sports if he's going to act like that. As somebody who's had to learn the hard way to keep physical reactions to his temper in check, I can relate to Blount's competitive spirit after getting smoked in the season opener like that.

But you take that off the field and you deal with it like an adult. Period. I would have shitcanned him too.

Poor Shelly

Bachmanniac is playing the gender victim card, saying that Democrats are only picking on her because she's a woman.

Also with women politicians, they want to make sure no women, no woman becomes president before a Democrat woman, and so they're doing everything they can to, I think, sabotage women like Sarah Palin, perhaps women like myself, or similarly situated women, to make sure that we don't have a prominent national voice. But the thing is, the people in our country, they don't care who the voice is, they just want someone, they want to know that someone is speaking out for them against what will certainly bring about the destruction of our great country if we continue to go down the Obama path.

And while I can't speak for the entire known blog universe, I can assure the good Ms. Bachmann that I don't pick on her because of her gender, but because I feel I have to correct the several wildly inaccurate statements she regularly spews (bordering on insanity) and to point out the fact that we have a national lawmaker who should be held accountable for her staggering ignorance and the very high probability that she is playing with only 42, 43 cards in her deck.

Her gender has nothing to do with it. Suggesting the Americorps program is an indoctrination camp, for example, makes me question her intellect. Playing the gender card makes what she has done over the last six months or so even more repugnant.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The White House has drafted its own version of health care legislation and may present it as early as next week.
• An eco-terrorist group has claimed responsibility for taking down two radio towers in Washington state.
• The WTO has ruled Airbus's European government subsidies amounts to an unfair trade advantage over Boeing.
• Companies kept workers on the job only 33 hours, six minutes a week on average in July, among the lowest hours since 1964.
• The ACLU has taken up a student cell-phone search case that could define unreasonable search and seizure in schools.

Last Call

After this morning's deadly airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 90 plus civilians, Rep. Dennis Kucinich is once again calling for a pullout of troops and an end to the Afghan War.

“News reports covering today’s attack by the U.S. command southwest of Kunduz province show that the good intentions of NATO forces in Afghanistan are not sufficient,” Kucinich stated. “If we want to avoid killing innocent civilians, we must end the war.”

The incident occurred after Taliban fighters hijacked two oil tankers and drove them to a village under their control, where they became stuck in the mud. The local villagers then emerged to try to siphon off the fuel. Meanwhile, the hijacking was reported to German troops, who called for an airstrike. The fireball when the trucks were hit killed or badly burned many of the villagers along with some Taliban.

According to the independent, “Western forces were engulfed in bitter controversy yesterday” as the extent of the carnage became apparent. “Nato initially insisted that all the dead were Taliban insurgents. Later, after angry protests from local residents and officials, they acknowledged there had been civilian deaths.”

General Stanley McChrystal, who commands NATO forces in Afghanistan, is now facing questions over why the attack was authorized, given his prior orders forbidding any airstrikes with a prospect of civilian casualties unless allied forces are in imminent danger.

“The attack … could not have come at a more volatile time in Afghanistan,” the Independent article continues, “with intense anger over civilian casualties and an intensifying clash between President Hamid Karzai and Washington over the disputed national election.”

Public support for the Afghan War is declining in both the United States and Europe. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is under particular pressure at the moment, following the unanticipated resignation of an aide to the UK’s Defence Secretary in protest over the war.

Our growing economic problem seems to be the largest driver behind the movement to end this war. We simply can't afford it any longer, economically, morally, strategically or militarily.

Like An Old Married Couple Or Something

Shatner and Nimoy, together again at Dragon-Con.

Taking on a roast-like atmosphere from the very beginning, the appearance was like eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who enjoyed ripping into each other mercilessly. It was an event that Dragon-Con “Star Trek” programming director Eric L. Watts said he never imagined would take place.

At the start, Nimoy brought up the recent smash hit reboot of “Trek” on the big screen by asking Shatner, “Seen any good movies lately?”

The newest incarnation of “Trek” has been a sore point for Shatner of late, and the remark set him off. No matter how many times Nimoy tried to change the subject, Shatner kept asking, “Why wasn’t I in the movie?” Finally Nimoy, who had a major role in it, gave his best guess, which was that Captain Kirk was killed in the movie “Star Trek Generations.”

Shatner admitted that he has yet to see the movie, though he said its director, J.J. Abrams, had offered to screen it for him. Adding that he also hadn’t watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he blamed his busy schedule and the fact that he would inevitably be asked “Why weren’t you in the movie?” by others seeing it with him at a theater.

A small quantum of faith has been restored to my universe, at least.

Let's Talk Payback, Don

Don Surber disagrees with Joe Klein's observation from yesterday, and quite vehemently so. But Surber's response is very illuminating.

When people opposed the war in Iraq and got loud, dissent was patriotic.

Now it is dangerous?

I don’t mind Van Jones or Nancy Pelosi. They are what they are.

I am annoyed by lefties who call themselves moderates to give them cover when they attack conservatives.

Gandelman and Klein are no more moderate than I am.

Gandelman and Klein are like those refs in the TV wrestling matches who only see the rule-breaking of one side and not the other.

Spare me the clutching of the pearls, girls, over a few shouts at a townhall meeting.

Liberals did not complain about the noise level when the shouting was from the left.

Townhall meetings are supposed to get loud. That is what a townhall meeting is supposed to be: People speaking out to public officials.

Unvfortunately, over the years politicians have staged so many townhall meetings that they have forgotten the true purpose of such meetings: To listen, not lecture.

I am not angry. I am amused. The left is discovering that paybacks are a female dog.

Deal.

With.

It.

You see, this is merely payback for Obama winning in 2008. It's nothing more than a few shouts. The guns at the meetings, the cries of facism, the birther madness, the rising tide of anger being fed by Beck and Limbaugh and Savage, the violence and craziness, are two things, according to wingers like Surber:

1) They are all the fault of the Left, for eight years of unbearable persecution of the right during the Bush years.

2) The winger response is 100% justified because of 1) there.

It is now time for the Right to exact revenge because they were thrown out of power by the voters. They will salt the Earth if need be as they destroy any semblance of political discourse. To the wingers, this is the End War.

Deal with it, Surber says. Remember those words. Anything goes now. When this detonates the country and the blood starts flowing, remember that it was just a little shouting.

If the wingers cannot run the country, then the country must be made to pay until they are.

[UPDATE 3:11 PM] The Kroog sums it up nicely:

Obama could have come in proposing to pursue an agenda identical to Bush, and he would still be a socialist/Commie/fascist, with those of us who don’t see it that way lying Nazis ourselves.

Something is going very wrong in the heads of a substantial number of Americans.

Indeed.

Epic Obligatory Baby Panda Win

Because I know of at least two people who will kill me if I don't mention the San Diego Zoo's new baby panda cub.

It's a boy! The panda cub born at the San Diego Zoo last month has grown to 2.8 pounds and his mother, Bai Yun, finally left the den on Thursday, allowing veterinarians to examine the cub for the first time and reveal his gender. According to senior zoo veterinarian Geoff Pye, the cub has reached his "initial cute stage" and is "very roly poly." Its black-and-white markings are just beginning to show. The cub was Bai Yun's fifth, and her third with longtime consort Gao Gao, making the pair one of the most reproductively successful panda couples ever. In accordance with Chinese tradition, the new boy won't get a name until 100 days after its August 5 birth. Hopefully he'll have hit an "advanced cute stage" by then.

There. I have mentioned cute baby animals and have therefore gained karma.

EPIC WIN.

Another Village Idiot Gets A Promotion

BooMan notes that AEI loudmouth and former CNN Capital Gang Sunday moderator James Glassman has been tapped to run the Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University.

If you want to know why supposedly liberal or objective Washington news outlets seem hopelessly tilted to the right, look no further than Glassman's résumé.

Executive editor of Washingtonian magazine (1979-81).
Publisher of The New Republic (1981-84).
President of The Atlantic Monthly as well as executive vice-president of U.S. News & World Report (1984-1986).
Part-owner and editor of Roll Call, later sold to The Economist (1987-1993).
Started television career as moderator of CNN's Capital Gang Sunday (1995-98).
Wrote a syndicated column in the Washington Post business section (1993-99, 2001-04).

Lately, he's been writing columns for Townhall. At least his new job will get him out of Washington where his influence has been nothing but detrimental to the national discourse.

And if you needed somebody in charge of the Department of Rehabilitating Bush's Legacy, there you go. Glassman's a Village Idiot through and through. And I don't buy that he'll be out of Washington's discourse, either. I see the position giving him more than a few guest columns at the WSJ.