Joe Lieberman, discussing the President’s “surge” plan, gives a perfect example of why I can’t stand him. It’s not just that he’s a weasel who fetishizes centrism, but that he’s a politician who doesn’t understand politics.

The Senate should “step back for a moment and give you [Gen. Petraeus] a chance…. Perhaps a last chance, to succeeed in Iraq,” Lieberman said. “If God forbid, you are unable to succeed, then there will be plenty of time for the resolutions of disapproval or the other alternatives that have been contemplated.”

Plenty of time? When? In 6-9 months from now, the Democratic and Republican 2008 primary races will already be in full gear. Any action, pro- or anti-Bush, will be seen as an election-motivated ploy. Joe Lieberman, who’s run for President himself, should know as well as anybody that trying to get anything done during a Presidential election is nearly impossible. The further we wait, the more likely that any significant action will be put off, lest the Senate be accused of “playing politics” with the lives of soldiers. But that’s the whole point of the “surge” anyways. Let Bush try to wait out the clock and make Iraq somebody else’s problem (and in the process, fuel a new generation of armchair hawks who, like their Vietnam-era brethren, will insist with blind hindsight that the Iraq war was winnable). If Lieberman honestly thinks that “there will be plenty of time” to change direction in Iraq once the “surge” fails, then he’s an even bigger fool than I thought.

John at Americablog makes a good point about the State of the Union.

Speaking of ignoring, what the hell happened to family values and the social conservatives. Did they get ANYTHING in the entire speech? Abortion, gone. Activist judges, gone. Gay marriage, gone. That’s the sleeper shocker of this speech, the utter cleansing of anything that would appeal to the family values crowd. They have truly become the crazy aunt in the attic, to be hidden at all costs.

That’s how it’s always been. The GOP has been playing the social conservatives like suckers for years and these voters, to their shame, dutifully show up at the polls every other year despite the mounting pile of empty promises. And as long as these wedge issues keep the “values voters” from jumping ship to a third party, they’ll continue to be exploited. Right wingers, it’s time to drop the faith in your party and realize that Republicans don’t care about you.

Wow. Jim Webb’s Democratic response to the State of the Union was awesome. He’s not the most dynamic speaker the Dems have to offer, but the speech itself more than made up for the delivery.

Regarding the economic imbalance in our country, I am reminded of the situation President Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.

Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves “as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other.” And he did something about it.

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. “When comes the end?” asked the General who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became President, he brought the Korean War to an end.

These Presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world. Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way.

Now that’s how you end a speech. This wasn’t the standard pathetic plea for bipartisanship that we’re used to seeing with the Democratic response, this was a warning. We’re in charge now, and this is how we expect you to behave…

Since everybody’s going to be throwing in their two cents about what the Democratic response to the President’s State of the Union should be, let me make the case for brevity. Rather than follow an hour-long speech with another 5-10 minutes of counter chest-thumping, why not just say :

“Tonight the President had a lot to say about protecting the American people, but this is the same man who thinks it’s okay to torture people. He’s lying to you again.”

Also, any guesses on what’s going to be the President’s WTF?! moment? We’ve already had human-animal hybrids, steroids in professional baseball, and a manned mission to Mars (sorta). My hope is that he goes a little nutty and goes off on a tangent about how cool the iPhone looks.

Kudos to CNN for finally exposing the fact that psychics are full of crap….

…but it’s worth pointing out that Sylvia Browne has been on Larry King at least four times since 2000. As James Randi noted, one of the reasons people believe these scam artists because they’ve seen exploitative scum like Browne treated like miracle workers on the news. The way I see it, Anderson Cooper’s ten minute bunking doesn’t come close to the hours of time “the most trusted name in news” has wasted by lending their credibility to frauds.

One of those damned blog memes, courtesy of Mr. Furious

1. Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies: The Bible, of course. Jesus is my favorite literary character after Frankenstein, Terl, and Velociraptor. Joking aside, probably Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. I love the way Shermer draws parallels between creationism, holocaust denial, ESP, astrology and other bizarre beliefs to explore why people are drawn to superstitions, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and more. Shermer has a tendency to be knee-jerk in his skepticism, but none of that is evident in this book.

Speaking of the Bible, I’m about halfway through Misquoting Jesus and it’s really good.

2. Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music: Side two of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. It’s what made The Beatles my favorite band and pretty much started my love of pop music. I doubt I’d own the majority of my music collection if I hadn’t heard Abbey Road in high school.

3. Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue: Goodfellas. From the opening scene’s voice-over “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster” to the final scene with Ray Liotta’s narration breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience that the good ol’ days are over, every aspect of this movie is perfect. (Halfway through writing this sentence, I had to run upstairs to grab the DVD. It’s that good.)

Runners-up : The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane

4. Name a performer for whom you suspend of all disbelief: For the last few years, all of my favorite character actors have finally gotten the mainstream attention they deserve. Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Paul Giamatti, John C. Reilly are brilliant in just about every movie they make.

5. Name a work of art you’d like to live with: A few months ago, I was at my friends’ art opening and was telling my friend Scot how much I was enjoying his new work. After a few minutes of my wine-fueled gushing, Scot seemed surprised and said “I always thought you hated art.”

“I don’t hate art,” I told him, “I hate pretension.”

That’s pretty much the story of my life. I avoid pretension the way George Bush avoids responsibility and self-awareness, so discussions of the fine art world put my bullshitting muscles to good use. “Quick, Greg, change the subject to something you know about,” I tell myself.

“So, have you seen American Idol this season? That Cowardly Lion girl was hilarious.”

But, like I said, even if I don’t know much about it, I like art. I can appreciate the aesthetics of art and can usually articulate why I like or dislike something, but I haven’t been exposed to enough art to speak about it with any degree of confidence. That said, here’s a piece of art that I do live with, which is also one of my favorite paintings of all time. An earlier version (minus the hand or blinds) of Tom Neely’s Sad Bird :

6. Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life: I rarely get “penetrated” by fiction. No, I’m not going for a cheap joke, just being honest.

7. Name a punch line that always makes you laugh: This bit from Mr. Show cracks me up every time I see it…

David: This show that we’re about to do is gonna blow your ass to high heaven!

Bob: David, David, you know the rule. Put a nickel in the swearing jar.

David: Oh shoot. [laughs]

Bob: Folks, we have a fun, new rule here at Mr. Show. Every time a cast member swears, they have to put a nickel in the swearing jar.

[David drops the nickel into an already full jar.]

David: The money goes to Swears For Cares, an non-profit organization committed to raising money through swearing.

Bob: So hopefully, we’ll make a little difference.

David: [holds up a nickel] A little fucking difference.

Since the rules are that I need to pass this on to three people, I’ll punt it to my three This Modern World co-bloggers, Tom Tomorrow, Bob Harris, and Jonathan Schwarz.

The Huffington Post has a cool new feature that you might Digg :

We’re excited to tell you that the Huffington Post is launching a new community powered section of our site called HuffIt. HuffIt lets readers decide what news stories should get the most attention on the Huff Post. You can submit and select news from anywhere in the world and then “huff” the stories you like best. The most huffed news stories will soon appear on our front page – allowing our community to become part of the editorial process.

If you’re curious about what I’ve been…huffing, my profile is here.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think we need to get in touch with our more traditional values. (via Digg)

Too bad the country is being run by Otis the town drunk.

Oh my god. This may be the greatest subtle “fuck you” I’ve ever heard, even if it didn’t get the reaction it deserved. At the beginning of Colbert’s interview with Bill O’Reilly, he jokes “That man is a sexual predator…you have no idea what that’s like.” Oh, I think he does. Ouch.

Send some love to Jane.

Charles Murray tells us the real problem with American schools. It’s not that they’re underfunded or overcrowded or fraught with inequality, but that some kids are just too dumb to learn.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education’s role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation’s future.

Today’s simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Why on Earth would anyone publish this horseshit? This whole article seems to be based on the bizarre notion that there’s a direct correlation between percentile intelligence (which is dubious on its own) and grades. It roughly follows, using Murray’s retarded logic, that those in the 90th percentile are the ones capable of making A’s (80th, B’s, etc.), therefore only the smartest 40% of kids are even capable of passing grades. The bell curve is adjusted a bit to get more kids to pass, but in the end, subjects like basic math, science, and English are just too hard for the dumb kids.

I cannot imagine a more simple-minded approach to education than the one laid out in this article and it’s the same arrogant junk science that Charles Murray has spent the last dozen years pushing. Some people are just “inferior” so we shouldn’t waste our time trying to help them. It’s a bullshit idea regardless of where you try to apply it and it’s especially heinous when applied to public education. The idea that the best way to fix our public schools is to stop trying to teach the kids who need our help the most is as immoral and ass-backwards as having a healthcare system that makes the sick fend for themselves. Then again, that’s pretty much how things work now…

Ummmm…Sen. Feinstein, you voted for the PATRIOT ACT twice. I agree that the Bush Administration’s mass-firing of federal prosecutors is an egregious abuse of power, but you and the rest of your timid colleagues are the ones who have allowed the President to consolidate power. To your credit, you’ve introduced a bill to change the PATRIOT ACT provision regarding the method by which interim appointments are made for U.S. attorneys, but isn’t the real issue here that the President has the power to purge ideological “enemies” from office at a whim?

I love this video (which I first saw at Crook & Liars) of Barney Frank giving his Republican counterpart a parliamentary beating :

There’s no shortage of things to hate about this Bush administration, but you gotta respect Rep. David Wu for finding a new reason to get pissed.



“These aren’t Vulcans!”

The positive press that the Democrats have been receiving for their “First 100 Hours” initiative really underscores the foolishness of the GOP’s political strategy of the past few years. It may have seemed like a brilliant idea to pander to their base at the time, but in hindsight, it makes them look like a bunch of idiots. You’ve won the battles, but losing the war gentlemen.

The GOP has spent the last few decades bashing the “Democrat(ic) party” as a bunch of out-of-control liberals and comforted themselves with the talking point that the country was moving to the right. The result? They’re controlled by the radical right while the Dems have been transformed into a party of Liebermen (and Liber-women). Thanks to the dynamic the GOP has put into place, the choices at the polls are rarely right vs. left, but extreme right vs. gutless centrist. With the Democrats finally being empowered to get some work done and stand up for themselves, the Republican party’s flaws are becoming clearer and clearer to the American people.

Which brings us to the “First 100 Hours”. Looking at this summary of the Dem’s agenda, the only thing shocking is how obvious every one of these proposals is. Raising the minimum wage for the first time in ten years. Enacting 9/11 Commission recommendations. Lowering prescription drug costs and student loans. Funding stem cell research. These aren’t wedge issues, they’re just common sense. The fact that these issues have been ignored while the Washington elite were busying themselves with Schiavo, Abramoff, and Foley will underscore how clueless the GOP has become.

What we’re seeing now is the Republican Party’s worst nightmare. The Democrats are defining themselves not just by what they would do, but specifically by what the Republicans wouldn’t do. And if they think this is bad, wait until the Democrats get into oversight mode and start investigating the scandals the GOP didn’t try to sweep under the rug like extraordinary rendition, war profiteering, signing statements, etc. This is going to be a fun year.

I know this isn’t a particularly noteworthy observation, but what incentive does the Iraqi government have to pick up the slack for providing their own security when President Bush is clearly a cowardly twit who doesn’t know what the hell to do? The dismissive attitude about a timeline for withdrawal (that insurgents will win if they “wait long enough”) seems like something the Administration should embrace. Until the Bush Administration is willing to say “Regardless of how ready you are, we’re going to be out of Iraq completely by the end of the year.” and back that up by withdrawing troops, then The Iraqis will never, ever pick up the slack.

Then again, this whole debate is contingent on the assumption that the President wants to pull out of Iraq, which he doesn’t. At this point, debates about what to do in Iraq are so pointless, we might as well be sitting around coffee shops discussing philosophy or reality TV.