WAPO:
But the online materials will not address a controversial question — whether Democratic leaders would use a parliamentary procedure known as “reconciliation” to try to pass health-care changes without the usual 60 votes in the Senate, officials said.
This is beyond stupid. Legislation never needs 60 votes to pass. NEVER. The WAPO is so dumb.
Sigh. Things would be so much easier if the Republicans didn’t have a 41 seat majority to the Democrats 59.
Krugman says Obama is WYSIWYG, if you’re paying any attention. Of course, he’s right – he usually is. But it’s surely also true that Obama’s oratorical style and general demeanor during the election campaign allowed others to see in him what they wanted to see. He was all about aspirations and he was all about you. I was struck by this when I saw him in person at Rhode Island College in the middle of the primary fight. Obama doesn’t refer to himself a lot (unless he’s doing the biographical thing). At least some of his supporters were set up to be disappointed, however unintentionally, because Obama gave them a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings. I empathize with them some, but not all that much. Not all of us put on blinders – during the speech, when Obama said something like “you may not agree with me on every issue” a voice called out “Afghanistan!!!”. Now there’s a guy who was paying attention.
A political leader should put pragmatism before ideology and accomplishment over acting on principle. The health care bill sucks but still, it ain’t nothing. I say keep Obama, get rid of the Senate. Not kidding.
You can squash a bug but not a rumor. The action that is applied to a rumor, idea, revolt, or an indictment is quash not squash. Maybe you can squash a pumpkin, akin to smashing it, but you can’t squash a panic – unless you’re desperate for a pun:
The pumpkin paucity panic is squashed
However, you can quash a beef, if ”beef” is synonymous with “quarrel”.
Wu-Tang Clan/ Slaughterhouse Beef Quashed At Rock The Bells
I won’t argue with that.
My ongoing annoyance with the on-a-mission climate change deniers in this country (they are less common elsewhere for various reasons, but especially because it has become a partisan issue and one of our political parties speaks in an increasingly singular voice of insanity) has just been matched by Meg McArdle. She’s not a denier, she points out, rather she’s a moderate, an independent voice. This is the same territory she stakes out in her political opinions. She’s splitting the difference between whatever positions can be found on any given issue. If you don’t know, this is called the Middle Ground Fallacy.
This fallacy is committed when it is assumed that the middle position between two extremes must be correct simply because it is the middle position. this sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
- Position A and B are two extreme positions.
- C is a position that rests in the middle between A and B.
- Therefore C is the correct position.
This line of “reasoning” is fallacious because it does not follow that a position is correct just because it lies in the middle of two extremes. This is shown by the following example. Suppose that a person is selling his computer. He wants to sell it for the current market value, which is $800 and someone offers him $1 for it. It would hardly follow that $400.50 is the proper price.
What’s at stake is the degree of warming associated with our carbon dioxide emissions. In particular, to what extent the earth’s many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems may mitigate (or exacerbate) temperature increases. I’ve long been skeptical of the more catastrophic scenarios, because all this carbon used to be in the atmosphere, which probably defines a ceiling on how bad it will get–a ceiling well below “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!” That said, I wouldn’t really want to live in the Jurassic, and not just because I’m afraid of hundred-foot lizards. (for example, I am also afraid of the huge flying roaches Palmetto bugs that live in our nation’s more southern climes). So that doesn’t mean I don’t worry quite a lot.
“We then applied this technique to study the history of carbon dioxide from 800,000 years ago to 20 million years ago,” she said. “We report evidence for a very close coupling between carbon dioxide levels and climate. When there is evidence for the growth of a large ice sheet on Antarctica or on Greenland or the growth of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, we see evidence for a dramatic change in carbon dioxide levels over the last 20 million years.“A slightly shocking finding,” Tripati said, “is that the only time in the last 20 million years that we find evidence for carbon dioxide levels similar to the modern level of 387 parts per million was 15 to 20 million years ago, when the planet was dramatically different.”
Some dolt on BBC Radio interviews Richard Dawkins on the topic of Christmas. For what it’s worth, I like Christmas every bit as much as Dawkins. Which is to say, it’s alright.
A lady journalist from Winnepeg once said he had the stoop of an aged crop picker and the face of a little boy.
Pitchfork has a pre-Songs of Leonard Cohen documentary about Leonard Cohen, the renowned poet. He does some stand-up comedy, smokes some cigarettes, reads aloud much of his poetry, plays with the I Ching, speaks French (naturally), and bits of Greek. He’s a vegetarian. He plays a guitar and sings, then plays a harmonic, poorly. He talks about sex. This is Leonard Cohen before he was a musician, a star, a ladies’ man, a spiritual seeker. The surprise, if it is a surprise, is that he already was all of those things in 1964 when this film was made. He’d sold more than 400,000 copies of his novel Beautiful Losers, far more than his recording debut sold, at least initially.
As an addendum, the end of the film has a bit of self-referencing as Cohen watches footage of himself sleeping and bathing. It’s an interesting moment because it presages what became something of a trend by the late 60’s. The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter ends in an editing room. In 1969 the art film Medium Cool took self consciousness to new heights.
