TPM has an angry article on some new, now routine, hostage taking by Senate Republicans since the failure of filibuster reform:

This Is How Filibuster Reform Comes Back To Life

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/a…

TPM forgot to specify the how but maybe they saved it for the secret discussion group:

Dig beneath the headlines and daily news stories to talk to some of the most knowledgable people in the country

http://prime.talkingpointsmemo…

They could have the most powerful and intelligent people on the planet in their secret society but secret societies just don’t do much for me.

There was a secret society that was a political party in the U.S. whose members were instructed to say, “I know nothing” to all questions.  Naturally they became known as the Know Nothing Party which didn’t enhance their grim prospects for survival.

I have had the highest security classification and know compartmented secrets that I won’t reveal even if I can still remember them in old age.  I think it is safe – hope so anyway – to refer you to a series of Al Capp’s comic strip.  The Feds offered to do anything possible for the residents of Dogpatch because a nuclear-tipped ICBM had targeted Dogpatch in error and would shortly exterminate the entire population.

The Dogpatchers couldn’t be told about impending doom that they might flee because that would reveal the military was composed of a bunch of idiots and that was Top Secret.

Outside of that I know nothing.

From the original article:

Reid could in theory revisit the filibuster reform fight.

Reid could in theory fly to Mars but I know of no theory that he could now cure his stupidity and culpability with medical treatment or other means.

Pity.

Best,  Terry

Sasha could surprise you.  She probably spent time in a hospital only for amputation of a leg from bone cancer:

http://lilisnotes.com/sashas-t…

In case you have trouble with the link, Sasha is claimed to be a twelve and a half-year-old American bulldog but she sure doesn’t look like any bulldog I am familiar with.

Three-legged Sasha runs, jumps, swims and catches frisbees which beats our two younger lunkheads who just watch a frisbie sail off, go to inspect it, chew it a bit and then wander off to fight and fool around.

Our 4-year-old, 106 lb. black German Shepherd only scares the wits out of people like the vet’s helpers [I would be frightened too BTW if I didn’t know him].   My wife promised to hold Coal tight while he was given a shot in the rump so he wouldn’t be muzzled.  She said the aide still seemed to be afraid Coal might kick or something.  Sure hope Coal doesn’t get none of that osteosarcoma.  Might be tough getting Coal into a study in an egghead university.

Truth be told Sasha’s prospects aren’t excellent.  One of four dogs in the clinical trial was sent off to dog heaven when the cancer metastasized to the lungs and other bones.  All got a low dose and aren’t eligible for Phase II [mean old investigators want the study to continue with the low dose] or Phase III or any Phase IV.  But inferior humans have done pretty well with low dose.

Be years yet before we will know if any such drug is good enough to be injected in cancer and other patients on an outpatient basis but it sure is pleasant to contemplate compared to the cutting, burning and poisoning of patients.

Obama has talked of shortening the gawdawfully long, expensive and torturous trial process and his appointees seem to be making some small progress in that. The primary enemies are mostly journalists and Nader-type liberals who sensationalize with reason to patients than help to afflicted rather than the usual suspects, Big Pharma.  

Coal, being the same breed as the top war dogs of all time – German Shepherds – should be used to the front lines but others are just collateral.  Veterinary medicine has a skeleton clinical trial system that tends to be much swifter to market than human trials.

Vast fortunes can be made with new and better drugs and for some that is all that matters.

But not for all.

In the hospital where I met my wife long ago, there were trials of a treatment for juvenile leukemia.  Diagnosis of juvenile leukemia was a certain death sentence for which there was no reprieve at the time.  “We are going to cure that sucker,”  a doctor told a callow youth.  Yeah, right, I thought.  

By golly, the doctor [and lots of other doctors and hospitals and researchers and scientists] dunnit.  At least for most little kids.

Sometimes life can be grand.  Even for dogs.

Best,  Terry

There is a bit of snark in claiming Tom Harkin’s dictum that failure to reform filibuster rules in the Senate ends any hope meaningful accomplishment for the Obama Administration is supported by Krugman’s analysis that says it was all over anyway with Republicans owning the House – but not nearly as much as sane people would hope.

Not that there was much to hope for from the Obama Administration in any case.

From what we think we know (humans know very little but we are all sure we know a lot) global warming [I prefer that nomenclature to the weasel wording of “climate change”] is a potent threat to all life on the planet akin to the Great Dying 250 million years when all life was nearly exterminated.

Five networks interview Chris Christie about Hurricane Sandy — and they’re all afraid to mention global warming

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/1…

The imaginary Robin Hood could not have shot an arrow straighter or truer to pierce the heart of the frivolity and hypocrisy of the mass media than David Sirota did with this paper missile.  Little wonder Sirota has so many enemies even among the negligible number of actual liberals.

Is there any hope then?

– Sure there is.

On the day you die, you can hope you won’t if you are still at all sentient.

Not likely it will do much good but you are always allowed hope.

Best, Terry

When I was growing up my mother talked on one or more occasions about the war between the two leading cooked cereals in her tiny piece of the world of Astoria, OR.  I have no idea whether the war was limited to the tiny historical outpost, was regional or even .national but the entire market was split between two contenders.

Proponents on each side declared their cereal was better tasting, fresher, more nutritious, whatever.  Both were prepared in the same vat and poured into different boxes.

Like today’s Democrats and Republicans.

Oh sure, the Democrats have Alan Grayson in the House and Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkeley in the Senate.  Somehow I often forget [shame on me] Tom Harkin who says he told Obama before the inauguration that Obama might as well take a 4 year vacation if the Senate didn’t reform the filibuster rules.

The Republicans have no such people but the wagging tail is not the whole of a dog.

I wrote my usual despised whine largely about the highly lauded Mary Jo on a diseased stock board devoted to a battered stock

http://ragingbull.quote.com/mb…

before reading David Sirota’s masterful dissection of the appointment with reference to a number of other dissenters:

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/2…

For me, that column was a ray of sunshine on a very cold day.

We may have all the impact on the national conversation of grumbling in a dark alley that homeless people call home but at least we are not alone.

Best,  Terry

Like Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment – in Obama’s case toward the moderate left, thereby reversing the 40th president’s political legacy. The Reagan metaphor helps explain the tone of Obama’s inaugural address, built not on a contrived call to an impossible bipartisanship but on a philosophical argument for a progressive vision of the country rooted in our history. Reagan used his first inaugural to make an unabashed case for conservatism.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/re…

Does E. J. Dionne not know that words have meaning?

Reagan was never remotely a conservative, let alone any kind of thinker.  His silly “shining city on a hill” should provide a clue.  The one-time union leader and aging philanderer was clearly a reactionary.  He had more in common with LBJ than most any other president though Reagan’s achievements were enormously destructive while LBJ, despite his enormous flaws, managed the monumental civil rights achievement that reverberates so today.

Both were mainly good at jawboning, something totally beyond Obama’s ken.

One great story involving Al D’Amato, “Senator Pothole,” is illustrative.  I think it was Michael Kinsley, every winger’s liberal so naturally he wasn’t, who told the story.

Al D’Amato was at a private dinner in a restaurant when a waiter told D’Amato he had a call.

When D’Amato got to the phone, Reagan started into his pitch for a vote on approving another missile funding that was hanging in the balance, D’Amato exploded, “Will you quit calling me, you fucking son of a bitch?”  D’Amato had been receiving nuisance calls from some stalker.

When Reagan somehow convinced the fine senator from New York that Al was talking to the President, D’Amato quickly agreed to vote for the missile funding, forgetting entirely about his lengthy shopping list in his embarrassment.

How I wish there were a recording of that conversation as there is with at least some calls by LBJ to some Southern segregationists seeking approval of Johnson’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

Best,  Terry

Seneca Falls is the small hamlet in update New York where activists held the first women’s rights convention in July 1848. Activists Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass were among the 300 people who spent two days discussing ways to promote women’s equality.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…

Actually the women’s suffrage movement was initiated with a meeting of 5 women in a church.  The building is only a shell now and the “park” [Women’s Rights National Park] gets few visitors.  There is little to see unless you have some idea of the significance of what you are looking at.

Best,  Terry

What faith is that, Joe?  Isn’t this like the preacher inveighing against sin while immersed in corruption and degradation?

If you aren’t despairing of the future, you can’t be sentient.

Will the U.S. Surpass Saudi Arabia in Oil Production?

Recent news reports said yes, based on the Executive Summary of a big international report by the International Energy Agency.

And that’s just oil.  Does anybody need to know about fracking natural gas that is giving firewater a whole new meaning?  Natural gas may be more harmful to the environment without the new technology than even coal mining because escaping methane is a vastly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Here’s what’s clear: While we debate and ponder the consequences, global energy consumption continues to grow exponentially.

http://www.popularmechanics.co…

Meanwhile purported environmentalists pushing environment-damaging, high cost, sometime [intermittent] power fight tooth and nail against baseload renewable power that is vastly more potent and cheaper than all other sources combined.

Compare the hottest hour of the hottest day in Death Valley to the potency of a run-of-the-mill supervolcano like Yellowstone that could potentially exterminate human life in North America.  Which would you say likely is the more powerful?

Our leading revered environmentalists would rather see a whole gawddam forest be burnt down along with the woodland critters and a few firefighters and waft tons of CO2 and toxins into the atmosphere rather than gather the kindling and generate power with biomass rather than coal because the former is natural somehow.

One of the ultimate clean power plants is in Iceland where a trash burning facility adds heat to the tepid waters of a warm spring in the tiny, isolated hamlet of Husavik to squeeze out 3MW of power from such sources.  The plant is currently undergoing modernization after it was bought by an Aussie company pushing advanced geothermal technology around the world for deriving power from low temperature geothermal waters.

But that’s not good enough for our megathinking environmentalists who prefer to drill many miles deep into the bowels of the earth for more power at enormous cost beyond the limits of current technology.

Mother Earth is a most bounteous lady but she can be turned into a mass killer beyond compare by mere mortals when her simple rules are ignored.

Who says we are an intelligent species?

Best,  Terry

Fischer accuses Democrats of painting NRA as ‘lunatics’

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201…

Not a single soul I am aware of thinks all NRA members are lunatics but I daresay it would be hard to find an NRA leader or loudmouth who isn’t unbalanced and should be kept safe from hurting himself or others.

I am more than a little perturbed by the loose talk about background checks.

When was anybody so wonderfully qualified to decide who was dangerous and who was not except for the self-selecting lunatics like Fischer?

The old Soviet Union often locked up those who objected to the depradations of the state in insane asylums.  Seemed Soviet psychiatrists determined anybody who offered resistance to the state had to be suicidal and therefore a danger to themselves and others.

There was at least some small bit of logic in that but psychological science is – ummm – different.  It is semi-democratic.  Psychologists and psychiatrists vote on what is sick and what is not.  The most obvious case is that of gays who once had a mental disease needing treatment but now are fully mentally healthy.

Science is not remotely democratic.  

Einstein’s theories of relativity seemed insane when first announced.  In later life, Einstein was objecting to quantum physics as theologically (by his standards) unsound.

Very, very touchy business determining insanity, especially since it is legal rather than medical terminology.

Best,  Terry

A SOLDIER was bashed by three or four men at his Darwin army base and says he was left for two days with no medical treatment.

Private Lachlan Nimmo, 33, has told The NT News about a culture of violence and a lack of support for victims in Defence.

He was bashed by “three or four men” in a carpark at Robertson Barracks on October 12 last year.

He was found bloodied and slipping in and out of consciousness in his room two days later.

Despite calls from his distraught wife, Evelyn, 29, guards did not look for him until he missed a shift.

By the time he was found and taken to Royal Darwin Hospital, his kidneys had shut down. He was put in an induced coma, underwent 10 operations and spent the next two months in hospital.

Doctors said he was just hours away from death.

http://www.news.com.au/nationa…

Despite the horrible circumstances of this event, it is oddly satisfying to learn (as if it wasn’t obvious enough already) that the phobia against social lepers like victims and particularly the manifest treatment of disabled enlisted soldiers is universal.

Victims carry a lifelong stigma and I suspect few understand it.

It is most obvious and ugly in the case of the raped female but omnipresent for all victims.

Real men win, you see, and good girls avoid being raped.

Damn you, Chuck Hagel, you put the problem front and center despite all your heroics and attractions.

Rachel Maddow Lays Out Why Chuck Hagel’s Positions on Rape, Abortion, and Gays are Important

http://www.towleroad.com/2013/…

A personal note:

My wife wanted oh so bad to rescue a tiny “rare” tiger kitten from the shelter.  For whatever reason I couldn’t tell her the tiger cats were by far the most common of all cats and a tiny kitten in a house with a PTSD German Shepherd and a warrior half-breed Border Collie might not be safe for a tiny, undersized kitten.

I had seen kittens killed by farm dogs.  Not a pretty sight.

But this tiny kitten was a true tiger.  She quickly put the dogs and and another cat in their places.  Only really, really dumb dogs are willing to take the punishment from unsheathed claws.

We named the tiny tiger Rachael.  

Best,  Terry

On This Week, the usually very precise Paul Krugman fell down the huge bottomless linguistic pit created by Bill Clinton and the DLC.

Krugman bemoaned the lack of any progressive economists in the Obama administration while being lectured by the like of Peggy Noonan on antediluvian economics.

Progressives have most distinguished themselves from the usual run of coastal liberals by being isolationist, insular, often tainted with more or less aggressive chauvinism.  

The last clear progressive “economist” I ever read was the fire-breathing The Nation columnist, Alexander Cockburn.

Cockburn styled himself a socialist while directing much of his fire at his fellow alternating lead The Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchens, who was a liberal and/or socialist.  Cockburn’s somewhat bizarre economics, rarely on display, was oddly reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s isolationist economics and even had a hint of Jefferson’s rabid racism.

Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower were both regular contributors to The Progressive.  The Progressive is a Madison, Wi, publication that traces its beginnings to Bob LaFollete and hews closely to LaFollete’s ideas without some of the ugliness.  Progressivism began with Teddy Roosevelt and his Bull Moose Party and has a history of wild warriors against conservatives of any breed.

Most notable in my view was Huey Long.  

“If you can’t take their money, drink their liquor, eat their food, screw their women and then look them in the eye and tell them you are against them, you’re not man enough to be in the Senate,” declared the Kingfish.  

No doubt Huey was first in line with his “Share Our Wealth” organization but he beat FDR bloody when FDR made draconian cuts to the pensions of veterans and their families.  FDR never forgot nor forgave, his hatred for Republicans was mild by comparison.

No way in hell was Krugman talking about the like of Huey Long.  Not terribly likely the two would ever see eye to eye.  Certainly Krugman would have known enough not to debate Huey Long while standing alongside Huey at a urinal.  A fellow senator did that in the Senate restroom and Huey simply turned sideways without saying a thing.  

Best,  Terry

My new Special Forces friend had a problem.  The VA said the wars he fought in never happened.  His other Special Forces Indian buddies were growing marijuana he said and there would be a raid next week but not where the Special Forces that never fought wars were.  Even the drug warriors knew better than to take them on outside of spraying them from the air.

It was much the same with a childhood friend of my son.  The pains were all in his head as were his wars.  That he spent months in a wheelchair with doctors declaring he would never walk again was probably his own damn fault as was the conviction of convenience that cost him his freedom and loss of all pay for doing some real hurt to a South Korean officer who had put a pistol to his ear to enforce an illegal order.  The penalties in that case were shortly overturned and pay and rank were all restored after the diplomatic problem blew over but not before his lovely family declared they knew he was no good and would never amount to anything.  I finally understood the chip on Steve’s shoulder when he was young.

I didn’t really fight in one of those non-wars but I was blown up on a bus.  One buddy somehow made it to the Wall in D.C. though he was another peacetime veteran of a war that wasn’t happening then.  When I got out of the non-war, Jack F. Kennedy was promising a real non-war with assassination squads which would really fix those dang commies if he got elected. JFK also promised to close that horrid Eisenhower missile gap that was pure imagination.  I foolishly told a very large bar fighter that his hero JFK would get us deeper into a war that we would lose.  The sucker punch I never saw coming did more damage than the Viet Cong bomb had.

Some of us idiots never learn.

Oh yeah, Hagel.  At least he was in a recognized war and no doubt he was a hero.  And he has shown some ability to learn despite being a Republican.

The sickening effort to defame Chuck Hagel as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel has been comprehensively debunked, in detail, while its neoconservative authors – notably the convicted liar Eliot Abrams – have once more disgraced themselves…

http://www.nationalmemo.com/ha…

Ridiculous.  No neocon was ever even embarrassed, let alone disgraced, for being shown to be an unconscionable liar.  That is the definition of neocon.

I like Vietnam vets, official or non-official, because [blush] I am one.  And Hagel has some admirable qualities, like that strange rudimentary ability to learn despite being a Republican.  And maybe particularly because he is no general.

But his statements as a right-to-lifer are a match for those of Akins and Mourdock.  I am delighted to learn Rachel Maddow has caught on.  Bright lady though a bit late on that.

Do we really need such a hero as Defense Secretary?  Will women now love him, so to speak?

Beats me.

Best,  Terry