Here’s to the Party of Non-Accountability

Toto – Hold The Line

I moved down to the Washington, DC metro area in early September. Jobless, with my fingers crossed, I was fortunate to get an offer to join the FireDogLake team. Joyous with my new employment and the mitigation of my financial anxiety, I started to look for places that I could give back to the community. A friend of my recommended doing some work at Martha’s Table. Their mission is to provide nutritional, educational, and community support for the homeless. Their main focus is “at risk” children and their families. When I contacted Martha’s Table 3 weeks before Christmas and asked what I could do to help, they put me on a waiting list. Although discouraging, it was heartwarming to hear that we live in a country where even in times of hardship for the average household there is plenty of charitable souls trying to help out during the holiday season.

New Medicare regulations to take effect January 1 will include a provision physicians, social workers and families pushed for. TheNew York Times reports:

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

If Congress couldn’t pass the DREAM Act with its strongly Democratic makeup, the prospects for next year, with a Republican House and a less Democratic Senate, are dim. It may represent a second-term agenda item Obama can sell in his campaign, but it’s not a humane approach to immigration reform which is likely DOA as long as Republicans hold the House.

Tonight you’re all the guests, as we discuss amongst ourselves one of the classics of the America holiday genre, the 1983 A Christmas Story, directed by Bob Clark. The movie is based on In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, a collection of semi-fictional stories about growing up in a small Mid-Western town between World Wars. Shepherd is also the narrator.

A Christmas Story centers around Ralphie Parker and his wish for his ultimate Christmas gift, a Red Rider BB gun with a compass in the barrel and a “thing that tells the time.”

I don’t think states or municipalities need much help from the federal government in their desire to rewrite public employee union contracts. There has been a concerted effort for years to demonize and delegitimize public employee unions, from both Republican pols and the media in general. This has left a distorted impression about greedy union contracts and well-paid government functionaries. So the new class of Republican governors would certainly want to capitalize on that by pleasing the public, who now favor things like wage freezes (which Obama just instituted at the federal level) and furloughs and bigger pension contributions, punishing those workers. And they are animated by a general hatred of unions, which have maintained their strength in the public sector while fading away in the private sector.

The Wall Street Journal scores some classified United Nations maps of Afghanistan showing the deterioration of security in the north and west without notable improvements in security in the south and east during 2010. Joshua Foust properly notes that he told you so.

I’m not going to embed the images of the maps, since I’m not sure what’s fair use here and I’d rather not tempt a lawsuit. But if you click through, you’ll see something striking that escapes comment in the Journal story. Among the changes from the March 2010 map to the October 2010 map is that there are now(ish) more high-risk areas surrounding Kabul. That fits with a longstanding insurgent strategy, as assessed by ISAF and explained to me over the past two years, of infiltration and resupply from the Pakistani tribal areas in the east to the areas near the capitol city, where they lie in wait for the moment to do something big.

Ralph Hall (R-TX) is the unassuming new chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee. Like many Americans these days, Hall considers the pinnacle of American advancement in science and technology to be ‘splosions. There’s no way to read his praise of the BP oil spill – that’s not a typo, I wrote “praise” – in anything approaching a good way.

The filibuster is essentially a dead procedural instrument walking. Democrats want to rein in its abuse, and Republicans want to use alternative legislative means like the Congressional Review Act that avoid a filibuster. It’s a matter of time before one side or the other bites the bullet and does away with it.