WASHINGTON (AP) — Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call.

In another conversation, the mother of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said.

You know, there are just a few things – probably impossible in the real world – which would be nice if they could come true.

1. If medical professionals on TV actually have anything better to do with their time, it would be nice if they could stop telling me how I shouldn’t enjoy bacon so much.

2. If hotel bars in Manhattan are actually charging $45 for a Bombay Sapphire martini, it would be nice if they told you that they planned to rob you in that fashion before you have two of them.

and

3. If Russian intelligence agencies actually have a list of people living in the United States whose phones they are tapping and are talking to their moms or whoever about Jihad and possibly attacking the United States, it would be nice IF THEY GAVE US THE FREAKING LIST.

It references previous court decisions regarding subjects which are among “the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy.”

True — but not relevant. The choice of sexual partners and practices is (with some exceptions) a very private matter, which was the basis of the Lawrence decision a few years back. Government recognition of those choices through the licensing of marriage is not an “intimate and personal choice.” Government licensure is a public act, which means that the public has the right to set those parameters within the bounds of the Constitution. (That, by the way, was why the Loving case succeeded, as it should have; the bar on interracial marriage directly contradicted the 14th and 15th Amendments.)

On one level, I can see how Ed’s argument has a lot of appeal, particularly if you support the idea that the government should be able to “define” the word marriage – and in a logical fashion to be sure – but I find a serious flaw with the argument. Going back to our public discussion last night, this line of reasoning requires you to start from an assumption that simply because there is currently a license required to engage in a particular activity, then there is an argument to keep it in the public sector. The problem here isn’t with Ed’s conclusion, but with the underlying assumption.

One thing which I think is long overdue in this country is a thorough review of the entire sphere of activities where government at all levels has seized the power to regulate and control actions by requiring a “license” – and an associated fee to put in their coffers! – before you can engage in them. If we were to assume that there is no legal and permissible human activity which government can’t prohibit by requiring a license and a fee, there’s little to argue with, but I reject that premise and believe that government has already grown too big for its britches in many areas. (“ll warn you in advance that this gets a little long, but if you’re interested in the subject, bear with me. And trust me, it ties back to the original premise.)

For any of these, I saw opponents citing completely unrelated arguments which miss the point, but I’ll start with a couple of the simplest ones, beginning with hunting. At what point did we collectively decide that the government should be able to charge a fee before you can feed your family by taking game “on the King’s land?” Didn’t we leave England at one point over things like this? Why do you need to pay a fee and obtain a license to feed your family? Here are a few of the incredible arguments I received against this premise and why they are wrong:

“So you should be allowed to fire a gun wherever you want?” – No. And not related. You can have public safety laws preventing anyone from firing a weapon within a certain distance of other buildings, etc and arrest anyone who does it whether they are shooting at a deer or a beer can. This has no bearing on licensing to hunt game. But it does drag the equally unrelated gun control debate into it to heat up people’s passions, so nice job at spin management.

“So you should be able to hunt any animal you wish to extinction?” – No. If we, as a society, collectively decide that we should ban the killing of a given species to prevent its extinction, (also rather dubious, in my opinion) then you can pass that law. It has no bearing on the taking of plentiful animals which you already say it’s okay to take providing you have a license.

“But the fees go to promote wildlife management and help hunters!” – That’s an excellent point which tugs at the heartstrings, but it also fails. Again… if we, as a society, decide that investing in such wildlife management is a good idea, (and I think it is) then we should jointly fund it by public agreement, not just levy the fee on one segment of the population, some of which may not agree with the idea. Also, people can donate to groups like Ducks Unlimited if they feel that strongly.

The same set of arguments can be made about fishing licenses, which are possibly even more laughable since they don’t involve guns. I don’t see anything in the constitution which should give government at any level the power to tax us and require a license to take a plentiful fish to eat.

Why do you need a license to take in a dog as your companion and pet at home? Why can the government demand that you license your dog? You can try to argue about dogs getting loose and biting people, needing shots, etc. but all of those situations can be outlawed in the name of public safety without requiring the individual dog owner who has yet to break any law or endanger anyone to purchase a license.

How about requiring a license for an individual to brew any amount of beer or distill liquor on their own property for the consumption of their own family. (Yes, you can brew 200 gallons of beer, wine or mead, but they still impose limits. And you can’t distill liquor at all without a virtually impossible to obtain permit.) There’s a marginal argument on distilling because of the danger of an explosion from an improperly ventilated structure, but local municipalities could require a codes inspection for ventilation. If you aren’t selling or distributing the product to anyone else (a different field of law) what empowers the government to demand you have a license?

The government – at all levels – has long been out of control in terms of the things it demands licenses for. I could continue this list for pages, but you get the general idea.

Now, to come full circle back to the original question.

If the previous questions were based on stopping the government from requiring a license and a fee to engage in activities which only involve ourselves or our families, where on Earth does the government derive the right to demand we “qualify for” and obtain a license and pay a fee to engage in a ceremony declaring to our friends and family that we are committing ourselves to a loving partner for the rest of our lives, whether that declaration be made before a priest, a rabbi, a Justice of the Peace or a mentor? Don’t bring up the “raising of children” issue here, because plenty of marriages don’t produce offspring and very nearly a majority of children are born to unmarried persons. We can talk until we are blue in the face about property division, etc but that comes into the contractual end of an agreement between any two parties. Caveat emptor. You can sign such a shared resources with any agreement or company, and if you don’t, shame on you. It has nothing to do with the fundamental premise of making a public promise to another person about your personal relationship. The government dares not – today – try to forbid you from living with, loving or engaging in consensual physical relations with another human being in the privacy of our homes, nor proudly proclaiming that relationship in the public square. Where does the government claim the authority to reach that deeply into your most personal relationships and insist upon your qualification for and purchase of a license along with the payment of a fee?

This is not an argument “in favor of gay marriage.” It’s a demand that the government stop exerting control and extorting fees where it has no right to intrude. That was obviously far too long of a diatribe, but if you really believe in limited government and personal liberty, you should be asking your elected representatives for a full review of all of these licenses – and many more – and demanding they explain precisely where they derive the authority to require them.

The Top Ten Reasons Hillary Must Be the Next President

10.) Worked herself to exhaustion at State Department and clearly deserves a job where she can do nothing.

9.) Will play golf from the red tees, so Boehner won’t even have to pretend to talk to her.

8.) Not only shoots skeet, but according to Bill, has multiple recipes for cooking them.

7.) Chelsea not yet old enough to run.

6.) Guaranteed to double current office holder’s bowling score.

5.) Will reduce annual budget by never ordering pizza deliveries to West Wing.

4.) Proven tarmac dodging skills. ‘Nuff said.

3.) Will pick Biden for running mate again, just to see the look on his face.

2.) Nobody thought she’d reach the 500,000 frequent flyer miles threshold on the State Dept. rewards plan, but we’re locked in now.

1.) A quick survey has revealed that Hillary Clinton is actually the last woman left in the country. If we don’t do it now…

One of my key points was that Manning doesn’t even qualify as a legitimate whistleblower by definition, as I explained in my column. Had he come close to qualifying, he could have found extra-legal avenues for his complaints. Given the rather poisonous media environment, as I think you’ll agree, the alleged traitor could have found a willing ear anywhere from the CBS evening news to even Wikileaks. Had he truly been angry just over the now public video and released just that – perhaps with a handful of carefully chosen pieces of military correspondence supporting his claims – he would have found willing allies in the press. And that kind of pressure can and does have an effect (at least sometimes) on the military and their civilian directors. It might even have influenced a somewhat more favorable outcome for him.

But going back to my original assertion, his blatant, scattershot release of nearly a million pieces of sensitive documentation made it hard for even the media to give him cover on the larger stage. Assuming the things his lawyer has already hinted at being willing to admit are true, Manning was no whistleblower. He was angry at something to be sure, but it wasn’t righteous indignation. He may have been angry at the military after finding, once on the inside, that he was a poor fit for it. But he was no crusader. He was treasonous.

The military justice system is not composed of idiots, no matter how much many of us who lived it like to joke about it. And I think the judge in this case is no idiot and has already seen through this as a sham. Just my opinion, of course.

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts so far: $38.50

Make sense now?

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I understand this is a short clip, but the rest of the conversation was essentially about the “need for gun control change” now. To provide the full context, you are invited to watch the entire segment. But here’s the part we featured:

Emphasis mine:

Chuck Todd: … having this discussion in Washington. The question is, does it last after the New Year? It may last this week before Christmas.

Guest: There is clear public opinion … public opinion is behind it. People are behind it. This is the right moment…

CT: There’s public opinion in general and there’s public opinion in the Republican congressional districts. Which is a different America. Anyway, thank you all. Thank you for the short … there… we have a busy morning.

This is one short taste of what is barreling down the tracks toward us like a freight train. Among the many memes which will be hoisted up the flag pole is the idea that any of you toothless, southern, probably inbred hicks who still wish to cling to your guns are “from a different America” which is somehow out of step with what all good Americans should know after Newtown.

This is shaping up to be a tremendously difficult period for Second Amendment advocates, and we’ll have much more on the subject to come. This was just an opening volley.

If he doesn’t spend the rest of his life in prison, Pfc. Bradley Manning wants go to college and perhaps run for public office, his lawyer, David E. Coombs, told supporters of the former Army intelligence analyst.

Manning is accused of illegally giving hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the website WikiLeaks. He faces 22 criminal charges and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted…

The crazy part is, I can actually think of a couple of districts where he might win.

Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills
outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.

“Something just went wrong,” said a still visibly shaken organizer of the
protest. “Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong.”The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activists, “growing tired of
throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats,” decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event “in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats.” “In fact,” said the organizer, “motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it, ergo, they should stop.”

According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960′s era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting “you’re murderers” to passersby. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.

“They peed on me!!!” charged one activist. “They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me ‘La Trene’ and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!”

Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers “farted on their heads.”

There’s more at the link, but you get the gist of it.

Hamas are moderates…

There are no unanswered questions on Benghazi.

Chris Stevens “wanted a minimum of security…”

The talking points were accurate.

Anybody can call themselves Al Queda.

[the local extremists] are “the Crips”

After the initial Klein comments about Hamas being moderates, they cut to a quick clip of John McCain, but when they return the real fireworks begin at around the 2:45 mark. The series of gobsmacked looks and dripping, sarcastic comments from Scarborough in response to Klein’s incredible allegations are worth the price of admission alone. Click play and let the good times roll.

BONUS: Klein essentially calls Petraeus a liar for saying AQ was involved.

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Frankly, I’m more concerned about the border issue than winning Hispanic voters at this point. We’ve been fortunate so far that we haven’t had more infiltration than we’ve seen across either border, but that good fortune won’t last forever. We need to address both that and the visa system that doesn’t produce any follow-up on violators. We have waited since 2007 to win back control of Washington to win a solution on our terms rather than a compromise that would both pass more quickly and spread the political risk.

Now that we’ve lost the presidential election, we won’t have that opportunity for another four years. We still have the House, though, and that gives us leverage to insist on prioritizing border security and visa reform ahead of normalization for those illegal aliens in the US. In two years, on the current trajectory, we may not even have that much, and there is no guarantee that a Republican will win the presidency in 2016, either.

This is the short term, “take what you can get” approach which may turn out to be the best damage control achievable. If the nation is in the mood for some hot and heavy bipartisan horse trading, the door may well be open to precisely what Ed proposes. An intelligent approach to border security could arrive along with a fresh look at the dreaded “path to citizenship” which so many find offensive. But if the second point I want to touch on tonight is valid, it may be well to remember the old adage about half a loaf being better than none.

In the long run, while Ed pretty much dismissed the question of whether or not the GOP should – or even can – win a significantly larger portion of the Latino vote, it’s a serious question for the future. And I’m not talking about the distant future. I’m referring to 2016 and who knows how long after that. Is changing the GOP platform on immigration likely to yield a bountiful harvest of votes?

My gut reaction is not only no, but heck no. Had the GOP pushed forward some candidates and party leaders in the Spring and Summer of this year with a modified, balanced message on this subject it might have made significant inroads. But when you come crawling away from an electoral beat down and suddenly say, “Oh, I guess we should start supporting immigration reform since we got our butts kicked” I don’t think you’re going to win over many Latino voters. In fact, I’d expect they would rightly see it as patronizing and phony. That’s not moving any votes, nor should it.

But then what to do? I think you have to ask yourself the following question. Do you accept that the GOP really is the “party of white people” and that racial divisions in the nation’s political DNA are not only real, but so permanent that minorities will forever vote for Democrats in titanic proportions? Because if you do believe that, then demographic trends should tell you that it’s time to pack up the Republican Party in its old kit bag and send it out into the sunset. President Obama didn’t even take 40% of the white vote last week and he still won. That party is over… pun intended.

But what to do about the fact that minority voters DO in fact currently vote for Democrats in massive proportions? The reality is that just putting up a few candidates or high profile, well paid pundits of color to represent the popularity of Republicans isn’t going to move the needle in any substantive way. You don’t need more minorities being elected or hired as “Conservative entertainment industry” stars. You need more real people who go out and vote and who speak for conservative principles in their community. Electing another Allen West or Ted Cruz isn’t going to change the flow of that tide one bit.

How does that get fixed? Come up with that answer and you’ll probably be famous overnight.

.. produce fewer poor people.

It’s fine to talk about that fact that increased prosperity and job growth will result in more jobs, giving people more money to spend, resulting in more jobs… ad infinitum. But a good team of strategists – who clearly have to be smarter than myself – will need to find concrete examples of this which can be easily conveyed in short message bursts to lower information voters and those with short attention spans.

Just a thought.

First, can anyone get that woman to stop reciting a polemic in favor of Obama – and how wrong conservative opinions are – long enough to ask Ed an actual question?

Second, as Doug Mataconis noted today, at least Ed got more face time than Eugene Robinson during the segment.

Enjoy.

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“Mitt Romney is a fine man with a great mind for business, but he’s a terrible politician and Barack Obama is winning with a slim but comfortable margin.”

After a couple of debates, it changed to:

“Mitt’s strong performance certainly helped him, but it doesn’t look like quite enough. Obama still wins in a nail biter.”

And now, with one poll after another racking up in Romney’s favor, it’s apparently changed to this:

In the race to 270 electoral votes, Obama still leads in Pennsylvania (20 Electoral votes), Michigan (16 EV), Ohio (18 EV), WI (10 EV) and IA (6 EV). Most polling sites have Obama securing 201 electoral votes, winning these five battleground states, totaling 70 electoral votes, would give Obama the necessary electoral votes to win re-election.

So the new story is that Romney will win the popular vote, but Obama will win the electoral college. It’s almost as if the the media machine would sooner predict a blizzard of badgers falling from the sky than choke out the words “President Mitt Romney.”

As an aside, I was one of those annoying people calling for the end of the electoral college after the 2000 election and saying the outcome there left a big asterisk by the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s first term. This idea was roundly rejected by Republicans. I wonder how everyone will feel if this latest prediction does come true and Obama manages a similarly dubious achievement.

LePage, a confrontational conservative governor who rode a wave of Tea Party support to victory in 2010, said the Marketplace Fairness Act would boost his state’s economy by helping traditional stores compete with online retailers.

“Unfortunately, a damaging inequity exists in the retail marketplace because some online retailers are not required to collect Maine sales tax, but Maine retailers are,” LePage wrote. “Not only does this hurt Maine businesses, it hurts the state. If the handcuffs on these small retailers were removed, they could compete on equal terms. They would generate mores sales, pay more sales tax to the state treasury, hire more local retailers and pump more money into local economies throughout Maine.”

As I’ve stated before, I was on the fence about this one for a long time. Even leaving aside the “taxes are bad” thing, anything which could impede online commerce just strikes a sour note with many of us. I had also considered the possibility that maybe this could be worked out at the state level, but a recent attempt in Illinois to do just that produced… nothing. But after sifting through all of the pros and cons, I have to admit that it may be time to just get it over with and do this.

The reason? Like it or not, fiscal conservatives must, at a minimum, believe in a level playing field. Equality of opportunity, not results… remember? After looking over the new Ryan Plan Part 2, I’m reminded that as we tighten our belt at the federal level, more and more things will need to be pushed back down to the states. Each of them will have to manage their budgets as they see best, and for the majority of them a state sales tax is part of their revenue stream. While it may be depressing, the feds need to provide each of them a chance to compete evenly.

The commerce clause is probably the most abused aspect of the constitution, having been used to push through laws ranging from gun control to donkeys in bathtubs. But this may be one of those rare cases where it can be fairly implied. If Washington can regulate commerce between the states, each of them should surely be able to collect legally approved sales taxes when such commerce takes place. Plus, states with no sales tax won’t have to worry about it anyway.

It may be time to just bite the bullet and pass this legislation.

The recession and the early, brittle years of the economic recovery absolutely shredded state budgets. With growth now returning to healthier levels, this should be a time for relief legislators. Unfortunately, as USA Today reports, they might have to face another sobering reality: The system most states rely on to generate sales tax revenue could become obsolete.

The paper writes that last year, state sales taxes claimed the smallest fraction of overall consumer spending since 1967. Americans paid an average tax of 4.27 percent on purchases, down from 4.63 percent five years before. While overall consumer spending rose 4.7 percent in 2011, collections grew by a mere 1.2 percent.

To put it mildly, this is no good. States are desperate for money. And in parts of the country that lack an income tax, such as Texas and Florida, sales taxes are crucial for funding a basic level of government services.

This article from The Atlantic touches yet again on a currently pending bill, the Marketplace Fairness Act, which we’ve written about here before. But it does highlight a larger question of state economies vs. the national economy as a whole. If those numbers from the USA Today report are accurate – and I see no reason to doubt them yet – then this trend represents a pretty big hit to the coffers of the individual states just as some of them are starting to climb out of the hole.

This is one aspect which I hadn’t considered earlier regarding the Marketplace Fairness Act. Apparently, given the SCOTUS ruling in question, there are already some states which are collecting taxes from online retailers (in states where they have a physical, brick and mortar presence) but others which can not. That type of imbalance, if it gets to a significant level, could begin spurring population creep between states.

I’m still on the fence about this legislation. Let’s collect some other opinions and data on it here.

The commander of the Military District of Washington has ordered a court-martial for Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the former intelligence analyst accused of giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Maj. Gen. Michael S. Linnington made the decision Friday after reviewing testimony and arguments from a preliminary hearing at Fort Meade in December, officials said.

There was no word on whether the as-yet-unscheduled court-martial would also be held at Fort Meade, one of three installations within the military district equipped to host such a proceeding.

While Manning would normally qualify for death (likely before a firing squad) all current reports indicate that the prosecution will only seek life in prison. Either way, the investigation has gone on long enough that the Army clearly feels they have the goods and can deliver a case sufficient to obtain a conviction. The current odds would indicate that Manning will likely never see the outside of a prison again.

What remains to be seen is if Julian Assange will be drawn into this web following revelations that his chat logs were tied to Manning from his laptop. The case is complicated, since Assange is currently awaiting possible extradition and trial in the UK for sexual assault charges.

But, with that said… on to the subject at hand. This entire process makes me sad beyond the capacity of words to describe. In the smaller lens, the entire idea of extending the conservative war against Planned Parenthood to embroil an agency like Komen is enough to incite rage. The media maneuvering on all sides has already devolved the discussion into something more suited to a Super PAC ad. The foundation was quick like a bunny to release barely plausible mutterings about how none of this had anything to do with abortion, but rather with new rules regarding who would be eligible for grant money dedicated to screenings for breast cancer.

[T]he organization is trying to focus on “higher impact programs” and get rid of “duplicative” grants — and she says the “scurrilous accusations” about the change have been “profoundly hurtful to the organization.”

The reality, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, is far more complex and distinctly political in nature. The Atlantic provides two different points of view incorporating direct interviews with some of the main players involved. One piece by Jeffrey Goldberg strongly suggests that the new rules put in place by Komen were a direct result of external pressure from pro-life groups, combined with internal moves by newly anointed VP Karen Handel, previously a gubernatorial candidate from Georgia and a staunch anti-abortion advocate.

But three sources with direct knowledge of the Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut-off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new “no-investigations” rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice-president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is “pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.” (The Komen grants to Planned Parenthood did not pay for abortion or contraception services, only cancer detection, according to all parties involved.)

A companion piece from Megan McArdle suggests that, while it may have been political in nature, it was needed to ensure long term viability for Komen.

Goldberg clearly disapproves of the decision. Though I’m pro-choice, I don’t share the outrage that was roiling my Twitter feed this morning. It is, as Josh Barro noted, absurd to pretend that abortion is somehow incidental to Planned Parenthood’s services, and since money is fungible, giving them money is probably helping to fund abortion provision. Since I think this is a very tough issue on which reasonable people can disagree, I can see why the federal government, and private foundations, would decline to fund their operations.

Yes, money is fungible. We all know this. But those without blinders also know that abortions are actually not the majority of the work done by Planned Parenthood. In fact they are not anywhere near the 90% figure once quoted by Jon Kyle. (Disregarding his later politically charged pronunciations that the figures were not intended to be factual statements.) In fact, such procedures account for roughly 3% of the work performed. (EDIT: See below) And Komen, according to every source I can find, has never once spoken out or supported in any way abortion procedures. They raise funds which go to early cancer detection, and this is also something which PP provides at little to no cost to tens of thousands of women, along with other routine preventative health services. I’m only aware of this because of personal family and friend contacts who have made use of these services over the years and who have never had an abortion.

But even these facts submitted in evidence are not the key point of this admittedly lengthy diatribe. I understand the vast divide in our nation over abortion and the heated feelings it can provoke. And because of that, I can also comprehend the visceral hatred which many conservatives hold for Planned Parenthood and the wish for its destruction whether I agree with them or not. But not so for Komen.

The key point here comes back to a completely unrelated piece I penned just this week which dealt with the difference between “civilians” in our political and ideological wars and people such as George Soros and the Koch brothers. In it – in part – I wrote:

I’m also mindful of the fact that there are many people out there who have no interest in our game and are simply trying to get on with their lives. If you are, for example, the owner of a dry cleaning shop who happens to get caught up in a political story, it can turn out to be a disaster. Even if you happened to be involved in some business contract with somebody who once worked with a company in Iran, or if you offered a standard health plan which was inclusive of some services offered at Planned Parenthood, I would strenuously object to your suddenly being thrust into the political arena and having your life disrupted against your will. You weren’t part of our war and I have no interest in seeing you become collateral damage in one of our battles.

I now find it ironic that I invoked the name of Planned Parenthood in a piece crafted when I wasn’t even remotely considering the Komen case. But it certainly applies here. There are already pro-choice combatants lining up to call Komen cowards and demand that the faithful cease supporting them financially. (While working on this article, my wife – yes… a Democrat – described a mailing list of her friends calling to “send their pink **** back to Komen” over the story.) It is true, as Goldberg pointed out, that some conservative forces are suddenly calling for donations to the group to support their “brave” decision which may make up some of the funding in the short term, and some high profile opportunists like Michael Bloomberg are dumping cash into PP in exchange for a fast headline, but that doesn’t seem like a long term, balanced solution.

No matter what any of us think of the 3% of PP’s business which consists of providing abortions, there is always a balance to be struck when dealing with entities which do things we don’t like. In a vastly larger, but still related sense, we could list the various evils and shortcomings of Saudi Arabia. I don’t need to list them here. But we still seem to do business with them no matter whether there is a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. Perhaps there is a parallel lesson here to be studied.

My friend Ed Morrissey jumped into the fray early on, praising the efforts and lauding the work of of Live Action in trying to close the doors of Planned Parenthood. We can have that particular fight another day in terms of how systemic the problems at PP are and the best course of corrective action, but as I noted above, they have still provided non-abortion related services to many women in need. These include breast cancer screening at little or no cost, along with similar services. But they aren’t the only ones who work in this field and all of them rely on financial support from the public. Is it a “clean” service to throw the baby out with the bath water in each of these cases?

No, in the end, what we’ve managed to accomplish is precisely what I worried about in the column from earlier this week. We’ve taken a group which was singly and purely focused on preventing breast cancer – a malady which affects both “bad girls” and “good girls” alike – and dragged them into the political battlefield on a subject which they never sought to engage. The final result – no matter how you feel about abortion, Planned Parenthood, or any of the myriad soldiers involved – is that less money winds up going to fight a fully preventable disease afflicting women who cut across all political and ideological lines.

So for those who are doing an end zone dance this week over the decision made by Komen… I hope you’re proud of yourselves. I see no reason to celebrate.

EDIT: (Jazz) Thanks to the comments for this link which indicates that abortion services performed by PP are probably more on par with 10% than 3%, though still far less than 90.)

In it, Olson argues quite forcefully that the Koch brothers have been torn from the peace and quiet of their private lives by a cruel political machine seeking to make hay off their names.

How would you feel if aides to the president of the United States singled you out by name for attack, and if you were featured prominently in the president’s re-election campaign as an enemy of the people?

What would you do if the White House engaged in derogatory speculative innuendo about the integrity of your tax returns? Suppose also that the president’s surrogates and allies in the media regularly attacked you, sullied your reputation and questioned your integrity. On top of all of that, what if a leading member of the president’s party in Congress demanded your appearance before a congressional committee this week so that you could be interrogated about the Keystone XL oil pipeline project in which you have repeatedly—and accurately—stated that you have no involvement?

Consider that all this is happening because you have been selected as an attractive political punching bag by the president’s re-election team. This is precisely what has happened to Charles and David Koch, even though they are private citizens, and neither is a candidate for the president’s or anyone else’s office.

It’s difficult to even know where to begin with this litany of complaints. The shorter – and certainly somewhat cheaper – angle would be to note the blind eye being turned when the shoe is on the other foot. Conservatives frequently and correctly cite press reactions to misdeeds by the Obama administration by asking, “can you imagine what would happen if Bush had…?” And it’s true.

But in this case, Olson fails to note that the Koch Brothers have an equally active and publicly abused doppelganger in the form of… (you all know where this is going, so say the name with me now…) George Soros. George is also a very wealthy man who has chosen to employ his wealth in the political arena in an attempt to effect change. And his name is regularly vilified in conservative circles. We’re not just talking about random bloggers or chat room denizens here. It took no more than fifteen seconds on a quick Google search going back less than 48 hours to find his name being bandied about by Newt Gingrich in an attack on Mitt Romney. The man’s name is brandished by conservatives up and down the line like an industrial size can of mace.

Now many of the folks gathered around this particular campfire may be saying, “and rightly so! Soros should be vilified!” And you’d be right. I absolutely agree. But the reason why I feel this is so brings us back to the original question.

Having been a player in this game for a while now, up to and including running campaigns at the congressional level, I look at it as something of a blood sport. I happen to enjoy it. But I’m also mindful of the fact that there are many people out there who have no interest in our game and are simply trying to get on with their lives. If you are, for example, the owner of a dry cleaning shop who happens to get caught up in a political story, it can turn out to be a disaster. Even if you happened to be involved in some business contract with somebody who once worked with a company in Iran, or if you offered a standard health plan which was inclusive of some services offered at Planned Parenthood, I would strenuously object to your suddenly being thrust into the political arena and having your life disrupted against your will. You weren’t part of our war and I have no interest in seeing you become collateral damage in one of our battles.

This can not be said of either the Koch brothers or of George Soros. Had these men stuck to, as Olson put it, managing “businesses that provide employment” and living their lives, they should be kept out of the fight. But none of them did. They suited up and put themselves on the field of play. By choosing to dive into political spending and activism, they were no longer observing the war from afar… they were combatants. And when you load up and begin shooting you can expect to pull some return fire.

Defend them as you wish, and with good cause, just as liberals will defend Soros to the end of time, I’m sure. But claiming that it is somehow unfair for politicians, politicos and activists to stuff them into the mix is a sad attempt at feigning outrage. George Soros, David Koch and Charles Koch are all big boys. They knew the bloody battle they were entering when they set foot on the field. I’m sure they can take the heat when it comes back at them.

It’s a great message, isn’t it? And it fits in quite well with Team Obama’s 2012 strategy. There’s just one little problem, and it’s found lurking in Warren’s past in the private sector. The title of this piece by Holly Robichaud in the Boston Herald pretty much sums it up. Insurance past should sink Lizzy.

While Marsha Coakley and Lizzy Warren share the same personal flaws of being out of touch with the Massachusetts middle class, the Harvard professor also has a potential deadly political sin in her background. Maybe it is the reason President Obama didn’t nominate her to head up the consumer agency. It is not a secret that his administration believed Lizzy couldn’t survive the Senate confirmation process.

One of the Harvard professor’s many well-com-pensated part-time gigs included consulting for Travelers Insurance. I know that it is hard to believe that on one hand, Democrats would be bashing an industry, and on the other hand they are making money from it. To be a Democrat is to be a hypocrite.

What did Lizzy do to earn $44,000 in compensation from the insurance company? She made it harder for claimants to collect.

Now, I’m no expert here, but that doesn’t really sound very consumer protectiony to me. According to the article, Warren lent her expertise to Travelers to help them develop a strategy to structure a bankruptcy deal where they could avoid making millions of dollars in payments to patients exposed to asbestos. The total lawsuits amounted to something in the range of $500M.

Say… would those be some of the same “factory owners” and their insurers who never got rich on their own and owed it to society to give something back because of the social contract? If you’re basing your entire candidacy on being the Defender of the Little People, this doesn’t exactly do anything for your credentials, does it?

In Missouri, Sen. Claire McCaskill is facing a tough bid to stay in office and critics are already noting the somewhat tepid, conditional support which she has shown for Keystone.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., reaffirming her earlier comments that give conditional support to the Keystone XL, said in a statement Wednesday:

“I support the pipeline. It should be built, and it should be built in a thoughtful and responsible manner, not based on a political timetable.”

U.S. Rep. Sam Graves, R-Tarkio, chairman of the House Small Business Committee, said:

“With an unemployment rate above 8 percent and an underemployment rate of 15 percent, I am completely bewildered at why this administration has decided to reject a true shovel-ready project that will create 20,000 direct jobs and about 118,000 spin-off jobs, many of them through small businesses.”

In Virginia, George Allen is back, and he’s going after the Keystone issue with a vengeance as he seeks their open Senate seat this fall. In fact, he’s already put out a new TV ad going after Tim Kaine.

Republican George Allen is quickly turning President Obama’s decision not to approve a controversial oil pipeline into a talking point in Virginia’s open U.S. Senate race.

Allen is out with a new web video ripping Democrat Tim Kaine for siding with Obama on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, hoping to point out that this is a growing trend on the campaign trail.

The video, titled “unabashed,” is 75 seconds and is a montage of newspaper clips and footage critical of both Obama’s decision and Kaine’s support. Like other anti-Kaine videos in recent months, it also shows footage of a speech in which the Democrat said he was an “unabashed supporter of the president.”

Those aren’t the only places, and in some cases, even Democrats who openly supported the pipeline are feeling the sting. In Montana, Jon Tester has been in favor of the project, but Denny Rehberg has still been tying him to it in public statements by referring to “Tester’s allies in the Obama administration” when discussing the lost jobs and opportunities. It’s hard enough to elect a Democrat in Montana as it is, and Tester certainly can’t welcome that sort of association.

The GOP doesn’t need very many seats to wrest control of the Senate away from the Democrats, no matter who wins the White House in November. As long as unemployment remains unacceptably high, expect Keystone to be a major bone of contention over the summer and to resonate in congressional races.

Financial disclosure documents filed by two of President Obama’s illegal appointments to the National Labor Relations Board show that one will continue to receive payments from a major labor union during his time on the board.

Richard Griffin, the former general counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers, will receive regular payments under two different IUOE pension plans. The payment amounts are not listed on the disclosure form. He will also receive a single lump sum payment equal to three weeks of salary (one week for each of the three years since he enrolled in the plan). Griffin’s annual salary as the IUOE’s general counsel was $376,778, according to the disclosure form.

Well… that’s just super. I was worried about the guy, you know? I mean, a recess appointment isn’t exactly the definition of Job Security, particularly when the man keeping you employed may himself be out of a job next January. At least now Mr. Griffin will be able to keep food on the table through the long, cold winter to come. (Or AGW induced massively hot winter as the seas continue to rise and… never mind.)

But all jokes aside, if you are in one of the most powerful positions in the country, specifically in terms of striking a fair and equitable balance between unions and employers, how does this not set off some alarm bells? You are acting, in effect, as a type of arbitrator between the two sides while collecting a steady paycheck from one of them? Are you serious?

Click through the link above to see the pertinent financial disclosure forms helpfully provided by Heritage. Of course, it may not be that big of a deal to you. I’m probably just being overly sensitive.

The flaw here is the frequently repeated but totally fabricated idea that job creation was ever the chief goal – or even one of the goals – of industry. It never was. Job creation was simply a happy side effect of industrial activity and capitalism in general. (And when I say “happy” I mean happy for the working public at large and the government whose existence relies on keeping the unwashed masses quiet and content.) The purpose of industry, or any capitalistic activity, is and always has been to make money and generate wealth for those who established and invested in those endeavors.

Let’s say you operate a factory which makes widgets, and one step in the widget creation process requires two pieces of metal to be welded together on an assembly line. Given a choice between a human being – or potentially several human beings working different shifts – and a robot which is capable of performing the welding, which would you opt for? If you have one shred of honesty left in you, you’ll admit that you’d take the robot every single time. Why? Because human beings are, by nature, expensive, messy and inconvenient tools to accomplish any such goal. You have to give humans paychecks, provide them with healthcare and other benefits, arrange to take care of their taxes and monitor their performance. They go on vacation. They get sick sometimes and miss work. They get in fights with their boyfriends or girlfriends, become distracted and make mistakes. They see a better job and quit, taking their skills with them. Sometimes they die and you have to retrain someone else from scratch. But the robot sits silently in your factory and welds one widget after another, 24/7, and doesn’t need time off for holidays.

If we look far enough back in time, the Luddites were correct. When they saw the machine which could do the job of many men, they foretold their own doom in terms of the working class. Businesses have always chosen and always shall choose the path which reduces costs and increases profits. When one of the options is to reduce the number of employees (or, failing that, to move the jobs to cheaper locations) they’re going to wind up making that choice in order to fulfill their mandate of remaining competitive and maximizing their profits. Every… single… time. And whether the business is engaged in manufacturing or services, they must strive to be as competitive and profitable as possible, leading to the need for the services of companies like Bain Capital, who assisted many of them in reworking their business models to achieve that maximum efficiency. And, yes, that often involved eliminating or relocating large numbers of workers.

I completely understand how cold and brutal that sounds, but it’s also the absolute truth. This notion that there was ever some sort of social contract between industry and labor in which capitalists had some warm and fuzzy obligation to provide jobs in exchange for the opportunity to succeed is a fantasy. And it was one which I myself subscribed to for years until many spoonfuls of the harsh medicine of reality were shoved down my throat. The only reason businesses used to hire more people is because we hadn’t figured out ways to operate without them yet.

And even though the Luddites were correct, the system still managed to stagger along and function fairly well to the benefit of workers for a long time. This was largely due to the repeating pattern of The Next Big Thing. When workers with scythes were no longer required to harvest the wheat, somebody had to build, maintain and operate the tractors and combines which replaced them. When automation and cheaper foreign competition overtook our ability to profitably produce radios, we invented television and spawned a fresh industry to create those modern marvels. By the time the television manufacturing market had moved to Japan we were cooking up computers. There was always The Next Big Thing to blunt the damage to the working class as industry developed ways to make money with fewer human laborers.

But with technological advances in efficiency moving forward at the speed of light, assisting the ease of globalizing the labor market as they go, those Next Big Things on American shores have become fewer and further between. And those operating businesses responded to those opportunities. This doesn’t explain all of our current employment woes, but it adds to the general climate where the supply of workers exceeds the demand of available jobs. In our anger at these losses of jobs and the perception of a growing disparity in wealth, we seek out someone to blame and find a convenient scapegoat in organizations like Bain, corporate raiders and the Vultures of Capitalism.

The only problem with this argument is that the vultures were always there. It just seems worse to you now because they’ve become much more efficient flyers.

Tebowmania is just getting started. And the newest way people are poking fun at Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow is in song.

On “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” the show’s host has created a new character – TeBowie. The concept merges David Bowie circa “Ziggy Stardust” with the high-profile QB.

Fallon, dressed with full Bowie-style make-up and a Denver Broncos uniform, performed the classic song “Space Oddity” during his early Friday (Jan. 13) broadcast. The twist, of course, is the tune features lyrics that reflect Tebow’s religious sentiment.

Roll 212!

Intelligence analyst Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked US government cables to the anti-secrecy website.

Accused of leaking thousands of documents and “aiding the enemy”, he could face life in prison if convicted.

Pte Manning, 24, appeared for a pre-trial hearing in December, in which prosecutors pushed for a court martial.

He was arrested in May 2010 in connection with the leak.

The US Army said in a statement that the head of the tribunal, Lt Col Paul Almanza, had concluded that “reasonable grounds exist to believe that the accused committed the offences alleged.

“He [Lt Col Almanza] recommended that the charges be referred to a general court martial,” the army statement said.

Some of the most common questions popping up on Twitter (and elsewhere) follow with my own take on the answers.

So this is a done deal?

Technically, no. The officer in question is only empowered to pass on a recommendation. The final decision will be made further up the chain, eventually decided by Maj Gen Michael Linnington. However, the odds of their bucking the findings are slim to none in this case. I’d say it’s a near certainty that we’re going to Court Martial at this point.

Will they hang him or shoot him?

First, nothing is a given because this was only a preliminary hearing. Manning is still innocent until proven guilty, so any answer is predicated on a finding of guilty when this is all done. And yet again, the answer isn’t 100% but the heavy odds are that the answer is “neither.” At Court Martial, anything could happen at the sentencing stage, but that’s not the will of the prosecutors. The Army is not seeking the death penalty, and if found guilty on the most serious charge he’ll likely get life without parole.

Will this take down Julian Assange?

The magic 8-ball says, “Future uncertain.” Given the previous findings from Manning’s hard drives which revealed chat logs with the Wikileaks founder, the United States should certainly be interested in chatting with Assange. But he’s currently facing trial on unrelated charges in Europe and the situation becomes vastly complicated from both a legal and diplomatic standpoint.

Can’t Obama step in and stop this?

Technically… he probably could. (I’d need to check with some better legal eagles on that one.) The powers of the man who is not only the Commander in Chief of the military but the President on the civilian side are nearly unlimited in such a scenario. But realistically.. particularly in an election year, I would seriously doubt that Barack Obama would defy the entire military system to set free a person accused of – for all intents and purposes – treason. It would be political suicide. Expect him to back up the chain of command on this one and stay out of it.

How soon will we know?

The wheels of justice sometimes turn a bit faster in the military than they do in civilian courts, but in a high profile case like this it could still be a good long while. I wouldn’t stay up late tonight waiting for an answer.

The controversy surrounding the show has spread beyond the Florida conservative group which began it. Just this week, as Jim Hoft reports, WordPress took down the blog Bare Naked Islam, which had been calling for the show’s cancellation. (Though the reasons cited by WordPress don’t specifically include a reference to the show.) They were also getting attacked from the Left, as PETA blasted them over one woman’s decision to give up her ten year old dog.

Lining up on the opposite side of the aisle, hip hop artist Russell Simmons took the side of the show, being joined by Mia Farrow. He called for a boycott of Lowe’s, (though I’m not sure what that’s supposed to accomplish) and bought advertising time during the broadcast himself.

So has the show benefited in the form of higher ratings amid all the Sturm und Drang, as I speculated it might earlier this month? The premier episode actually did fairly well, with more than 1.7 million viewers and a .9 overall rating, though it dropped nearly 50% over the next couple of weeks. The impact on the ratings from these stories seems to be… not so much.

TLC’s ‘All-American Muslim’: Controversy Does Not Equal Ratings

It would appear members of the conservative Florida Family Association are among the few actually paying attention to TLC’s All-American Muslim.

The reality series about Muslim families living in suburban Detroit, which lost advertising from Lowe’s and other brands after FAA condemned it as propaganda, is languishing in the ratings.

Only five episodes into its first season, the series ranked 78th among Sunday’s cable broadcasts for Dec. 11. With only 908,000 viewers and a 0.3 rating among adults 18-49, it’s being easily outperformed by series like History’s American Pickers, Discovery’s Moonshiners and its latest lead-in, Little People Big World: Holiday Surprise.

We’re still waiting for the confirmed numbers for the last episode, but the trend lines don’t seem to indicate that all of the shouting over the subject matter is causing viewers to come back in droves.

And if not Ron Paul, then who? This brings us back to an old chestnut where people ask how any gay person could vote for any Republican. I bring this up today because of a letter I received recently from a conservative who also happens to be a lesbian which tackles this question in a direct fashion. I have permission to reprint it, but because of her particular circumstances, the author shall remain anonymous. (So you are free to disregard this if you don’t care for unnamed sources.)

Answering the question of how somebody can be a politically conservative lesbian in the 21st century is harder than it sounds and still brings me some uncomfortable moments, but I can take a shot at it. It also matches up with how people in a supposedly enlightened age can still be in the closet. While I know it’s not the same thing and the metaphor fails, I tend to think of it as being something like being part of any other “assumed minority group” when it comes to voting. (And I simply gag on that phrase.) It’s kind of insulting to think that just because you happen to be Jewish, or black, or Hispanic, or Muslim, or a man, or a woman, old or young, – OR GAY – that somehow that sticks you into a particular folder and you need to agree with everyone else who fits that category on EVERYTHING.

These days it seems like the big defining thing about gays in politics is marriage. (Now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has gone away, which I see as a good thing, particularly since the love of my life was in the Air Force and in the closet also.) And for those who want to fight that battle, good for them. I just can’t get excited about the marriage question. I know many of our sisters do, and good for them, but here’s my main stand on that. I care more about my relationship with my girl and my God than I do about my relationship with the state. If we decide we want to be married, we will have a ceremony with our friends and family and take our vows before God. We will be married in our eyes and in the eyes of those that matter to us. I don’t know if that’s going to happen and neither of us is particularly worried about it. If the state or the nation think I’m married doesn’t matter much to me.

But I DO have concerns about our country when it comes to public policy, and most of my friends who are seriously engaged in politics over marriage push a whole bunch of policies which seem to me to be destructive. We have to cut the debt. We need our own energy that pays for itself. We need law and order and fairness under those laws for everyone. And my liberal friends don’t get that. And that ties in to the question you asked about jobs.

Why am I in the closet? Because where I work I found out early on that openly gay people of either sex were in for trouble. We live in a supposedly VERY liberal city, as you know, and the owners claim to be very progressive. But when it comes to having clients find out that anyone on the staff is gay, they say pretty much, “business comes first.” I could get [expletive deleted] off about that, but I need a job. And my employer needs customers. I can trash him for being “weak” and “not taking a stand” I guess, but I still wind up unemployed either way if he goes out of business. I honestly don’t give a [expletive deleted].

The world’s not a fair place full of unicorns and rainbows. I need to make a living. I need to have the country survive so I hopefully CAN make a living. Things will get better in the future. We have bigger fish to fry right now than having me just support people who think I should be able to get married but are sending America into a messed up situation where maybe nobody’s marriage will matter. I don’t have to be out. I don’t approve of forcibly outing private citizens. And just because I think some of my friends should be able to get married if they want to, it doesn’t mean I should vote for idiots if they agree on that one thing.

Thanks.

Here’s the portion of that which stood out most to me. “I care more about my relationship with my girl and my God than I do about my relationship with the state.” I have to wonder how prevalent that attitude is across the country, and if just maybe it might be the most libertarian stance of all. If you truly do follow a libertarian ideology and don’t think that the government should be involved in the business of marriage, why would you care if the state “endorsed” your marriage or not? Either it is the state’s business or it isn’t, right?

I keep meaning to bring this up with Chris Barron of GOProud fame and get his take on it. Anyway, just something for you to chew on during the closing days of 2011.

Sensenbrenner was overheard saying that after buying all their “crap” (his word) a woman approached him and praised first lady Michelle Obama. He told the woman that Michelle should practice what she preaches — “she lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.”

This guy has been around long enough to know that you can’t be saying things like that in a public place. And it’s not a very smart line of attack, either, given that Sensenbrenner isn’t particlarly svelte himself. Predictably, he did the right thing and quickly issued a public, formal apology to Mrs. Obama. But what about his complaint regarding the First Lady’s push for young people to be more healthy?

It’s true that Michelle Obama has been very publicly active in health initiatives, particularly regarding children. Whether it’s organizing a record breaking jumping jacks event, visiting school lunch programs or pushing her Let’s Move initiative, she always seems to be up to something. But none of these really affect legislation or carry any power of the long arm of the government over individual citizens. Even the much maligned “My Plate” program – replacing the food pyramid – was a product of the Department of Agriculture who were under no obligation to adopt her ideas.

Also, she’s far from first First Lady to get involved in such activities. Until the second half of the 20th century the wives of presidents largely acted as hostesses for social events in addition to taking care of their husbands and children. Jaqueline Kennedy was quoted as saying her major role was, “to take care of the President” and added that “if you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.” She did have an extensive interest in culture and the arts though, and is credited with adding a large number of sculptures and paintings to the White House collection.

After Kennedy, First Ladies seemed to get a lot more involved. Lady Bird Johnson created a Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, with the intent of planting lots of flowers and plants and generally beautifying Washington. (And later, the rest of the country.) Pat Nixon had an initiative to encourage people to perform more volunteer work and Betty Ford traveled the country raising awareness about breast cancer. Nancy Reagan used her time in the White House to lead an international push against drug and alcohol addiction among young people, while both Barbara Bush and Laura Bush actively pushed education in America as their own personal agenda items.

But, again, none of these were areas where the presidents’ wives were actively sticking their noses into the machinery of the government and the business of the people. The only high profile exception to this (and a notable, odious one at that) was Hillary Clinton and her ham handed attempts to insert herself into the health care reform legislative process. And we all know how that worked out.

So for any other members of Congress who may be considering it, no matter how much you like your double bacon cheeseburgers, (and I’m with you 100% on that) going after the First Lady in any fashion is probably a pretty bad move. It’s bad politics and it’s weak in terms of any sort of legal argument. And, most obviously, making remarks about the dimension of her “posterior” is totally off the menu. (Pun intended.)

The theory behind it was that if Manning had passed the state secrets off to some third party – not a military member – who then turned around and made them available to Wikileaks, or if Manning had simply uploaded them himself, then Assange was essentially just acting as a journalist after “finding” the documents on his server and was untouchable for the most part. The assumed third party in question who either assisted Manning, or at least had spoken to him about it, had been previously taken to be computer hacker Adrian Lamo, who has since been institutionalized. But all that may be about to change. As we mentioned yesterday, Army data specialists have been prowling through Manning’s computer and extra hard drives for some time. And guess what they found now?

Jolt in WikiLeaks Case: Feds Found Manning-Assange Chat Logs on Laptop

A government digital forensic expert examing the computer of accused WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning retrieved communications between Manning and an online chat user identified on Manning’s computer as “Julian Assange,” the name of the founder of the secret-spilling site that published hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables…

Mark Johnson, a digital forensics contractor for ManTech International who works for the Army’s Computer Crime Investigative Unit, examined an image of Manning’s personal MacBook Pro and said he found 14 to 15 pages of chats in unallocated space on the hard drive that were discussions of unspecified government info between Manning and a person believed to be Assange, which specifically made a reference to re-sending info.

While the chat logs were encrypted, Johnson said that he was able to retrieve the MacBook’s login password from the hard drive and found that the same password “TWink1492!!” was also used as the encryption key.

Assange’s name was attached to a chat handle “dawgnetwork@jabber.ccc.de” listed in Manning’s buddy list in the Adium chat program on his computer. That Jabber address uses the same domain name allegedly mentioned by Manning in the chat logs that ex-hacker Adrian Lamo gave to the FBI and to Wired.com last year. In that earlier chat log, Manning was making reference to a domain that Assange was known to use.

In Manning’s buddy list there was also a second handle, “pressassociation@jabber.ccc.de,” which had two aliases associated with it: Julian Assange and Nathaniel Frank. CCC.de in the domain refers to the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker club in Germany that operates the Jabber server.

I don’t know if this will turn out to be enough of a “smoking gun” to let slip the hounds on Assange, and we’ve been burned too many times for me to get my hopes up now. But the initial indications certainly make it look suspicious. If there are records in there of Assange directly following up with Manning and asking him to “re-send” some of the classified material, we’re moving into a whole new ball game. In that case, he’s no longer acting as a journalist at all, but as the recipient of state secrets.

Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen. What looked like a fairly open and shut court martial for Aiding the Enemy in a time of war may have just gotten decidedly more interesting.

The U.S. exported more oil-based fuels than it imported in the first nine months of this year, making it likely that 2011 will be the first time since 1949 that the nation is a net exporter of such goods, primarily diesel.

That’s not all. The U.S. has reversed another decades-long trend. It began producing more crude oil in 2008 than the year before and accelerated that upswing 3% in the first nine months of this year compared with the same period in 2010. That production has helped reduce U.S. imports of crude oil by about 10% since 2006.

“It’s dramatic. It’s transformative,” Edward Morse, a former senior U.S. energy official who now directs global commodities research at Citigroup, says of the historic shifts. He says the U.S. is importing a smaller share — 49% in 2010, down from 60% in 2005 — of the oil it uses, adding: “We’re moving toward energy independence.”

Before we start jumping for joy here, it’s important to note that these figures include all exports of any petroleum based products, not just what we drill here at home. Two factors accounted for the lion’s share of this shift, and one of them is the increasing quantity of oil sands based products which we import from Canada and refine. Large amounts of that, particularly diesel, are then resold and exported.

The second factor is the boom we’ve seen in seen in the extraction of oil (along with natural gas) in shale deposits, particularly in North Dakota, Montana and Texas. Additional strain on domestic supplies has been relieved by the falling price of natural gas as we open up more supplies in Pennsylvania, Ohio and elsewhere. A number of manufacturing interests, such as steel production, have been increasingly turning to natural gas to cut production costs, making their products more competitive and lowering demand for crude oil products.

Crude oil production is still far below where it could be, given the stingy nature of the Obama administration when it comes to drilling permits and oil lease auctions, but even that has been on the rise. The industry has managed to fight its way back to a great degree, producing jobs and reducing our dependence on foreign sources, even as they fight with their own government. Imagine where we could be if Washington wasn’t trying to throttle the flow by holding up the Keystone XL pipeline or constantly pushing job killing bills like The FRAC Act which would restrict horizontal drilling and development of previously untenable resources.

Of course, as the study notes, no matter how much progress we make, we’re probably never going to get back to the production / consumption ratio we had in the 70′s. But that doesn’t mean that we still can’t do a lot better than we are now. In 2010 we only imported 12% of our oil from Saudi Arabia, down from 19% in 1993. And with just a little less interference from the government, we can drive that number down further still.

I spent the morning plagued by an indescribable sense of sadness, though everyone had known for some time that this day was coming. I never met Hitchens, but it always felt as if he lived around the block from me and only poor timing had kept us from running into each other. Such was the nature of his constant output of notable work; his books upon my shelves, the regular links which popped up in my mail, pointing to this or that column in every major publication which wound up being brilliant, infuriating, or – most frequently – both.

For many years I have either puzzled or enraged my friends and regular correspondents when the inevitable topic among writers would crop up. Who are the greatest writers of our time? I long ago narrowed my list down to four – George Will, James Kilpatrick, Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott. (That last entry never fails to send conservative friends into apoplectic fits, but he deserves his place on the roster.) Sadly, we have now lost two of the four.

We can, perhaps, learn more about the nature of the man not from what he wrote, but what his friends and enemies wrote about him over the years. (And the ranks of the aforementioned categories are legion.) But even identifying his actual friends can be difficult, since he demonstrated a lifelong propensity to slash at his allies – in a seemingly careless way – with the same vigor he displayed in eviscerating his foes. Even that should have come as no surprise, though. What else should we expect from someone who penned a scathing editorial attack on Mother Theresa? Andrew Anthony of The Observer offered a defense of Hitch’s wide ranging attacks in a jacket blurb he did for one of my favorite books in the Hitchens collection, Love, Poverty, and War:

Among his many weapons… a moral authority that is built on something sturdier than cheap moralizing.

Hitchens wasn’t some overnight success, suddenly appearing after his famous moment of liberal apostasy when he embraced the invasion of Iraq. (A seminal moment which led to a mass upwelling of rage among his legions of followers, including yours truly.) He had always been there, frequently behind the scenes, stirring up trouble wherever he went. I often pictured Hitchens as the quintessential, revolutionary character in all of those movies we all remember. Whether it was Dead Poets Society or The Big Chill, there was always the one rebellious student, striding back and forth on the university library steps, gesticulating wildly and quoting centuries dead monks which nobody else had heard of yet, while a crouched group of future protesters and disaffected youths looked on in awe. Hitchens was that guy. He was always that guy.

I imagine him at the moment of his birth as being the baby who refused to squander his first breaths bawling and mewling after the doctor spanked him. He would have contained himself, storing up his energy until he developed sufficient motor skills to hold a pencil and write his first scathing review – probably a critique of his mother’s womb as a prenatal carrying device. (“All in all a creditable conveyance, though tending a bit toward the damp side and the lighting was simply abysmal.”)

Hitchens moved boldly across the world stage, wandering through places which would paralyze a more cautious man. While he found much to criticize, he still revealed a deep well of empathy in his writings for those who were left out in the cold by forces they could never hope to overcome themselves. In one of the many jewels among his collection of essays, I was particularly moved by the stark image he painted of North Korea following a trip there in the nineties. Titled, “Visit to a Small Planet,” (an ironic homage to the Jerry Lewis film of the same name) he crafted a meticulous, insult laden assault on the late Kim Il Sung and his hapless, seemingly inbred progeny. He describes his visit to the U.S.S. Pueblo with a visceral, white hot anger, but then goes on to convey the shame he experienced for feeling hungry in a land filled with hopeless, starving peasants.

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as “duck.” One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn’t tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn’t seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. (In a Pyongyang restaurant, don’t ever ask for a doggie bag.) Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him. Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died with grass in their mouths.

Hitchens was one of the few who could pull off the feat of making up his own, new words when a suitable one was not extant in the English language. And the imagery of the North Korean children who, “died with grass in their mouths” while their delusional leaders told them they lived in a land of milk and honey is heart rending. But that was Hitchens in a nutshell. You didn’t need to go to North Korea after that. He had done it for you and you could immerse yourself in the experience without ponying up the cash for a plane ticket and a full suit of body armor.

Hitchens was the party crasher who never made you feel like calling the cops. He was completely unapologetic for the smoking, the drinking, the unhealthy food and his take no prisoners, bon vivant lifestyle. He was The Honey Badger decades before YouTube would be invented to bring the now iconic video clip to us. He simply did not – if you’ll pardon the alteration – give a crap. Hitchens was in technicolor when much of my early life seemed to be playing out in black and white.

And now he’s gone. I’m sure I’m not the first to describe him as a “devout atheist” and I won’t be the last. (Another case where an ironic contradiction in terms is the only suitable way to describe him.) He has either been proven right and sunk back into the cosmic background noise, or found himself to be wrong and is pounding on the Pearly Gates in righteous indignation. If so, somebody will have some explaining to do, and I expect in this case Hitchens will be demanding an answer as to how God could be such an inexcusably obstreperous contrarian as to exist.

Yes, I can bring myself to say it now. Christopher Hitchens is dead. But he most assuredly did not die with grass in his mouth.

Addendum: Hitchens beat the ploughshares of the English language into a sword. And he wielded it mightily.

McCaskill still blasted the GOP for including the provision in the bill, but said she’d be “gosh darn if I think it’s a good idea to raise taxes on people working as hard as they know how right now.” In other words, Republicans put Senate moderates like McCaskill and Ben Nelson over a barrel, and they’re going to have to give the GOP something in order to produce an extension of a payroll tax holiday that was a bad idea when it was first implemented and hasn’t done anything to boost the economy anyway, but now it will look like a tax hike if it goes away. The Senate, which hasn’t produced a budget on its own in almost 1000 days now, couldn’t have botched policy any worse than this. McCaskill’s basically looking for a way out.

This brings up a problem I’ve been trying to highlight here for the last month. When Republicans begin talking about tax hikes, extending tax cuts and the related effect of each on the economy, there is a big trap waiting which the Democrats would love to see us spring. Let’s examine the emphasized portion above. So there is currently a “tax holiday” in effect which has effectively lowered the tax rate being paid by workers across the country. What that means, by definition, is that it is the current tax rate. But it was only intended to be temporary and it produces a negative effect on the Social Security trust fund, right? So we should oppose extending it on that basis… right?

(We’ll pause here for a moment so everyone can nod their heads solemnly in agreement.)

Now let’s take a look at the famous “Bush tax cuts.” We all know the story there. Something has to be done to keep the Democrats in check or they’re going to let them expire, which will result in – and I’m using the same language you can find on any conservative site around the web here – a massive tax hike, particularly on the rich job creators.

See anything fishy yet?

Those tax cuts were also written into legislation as being “temporary” in nature because they were designed with an end date specified, unless they were extended. (Or “made permanent” which is a complete joke because nothing of that nature is permanent and the next Congress is never bound by the decisions of the last one.) And allowing such a “tax hike” to take place would be disastrous for the economy, right? Right? Because you can’t have the government sucking more money out of the economy. It hurts job creation and etc. etc. etc.

The tax code is constantly in flux. (Mostly because the tax code itself is a destructive disaster to begin with, but that’s a story for another day.) Any time the tax code today changes tomorrow, it’s either a tax hike or a tax cut. You can’t make it one or the other based on your whims without being subject to charges of hypocrisy. If you fight against keeping the current payroll tax holiday in place saying it “will look like a tax hike,” you’d best not have a history of saying that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would be a tax hike. Otherwise you’ve load up the opposition with ammo.

And if lower tax rates enacted by a Republican “helped the economy,” then you’d best be ready with an awful lot of data to show the massive majority of middle class workers that lower taxes which put more money in their pockets “hasn’t done anything to boost the economy anyway.” Otherwise you’re only making the fondest dreams of Democratic strategists come true.

Now some of you will be quick like a bunny to jump to the barricades and say, “No, no! There’s a difference between the marginal tax rates and payroll tax deductions!” To a certain extent you may be correct in theory, but we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about politics and talking points and thirty second sound bites which are easily digested by the masses in headlines. Who do you think the target audience here is… the OMB? Any outcome which results in more money being withheld from workers’ paychecks tomorrow will carry the only lasting image which counts.

You really can’t have it both ways.

The Seattle School Board is considering relaxing its ban on unhealthful food in high schools amid complaints from student governments that the policy has cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in vending-machine profits over the past seven years.

But board members now acknowledge they probably went too far. The restrictions, which are more strict than the now-crafted state and federal nutrition guidelines, allow only products such as milk, natural fruit juice, baked chips and oat-based granola bars.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many students are not particularly interested in those items.

In 2001, before the junk-food ban was passed, high-school associated student body (ASB) governments across the city made $214,000 in profits from vending machines, according to district data. This year, they’ve made $17,000.

Well, there’s a shock. In a television report on CNN they interviewed a few students who said they were simply either bringing their own treats to school or running out at lunch or during study halls to the store down the street and buying them. Gee… ya think? So the end result was just that they cost the student government a ton of funding with no real change in dietary habits.

Keeping children healthy is important. It involves a lot of personal choices involving not only what and how much they eat, but how much physical activity they get, as opposed to sitting in front of the television or a video game. And who do you suppose has the real power to influence those choices? At one time in the far distant past I seem to recall that parents were responsible for that, not the school or the government. And if the parents fail at that job, Seattle has demonstrated once again that the rest of the “village” is completely incapable of it.

—

When I was a child I read the constitution because teachers still made you do that in those days.
When I was an angry young man I read the constitution to learn about my rights to scream and complain and try to make others do as I wished.
As a tired old man I read the constitution to see how it might protect me from my own government which has made me distrust it too often.

—

When I was a child I listened to nursery rhymes or the theme songs from shows like the Micky Mouse Club or Family Affair and went to bed with a happy sigh.
When I was an angry young man I sighed at my parents’ choice of country and western, while I listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen, blasting at ear splitting volume and venting my rage.
As a tired old man I listen to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen and sigh when I realize my radio is tuned to the oldies station.

—

When I was a child I watched the funeral of a president who served his nation and had been killed, and saw my mother weep with despair.
When I was an angry young man I watched a president resign in disgrace and felt he had done a disservice to us all and saw the nation despair.
As a tired old man I feel disappointment in my president’s service and despair over some who wish to become president in his place.

—

When I was a child my mother took care of me.
When I was an angry young man my mother wondered why I didn’t take care to call her more often from my travels around the world.
As a tired old man my mother now needs to be cared for and I wish desperately that I had called her more often when we were both younger.

—

When I was a child I resented my father’s punishment and all of his stupid rules.
When I was an angry young man I scoffed at my father’s stupidity and his outdated view of the world
As a tired old man I wonder if I will ever be as wise as my father was and how I could have been so stupid.

—

When I was a child I drank well water straight from a hand pump behind my grandfather’s house and it had a wonderfully refreshing effect.
When I was an angry young man I drank whiskey straight from a bottle, often to ill effect.
As a tired old man I drink martinis and sit staring off from my porch, wishing I could remember the taste of that well water again. The effect is melancholy.

—

When I was a child I thought girls were no-good and crazy, and I would chase them to tease them badly.
When I was an angry young man I would chase crazy women who were bad for me, all the while thinking I was too good for them.
As a tired old man I realized the woman I wound up catching was badly crazy about me for reasons I never deserved or understood, and that I’d probably never be good enough for her.

—

When I was a child I thought everyone lived forever.
When I was an angry young man I didn’t think I’d live to be 35.
As a tired old man I’ve come to think you need to live as best you can every day. You’ve only got the rest of your life to do it.

The new tool is picking up some traction in the media already.

Those who download WhipCast will receive the full text of legislation before it is considered on the House floor, the House floor vote schedule, alerts on key votes coming up in the House, and more, all at their fingertips on their iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, or Android.

Downloading this first-of-its-kind app is fast, easy and free, and can be used on almost any mobile device. All you have to do is go to the app store on your iPad, iPhone, Blackberry or Android device and type in ‘WhipCast,’ or, just click on link of the device you’re using right here and it will take you straight to the store to download

Here’s a video that explains more if you’re thinking of installing this.

Sen. Isakson wrote about this in a recent op-ed.

On August 26, 2011, the NLRB decided to recklessly abandon this longstanding precedent. In its Specialty Healthcare decision, the NLRB decided that unions can now target a small group of employees doing the same job in the same location for organization purposes. For example, in one grocery store, the cashiers could form one “mini union,” the baggers could form another, the produce stockers could form yet another, and so on. This could potentially create several different unions within the same store location, making it easier for unions to gain access to employees and nearly impossible for employers to manage such fragmentation of the workforce.

Union forces are already up in arms over these proposals, as it would cut the legs out from under a scheme where as few as two or three cashiers in a single grocery store could wind up creating their own “micro-union” even if the store employed hundreds of cashiers across many locations.

It’s worth pointing out that it is certainly not unheard for more than one union to exist in a large workplace. One example which comes to mind is naval re-fitters working in and around the many shipyards in the nation. In those types of shops you’ll find the IBEW representing all of the electricians while the structural and plumbing guys might be in the pipefitters. But in each of these cases you’re talking about a majority of all of the workers engaged in the same type of work joining up.

The challenges which employers would face should be obvious if any three people in any occupation decided to declare themselves a union one day and demand negotiations. Assuming this comes to a vote in both chambers, it will be interesting to see how successful Congress can be in taming the power of the NLRB and other executive branch agencies. So far S. 1843 is heading into committee while H.R. 3094 has cleared the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, but has not yet been presented for a vote on the floor.

No, Erick wasn’t donning purple sneakers and waiting for some sort of mother ship hiding being the aforementioned asteroid, but he was proclaiming Romney such a great risk to the conservative fabric of the universe that he might “walk back” his rejection of Jon Huntsman. Yes, this is the same Erick Erickson who, at one point, appeared ready to hold the hem of Rick Perry’s bridal train as he walked down the aisle. (While I invest considerable snark in this description, you should click through and read his analysis of the current crop of candidates, which includes a lot of insightful analysis mixed in with a combination of anger and despair.)

But before you rush out to support Jon Huntsman, are we possibly forgetting somebody? Is this the time for… dare I say… Roementum?

Let’s face it… we’re running out of names in the hat. And Buddy Roemer has been waiting patiently on the sidelines in a grossly underfunded campaign, just in case everyone else imploded. I’ll be the first to tell you that I’ve been needling people on the social media circuits about Buddy’s campaign, and not just because I was trying to get in on the ground floor in hopes of eventually being named the U.S. Ambassador to Key Largo. (Though I’m still open to the position if you win, Buddy.)

But beyond all of the conservative side-show humor, Roemer is a solid fiscal conservative who actually gives a compelling presentation on the stump when he can drag enough people away from the pre-annointed superstars to listen. No, I don’t agree with all of his positions, but I suppose I can say that about all of the candidates. His campaign finance positions disturb me on multiple levels, since I don’t care for the idea of the government dictating how people spend their money or express their political speech. But that doesn’t mean that I would deride his personal decision to limit donations to his campaign to small amounts from individual donors.

Yes, I know… pipe dreams and silliness. But as I said, unless you’re firmly in Romney’s camp we may be getting down to Ghostbusters territory pretty soon. Who ya gonna call?

Can you feel the Roementum? (We may be discussing this tonight at 8 PM eastern on the RINO Hour of Power. Join us!)

First, to the original facts of the case. At the conclusion of my original piece, I asked the question as to whether or not Politico “had the goods” on this and I posited that they did. This question is now definitively settled and has been confirmed – repeatedly – by the candidate himself. There was at least one woman – and nearly certainly two – who made accusations of sexual harassment. This led to to charges being raised, an investigation and a payment being made which included a non-disclosure agreement. These were the items that Politico reported, and their original article went to great lengths to point out that they were “allegations” and that they involved gestures, comments, etc., and not physical contact or any sort of affair. What they reported has turned out to be the facts.

If you are one of the people still clinging to blaming Politico for this, describing it as a “smear” and the rest of the responses I’m seeing, you’re off base. When a person runs for the presidency, if there are documents such as these lurking out there – particularly involving a case where a payout resulted from it – that’s news. It’s going to be reported. To deny this you have to either be such a partisan supporter of the candidate that you won’t allow any non-positive reporting or so new to this process that all I can say is, “Welcome to politics. Hope you enjoy your stay.”

Calling what Politico did a “smear” would be no different than Democrats saying the press “smeared” Eliot Spitzer for noting that he cavorted with prostitutes. It’s not a nice thing to say about anyone, but if it happened… it’s news.

But as I alluded earlier, the bigger story for the time being is really the response by the candidate and his staff. (I specify “for the time being” because this wound could still be ripped open further if any new developments or additional allegations emerge on the heels of this.) The handling of this by Team Cain over the first 36 hours has been nothing short of abysmal, and the candidate himself has probably done the most damage.

In a very short period of time, Herman Cain did what can only fairly be called a complete reversal in his story, contrary to the well intentioned protests from his supporters. The candidate went from saying that he had no knowledge of any such settlement, and he “hoped” that the payout wasn’t very large, to saying that he was aware of some sort of payment, to providing details of what he thought the payment might have been. (This was all in the same day after he’d been given ten days notice to prepare, but more on that below.) This culminated on Tuesday morning with an interview with Robin Meade on CNN Headline News Morning Express where he made a truly floundering attempt to claim that he was answering the questions correctly based on the difference between a “settlement” and an “agreement.”

This was one of the most transparently evasive moments of the entire saga. Even for those of you claiming that Cain is such a keen legal eagle that he was drawing a proper legal distinction between the terms, (and it’s already starting) the problem should be clear. Were that the case, Cain knew that he was talking to reporters feeding a general audience, not grading somebody’s LSAT essay. Even under those circumstances, the proper answer might have been, “There was no settlement that I know of, but there was an agreement by the board which resulted in a payment to end this matter, even though the complaint had no merit.”

By failing to point that out, Cain demonstrated that he was uncomfortable with the answer and was attempting to hide the facts of the case. It was a bad move, and Herman Cain emerged from the exchange carrying a lot of wounds, mostly self-inflicted.

That’s less than weak tea. It comes across as a stereotypical politician trying to parse words to cover up what he didn’t want to say previously. It doesn’t rise quite to the level of “it depends what you mean by is” but it’s not far off. In fact, Ed Morrissey touched on this briefly this morning, but as I told him earlier, that seems like a bit of a whitewash to me. Cain may not have recalled all of the details the moment he heard it, but over the last week and a half he certainly could have dredged them up rather than acting like all of these memories came flooding back in a four-hour period on Monday. Cain has also attempted to make precisely that “memory loss” defense, but it rings completely hollow in my ears.

One of the other defenses being foisted is that Cain “isn’t a politician” and should therefore not be held to the same standards. (For reference, see Chris Barron’s piece today where he makes precisely this charge, as well as sticking to the “smear” line of attack and the memory loss defense.) Perhaps so. But he has hired professionals including Mark Block. Block was on TV two hours before Cain on Monday morning peddling a story saying he was “not personally aware” of any such charges ever being raised. This was obviously a clearly calculated defense strategy which had been worked out and they both wound up looking incompetent and shifty when Cain scuttled his assertions a mere two hours later. Perhaps Cain didn’t know any better, but Block absolutely should have. The man should be fired for – if nothing else – complete incompetence in handling this response. (Unless, of course, he was overruled by the candidate, in which case Herman Cain carries all the weight for it himself.)

All of these botched responses, stonewalling and arguing over semantics make Cain look shifty and evasive. Given ten days notice, if he had simply come out Monday morning and said that yes, in fact, a scurrilous suit had been brought against him a decade ago and had been rapidly debunked and dispatched with a small severance payment, the matter would be dead and gone. Instead, this amateurish handling of a breaking story which they knew about ages before it hit has damaged his credibility and raised suspicions where none need have been found.

And if all of this isn’t enough for Cain to show Mark Block the door, the already unfolding story of his non-profit and it’s alleged financial ties to the campaign should finish the job. That story isn’t getting nearly as much play yet because campaign finance charges aren’t as sexy as the current tale, but it’s in progress and could get very serious. Block seems to have been nothing but trouble for Cain thus far.

I don’t think this will be the final installment in the series. There are still a number of whispers out there and there may be additional details on the investigative agenda which are still too green to pick from the tree. Time alone will tell, and this may not sway enough of Cain’s supporter to derail his run at the nomination, but none of this looks good.

Joe, Willie Geist and Mika were joined by Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin, as well as a remote appearance by Robert Costa of National Review. Seemingly out of nowhere, Halperin brought up the issue that Perry “suffers from back pain” which immediately resulted in the crew breaking out in a series of jokes about people who dabble in pain medication mixed with alcohol. It’s frequently a running joke on the show that Mika has had some experience with taking vodka and painkillers, so they asked her to list some of her favorites. They continued to imply – without directly stating it – that this was what was going on with Rick Perry.

Unfortuantely that first portion is not showing up on the MSNBC web site, (I wonder why) but they did put up the clip of the exchange taking place during the next segment. It includes some additional inferences followed by Mika making a rather blunt supposition.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Transcribed portion begins at the 3 minute mark, but watch the whole thing.

Joe Scarborough: He had a good time. He had a good… time.
Mika Brzezinski: Exhausting, grueling work… campaigning.
Joe: To quote the Nora Ephron line…
Mika: … he’s very tired.
Joe: .. I will have what he’s having.
Mika: I have what he’s having.
Mark Halperin: What’s that cocktail again? What was that?
Mika: Adavan and… No, we joke, but I have to say, it comes to mind. That’s all. It just seems a little…
Joe: Listen
Halperin: What’s your favorite cocktail again, Mika? What’s the three?
Mika: Now stop it… what did I say?
Joe: I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what my cocktail was when I had severe back pain and couldn’t walk for four months. Valium, Vicodin, just a little bit of vodka just to wash it down until my doctor said ‘don’t do that.’
Robert Costa: I don’t think it’s right to hint that he’s using drugs. I think the guy was just having a little fun.
Joe: No, no, no, I’m not talking about … I’m not saying he was using drugs. I’m saying I was.
Mika: It just… makes you think. That’s all. I’m sorry…
Joe: It makes you think that he was having a good time.
Mika: Really loopy. Really loopy.
Joe: Come on now. There’s no law against having a good time.
Costa: None at all
Mika: There’s no law against thinking somebody was acting completely loopy and wondering if they were maybe… drunk.

The preceding segment, as I indicated, was even more blatant, but this one is shocking enough. I don’t know what Rick Perry had for dinner or beverages in New Hampshire prior to that, nor do I know anything about his current medical condition. But I would hazard a guess and say that none of the people on this panel did either. To come out and just begin inferring that a presidential candidate was drunk and/or using prescription pain medication based on one truncated video clip is pretty bad.

I would hope that MSNBC will either produce some proof of these allegations or have Brzezinski and friends pony up an apology.

During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO. The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

When this news first broke and we began immediately dissecting it on Twitter, I was mostly cautioning everyone among both Cain’s supporters and detractors to slow walk this one. Stories such as this, ripe with the juiciest buzzwords, are serious poison pills which can leave pundits looking very silly when they finish blowing up. One of the main problems is that the story, while apparently fairly well sourced and researched over a period of time, fails to deliver some of the bedrock facts which would help nail this down one way or the other. Of course, while I wish the reporters from Politico had showed us a little more leg, so to speak, I can also understand how the sources could leave them tongue tied in key areas.

Some things to consider before you jump too quickly into this maelstrom center on the types of accusations being levied. As Da Techguy points out, when you are a successful businessman in a position of power with a lot of money in play, you can attract lawsuits. It’s just a fact of life. I’m not in any way implying the two women in question were disingenuous in their accusations – we simply don’t have enough details to say either way at this point. But such things do happen in the real world, and sometimes large organizations will pay somebody off to just make a problem go away and avoid a prolonged freak show. The payments in question here are apparently in the “five figure” range, so that would be a cheap parachute to grab, IF that’s what happened.

There are also many levels of “sexual harassment” which fall well short of sexual assault. (Which has not even been alleged here, we should point out.) Again, we’re lacking the details of what is alleged to have been done. While not excusing anything, there’s a bit of a difference between grabbing someone’s private areas and, for example, a wink and a nod at an inappropriate moment which somebody might interpret as being more suggestive than it was intended. Politico doesn’t give us enough specifics to see where the alleged activity falls on that scale, so it’s too soon to say one way or the other.

But even with all of that said, this looks pretty bad, and Cain’s supporters may want to be careful in how exuberant they are in his defense. The responses we saw both last night and this morning make it look as if there is either some serious fire under all of this smoke or the Cain campaign is incompetent beyond description. It is now confirmed that Politico was working on this story and in contact with Cain’s people for ten days before they went to press. In all that time, surely somebody must have sat down with the candidate and said, “Look… the storm is coming. This is going to go public. We have to be ready with an answer.”

The answer they wound up going with was nothing short of disastrous, taking the form of an attempt at blaming the liberal media for reporting on it rather than denying or clarifying the story in a less damaging light. Cain’s campaign spokesperson called in to Geraldo and flatly refused to answer the “did this or did this not happen” question, saying instead that the media should contact the restaurant association. The question was put to Herman Cain himself, who glared silently at the camera for an uncomfortable period before saying, “… have you ever been accused of sexual harassment?”

If there’s a worse answer out there, I’m hard pressed to think what it might be, other than grabbing the reporter by the crotch and running away. With a week and a half to prepare, they had to be able to deliver better than this, and thus far it’s all been fumbles coming out of the gate.

I’m seeing some other defenses and postures coming from Cain supporters this morning which should really be avoided. The first is the knee-jerk reaction to say, “But… but… BILL CLINTON!” Yes, we all know what nasty business Bubba got up to. But if the past several years have taught us anything, it’s that liberals have beclowned themselves to the point of Bad Joke Status by responding to every criticism of President Obama with, “But.. but… BUSH!” Pointing out someone else who did something worse doesn’t alter what your guy has done.

The second – and probably worse – line I’m seeing is an attempt to conflate this situation with that of Clarence Thomas. Aside from both cases involving a prominent black man they have little to nothing in common. Anita Hill emerged from obscurity years after the fact to level undocumented charges which couldn’t be effectively substantiated only when Thomas was on the verge of ascending to the highest court in the land. The two women in question here apparently brought forth their complaints in a timely fashion and sought a resolution. They then seem to have remained silent on this and were not the ones who brought up the charges we’re seeing this week. This gives them a lot more credibility than Anita Hill.

So who did leak this particular story? I’ve already received a number of e-mails from correspondents suggesting a variety of theories. One popular one is that the Cain campaign leaked it themselves to “rip the band aid off quickly” and get this out of the way well in advance of the general election. While that can be an effective strategy for candidates, I call baloney on it in this case. If this had come from the Cain campaign they would have been far better prepared with a response as opposed to the train wreck currently unfolding in the press.

Was it either Romney or Perry? Possible, I suppose, and if that’s the case Politico’s reporters would never out their original tipster. But somebody else might let it slip, so it would be a hugely risky move.

The best bet – and this is only a guess, mind you – is that somebody connected to the National Restaurant Association in some fashion who has an ax to grind with Cain decided to whisper in Politco’s ear. Or perhaps just somebody familiar with the case from the 90′s who wanted to feel important and be the hero for some reporters and make a big splash. Hard to say, really.

But, to wrap this up, from what we’ve seen thus far I think Politico has the goods on this one and they’ve got more that they’re not letting out of the bag yet. (If they ever plan to do so at all.) There are too many people weighing in on the story for this to be complete fiction at this point, so Cain’s defenders should be cautious about trying to lay this entirely at the feet of the liberal media. The question at this point is whether this will merely be a thorn in Cain’s side or a gaping breach in the hull of his campaign’s ship. We should know soon enough… probably after a week or ten days gives the story enough time to soak in nationally and then get a few new rounds of polling completed.

NOTE: See also Ed Morrissey’s analysis of this breaking story this morning.