The Dish

A high-def, time-lapse fix that should last a while:

Time-Lapse Favs from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

GE has created an interactive polar area pie chart showing insurer and out-of-pocket costs for various conditions. The graph allows adjustment of the patient's age to help you get a handle on health care costs.

(Hat tip: Flowing Data)

Nate Silver sighs:

[Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit] is talking to his colleagues about making a prettier picture out of his data, and not about manipulating the data itself. Again, I'm not trying to excuse what he did — we make a lot of charts here and 538 and make every effort to ensure that they fairly and accurately reflect the underlying data (in addition to being aesthetically appealing.) I wish everybody would abide by that standard.

Still: I don't know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that's literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

The key to these bloggers' mentality is simply to find some tiny thing and focus all attention on that in order to persuade people that the bigger reality is untrue or irrelevant. This is not an argument; it's a technique. It's a technique to persuade people not to examine all the evidence, since the source of the evidence – secular humanist scientists – are evil suspects and against God and in favor of making your gas bill higher.

You can't actually persuade people that way, of course. But you can fortify their resistance to examining all the evidence.

Reihan considers Tim Pawlenty for 2012:

Pawlenty's greatest advantage is that the Republican field in 2012 looks fairly thin. Mitch Daniels has the strongest credentials, but he doesn't have an obvious base. Mitt Romney has formidable financial resources and he gained crucial experience during his 2008 presidential bid, but, as the former governor of Massachusetts and a newly minted pro-lifer, he has a number of liabilities. Mike Huckabee has won the loyalty of evangelical voters, yet economic conservatives are allergic to his brand of populism and it's not clear that he has much appeal beyond his base. Rather depressingly, Tim Pawlenty could win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 simply by being the least offensive candidate. Even if enthusiasm for Obama dies down in a few years time, that doesn't bode well for the general election.

Althouse responds to my take on her bloggingheads with Michelle Goldberg:

I know Sullivan wants me to check out his list of "lies." I picked one to check out, that she said the only flag in her office was the Israeli flag. As Sullivan himself notes, she must have meant to say the only foreign flag, since she did also have an Alaskan and an American flag in her office. That's the sort of sloppy speaking that one would correct easily if it were pointed out at the time. Of course, I also have the state flag and the American flag. I mean, it would be pretty ridiculous for a state governor to only have a foreign flag! There isn't even a motivation to lie. That there's no motivation here doesn't mean it's an "odd lie" — which is Sullivan's term. It means it's not a lie at all.

What's odd is his definition of a lie. If I said I was just wearing jeans to a party, you wouldn't have exposed me as a liar if I turned up wearing a shirt and shoes as well. In fact, you'd sound like a dork — or, with good enough delivery, a comedian — if you said, "You liar. You said you were just wearing jeans!" Calling something like this a lie marks you as someone who's centered not on finding out what is true, but on destroying someone.

Althouse picks an odd lie that is motivated by a desire to please a political constituency as well as say something with utter indifference to reality. It is indeed one of the milder ones, as I noted myself. It's an exaggeration that is literally untrue but not at the level of delusion of the rest. It is not what Althouse wants to say: a prediction of future events that doesn't work out that way. It is a statement of current reality that is untrue. But keep going, Ann. Debunk them all. With facts, not spin.

And, of course, Althouse is right that any single one of these "odd lies" could be explained by the usual human fallibility. We all make minor things up from time to time, white lies, on the spur of the moment. But all of them? Empirically disproven by the public record? In a relatively short career? It's the pattern here that I'm establishing. And the pattern is emphatically not one of mere bad memory or spin. It is one of clinical delusion.

It is my contention that all is not right here. In fact, something is very seriously wrong. This is not about destroying anyone. It is about saving a system that perpetrated an error as huge as this one. And we cannot save this system until we fully understand the depth of the scandal in front of us: that this clinically delusional person had a good chance of having her finger on the nuclear button. And still does if she is not fully vetted and understood. I intend to keep doing that until the whole truth is in front of us.

If you don't want to pursue that truth wherever it takes us, read someone else.

The Daily What finds it:

The Brazilian city of Porto Alegre has been experiencing heavy rains as of late, so a bunch of kids got together and decided to do the only reasonable thing you’d expect a bunch of kids to do in such a situation: They grabbed their surfboards and headed down to the city’s open sewer system.

He's taking the usual slew of tactical hits as his opponents try every single line of attack and pound every day, squeezing every ounce of agitprop from the news cycle. His numbers are gliding downward (although not by much), his foreign policy gains are structural and have as yet no tangible results, a critical Mid-East ally, Israel, is doing all it can to destroy his credibility with the Muslim world, his health insurance reform is still not passed, the debt is simply staggering (and the GOP's willingness to blame it all on him is as shameless as it can be convincing to those who know nothing and think less), etc etc.

And yet I remain absurdly confident that he is on the right path. Why? This rare moment of Beltway perspective helps explain:

No pain, no gain? In a way, last week epitomized President Obama’s 10 months in office. There was lots of seemingly short-term pain — members of Congress calling for his Treasury secretary to resign, more P.R. snafus over the stimulus, the chattering class criticizing his Asia trip, and his approval rating dropping below

50% for the first time in Gallup’s poll. 

But there also was long-term gain — the Senate on Saturday moving one step closer to passing health-care reform and a growing economic consensus, via the New York Times, that the stimulus is working despite all the P.R. headaches it has caused. Indeed, this short-term pain/long-term gain for Team Obama occurred during the presidential campaign. For all the hits they took (Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, “bitter,” the PUMAs, Bill Ayers, Landstuhl, even Joe the Plumber), they were always working toward the prize (270-plus electoral votes). And remember this: If you simply judged the last three months of the 2008 campaign by which campaign “won” the daily news cycle, McCain came out ahead. That’s perhaps the best example of the short-term/long-term.

I think Obama's handling of the economic crisis has been about as good as it reasonably gets; I think his handling of Iran is equally adroit; I find his relentless emphasis on reality in Afghanistan a good sign; I suspect the only way to get health insurance reform is the way he has attempted; I think the stimulus was necessary and sufficient; and I think unemployment will be coming down when he runs for re-election. On those issues I differ with him on – accountability for war crimes and civil rights – I can see the cool and cunning logic of his moves so far. The depth and complexity of the problems he faces remain immense. Perhaps he will prove incapable of surmounting them. But his persistence matters here. And we are not yet a year in.

He is strategy; his opponents are tacticians. And in my view, their tactics are consigning them to a longer political death than if they had taken a more constructive course. I could be wrong on all this, of course. History makes fools of us all. But this is my take as of now. And my relief at his being there remains profound.

The Iranian regime is using SMS to warn people not to protest:

The reports come ahead of Student Day on December 7, which the opposition has vowed to “turn green” in support of the Green movement backing opposition leader Mir Hossein Musavi.

One blogger posted a picture of the cautionary SMS, which states: “Respected citizen, based on our information, you have been influenced by the antisecurity propaganda of the foreign media. If you get involved in any illegal protest and get in touch with the foreign media…”  The image is cut off after that, but according to other sources, the message threatens that the person “will be considered a criminal according to several articles of the Islamic law and dealt with accordingly.”

And the political executions continue. I believe these moves are signs of desperation in the coup regime. But we will see on December 7 if the Green Movement can still command the people.

The signs above that signing table are priceless.

Two Sarah Palins.