The Dish

The Onion has the scoop.

The GOP is trying to get voters to forget their fiscal recklessness over the last eight years. And the conservative media – which is sadly far too often just a partisan mouthpiece – is helping the amnesia along. One of the few principled fiscal conservatives in the Bush-Cheney years. Bruce Bartlett, is refusing to forget. He tells a classic tale of one Republican, Trent Franks of Arizona. Here is what Franks is now saying about the health insurance reform in the Congress:

"I would remind my Democratic colleagues that their children, and every generation thereafter, will bear the burden caused by this bill. They will be the ones asked to pay off the incredible debt," Franks declared on Nov. 7.

So what was Franks' position on Medicare D? He voted for it, after some of the most egregious Congressional arm-twisting in memory (so egregious Rove et al extended debate for three hours and turned off the C-Span cameras). What is the difference between Medicare D and the current health insurance proposal? You guessed it:

The Medicare drug benefit was a pure giveaway with a gross cost greater than either the House or Senate health reform bills how being considered. Together the new bills would cost roughly $900 billion over the next 10 years, while Medicare Part D will cost $1 trillion.

Moreover, there is a critical distinction–the drug benefit had no dedicated financing, no offsets and no revenue-raisers; 100% of the cost simply added to the federal budget deficit, whereas the health reform measures now being debated will be paid for with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, adding nothing to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. (See here for the Senate bill estimate and here for the House bill.)

The fantastic hypocrisy of today's Republicans – their refusal to come to terms with their own responsibility for the current fiscal crisis, their attempt to project their own profligacy onto a new administration struggling with one of the toughest economic legacies of any White House since Reagan – makes me ill. And how a man like Karl Rove can go on television complaining about the debt boggles the mind.

Well: it doesn't boggle the mind as long as you accept that he is a principle-free, ends-over-means tool.

A few days ago, many Republican bloggers thought KSM didn't deserve a trial. Now they are calling the civilian trial a "show trial" because it is possible that the government could continue to detain KSM in the unlikely instance he gets off. Allahpundit:

Not only will we be right back where we started, it will expose the federal trial as nothing more than a show trial.  Show trials are conducted by despots and dictators to give only a thin veneer of legality to political detentions and executions.  If the state isn’t prepared to abide by the decision of the court, including dismissals and acquittals, then the use of the trial system is worse than useless.  It demeans the federal system needed for Americans to seek unbiased justice.

Drum makes an obvious counter-point:

I'm not categorically opposed to using military tribunals in cases like this, but that's hardly an option anymore thanks to the Bush administration's contemptuous efforts to turn them into obvious kangaroo courts.  Hell, even military lawyers couldn't stomach them.  As for an international court, that would be fine too except that conservatives have blocked every attempt to make the United States a party to them.  The only real choice left, if you want ensure something within shouting distance of a fair trial, is a civilian court.

I'm just delighted and amazed that anyone on the right now cares about "show trials". Where were they during the Bush administration's disgustingly rigged "military tribunals"? Oh, yes, I remember – where the tea-partiers were when Bush added $5 trillion to the debt. Way up their own posteriors.

Jessica Valenti describes how Palin is trying to have it both ways when it comes to gender:

In her widely watched Oprah appearance, for example, Palin said that she resented people questioning her ability to serve as vice-president while being a mother to five children – something a man would never be asked. But Palin also complained that in her interview with Couric, she thought she would be speaking to the reporter "working mom [to] working mom" and that she was annoyed with "her badgering and questions". In other words, Palin thought that because Couric was a woman, she wouldn't take her job as a journalist seriously. Palin expected a puff piece instead of pesky questions about economics, abortion and Palin's policies – you know, things a "working mom" couldn't possibly be bothered with.

If one started a list of things that Palin wants both ways, it would exceed the list of her 34 documented odd lies.

"It's definitely a HarperCollins tour. Not a Sarah Palin campaign," – Tina Andreadis, HarperCollins publicity director for the "Going Rogue" book tour.

A reader writes:

Having grown up in Gilo, I have to chime in on all these people expressing the fact that expanding Gilo is not a problem. My mom, who lived there for a while, responded to the article by saying, "When we were growing up, those weren't settlements. Those were just cheap houses."

Does that mean that it's acceptable to expand Gilo? No,

it does not.

The problem is that each side has been so invested in its own perception of reality that they ignore the other side's feelings about the issue. In a normal run of events, it would be perfectly fine. But to ignore the context of what those settlements mean to Palestinians, the political reality behind the on-the-ground reality, is peevish. It's naive to pretend that it's fine.

There are other places to build cheap houses. Israel is a small country, but it's far from being fully developed. What is the necessity to build the houses there?

It appears so.

David Corn makes a cameo in the book. Palin distorts the story to make it fit better with her self-serving story. It's not that big a deal – more selective unfairness than a lie of any sort. Corn's explanation here.

A new poll finds that 51 percent of Americans think canceling the rest of the stimulus would create more jobs. Derek Thompson is slack-jawed:

The idea that canceling the stimulus would create more jobs implies that passing the stimulus has actually killed more jobs than it's created, which is bonkers. Let's say you don't want to consider infrastructure spending or green technology spending or a single job that might have been created in the private sector. If nothing else, the tens of billions we've sent to state budgets have, without question, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, like teachers, that are supported by state taxes. It's just a very basic fact.

They're watching Fox. Facts don't matter.

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their seventh grandchild, Sarah Lynne Cheney, Wednesday, November 18, 2009.  She weighed 6 lbs., 14 oz and was born at 8:17 A.M. at Sibley Hospital in Washington,  D.C.  Her parents are the Cheney’s daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe.”

Many congratulations to the Cheney family. And congratulations on the word “parents.”