The Dish

Marcy Wheeler reacts to the news that KSM will be brought to trial in New York:

While I’m glad a trial of KSM will demonstrate that our criminal system can deal with the worst of the worst, it’s the treatment of the others–al-Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah, and al-Qahtani–that will truly demonstrate the strength of failures of our legal system. KSM, after all, has said he wants to be executed; KSM freely boasts of his role in 9/11. That’ll make it easier to avoid discussing his brutal torture.

But what do you do with someone like Abu Zubaydah, who is probably not fit for trial, whose diaries (which the government still won’t give him) would prove he was tortured, and who wasn’t who they said he was when they waterboarded him 83 times?

Red State is flipping out. Greenwald is upset not every detainee will get a trial.

A reader writes:

NPR / Dina Temple used the word "torture" two or three times to refer to waterboarding in an reporter-to-reporter chat this morning on NPR. It was in the context of the 'evidence' gathered against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Somewhere, Orwell is happy.

As the Democrats in New York State again stick it to their gay supporters, just as the Democrats in Washington continue to do, it's worth watching this brief interaction. A constituent of state senator George Maziarz asks him a question at a constituency meeting. The question is civil, it contains many arguments, it offers any number of ways to address its points. What does Maziarz do? He simply dismisses the arguments, addresses none of them, reiterates his position that marriage is between a man and a woman, period, and gets a round of applause. No argument, no engagement – just raw majority power against a tiny minority in often desperate straits.

And that's what it will surely do, as all populist protest movements do, after they have eaten up the Republicans. And burped loudly.

Ambers wonders if Pawlenty is becoming a Romney:

It's no surprise that no potential 2012 aspirant wants the Romney-esque tag. Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) is in danger of acquiring the label. Dan Balz, an influential and well-respected political journalist, pointed to Pawlenty's flip-flop on climate change, his seeming eagerness to plunge into the tea party crowd's daily obsessions — whether they be the president's address to schoolkids or the notion that health care mandates violate the 10th amendment or the idea that Sen. Olympia Snowe isn't sufficiently conservative to be a Republican.

Yglesias partially defends the public's entitlement hypocrisy:

What we really see with the entitlement situation is a public refusal to think seriously about the future—a kind of myopia more than a refusal to pay the tab. What actually happens when the tab comes do [sic]? We’ll have to see. But I don’t think we really know what the public’s view of the coming crisis will be when it actually arrives.  

Fred Kaplan explains why the Afghanistan decision has taken so long:

[C]ontrary to the media's incessant focus on numbers, this has never been a decision primarily about troop levels. Last summer, retired Gen. Colin Powell advised Obama that the key question was not how many troops to send but what those troops should do—and that this was primarily his decision, not some general's. Obama seems to be following that advice.

[…]That's what the drawn-out discussions have been about, that's (in part) why it's taken so much time. According to some officials, after each of the eight sessions, Obama has been dissatisfied with the answers at some level and has hammered them to bring back more detail the next time—on the state of the Afghan army, on the impact that various deployments would have on the state of the U.S. Army, on a province-by-province breakdown of Afghan politics and security. All these questions directly, even crucially, affect calculations of acceptable risk or clear futility—the chances of success or failure.

Portrush, Northern Ireland, 8.40 am

Maybe a little says Nate Silver:

My 30,000-foot view is that between the pressures of the jobs situation and the health care debate, the Democrats are in fairly bad shape. But, there's a long way to go before next year, and

their situation does not seem to be quite as bad as it was in August.

Certainly, if I were the Democrats, I'd be adopting a fairly defensive posture, putting money into defending seats — especially those held by non-Blue Dog incumbents — rather than getting cute and trying to pick off more than a handful of potentially vulnerable Republican seats. I'd also be thinking about policies — like a jobs package and financial regulation — that tap a little bit into the populist spirit and might result in somewhat awkward Republican positioning. 

When will people realize that Obama is a strategist, not a tactician? If you cannot see the long-term game here, and the fact that the Republicans are merrily laying the foundation for their own potential implosion, you're not watching closely enough.

Spencer Ackerman's report on the November 12 Afghanistan meeting, linked to by the Dish, has been withdrawn. It was, in critical respects, untrue, and misleadingly framed.