"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" clears the filibuster!

63-33.

UPDATE: The Senate votes to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," 65-31.

“We righted a wrong,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut and a leader of the effort to end the ban. “Today we’ve done justice.”

4 Senators did not vote. 3 Republicans — Bunning, Gregg, and Hatch. 1 Democrat: Joe Manchin. All of the no votes were Republican. Republicans voting yes were: Scott Brown, Burr (of NC), Susan Collins, John Ensign, Mark Steven Kirk (in Barack Obama's old seat), Lisa Murkowski, Olympia Snow, George Voinovich.

I don't like all this lame duck action, but I'm greatly pleased to see the awful old law repealed at last.

AND: John McCain raged, as Dana Milbank describes it:

McCain famously said in 2006 that he would support repeal once military leaders recommended it. Instead, he led the opposition to repeal. McCainologists in the Capitol speculate that on this and other issues he's driven less by policy consideration than by personal animosity....

On Saturday, McCain's rage was all the more striking because the general tone of the debate was tame. Republicans were mostly defensive, objecting not to the service of homosexuals in the military but to procedures and other technical matters. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said of the repeal: "Should it be done at some point in time? Maybe so, but in the middle of a military conflict is not the time to do it."...

When it came time for his closing argument before the day's key vote, McCain spoke for only a few seconds: "Today's a very sad day. The commandant of the United States Marine Corps says when your life hangs on the line, you don't want anything distracting. . . . I don't want to permit that opportunity to happen and I'll tell you why. You go up to Bethesda Naval Hospital, Marines are up there with no legs, none. You've got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs."

McCain turned and, without another word, walked into the cloakroom.

The DREAM dies.

In the Senate — 5 short of the 60 votes needed to break the filibuster.

“This bill is a law that at its fundamental core is a reward for illegal activity,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) on the floor an hour before the vote. “It’s the third time we’ve tried to schedule a vote on it during this lame-duck session. It’s the fifth version of this legislation that has been introduced in the past five months.”...

“Many of you have told me that you’re lying awake at night, tossing and turning over this vote, because you know how hard it’s going to be politically, that some people will use it against you,” [Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin]  said. “But I might say, if you can summon the courage....”

But the courage to reward illegal activity was insufficiently summoned.

Gift ideas — food category.

I was searching around in Amazon for gifts and, bereft of ideas, decided to search for "food." (Ah! What searching for food has meant over the ages of human history and pre-history!)

Well, the first 7 items on the list weren't even food. The top 30 was mostly things like the Melissa & Doug Wooden Sandwich-Making Set, the Melissa & Doug Slice and Bake Cookie Set, and various other Melissa & Doug wooden food stuff. Why wooden toy food? — you might ask. Whatever happened to plastic toy food? I figure, when it comes to play food, wooden is like organic. You want the kids to have healthy fake food.

If you don't count jars of baby food* — organic, of course — you don't get any food when you search for food until you get to.... well, the list goes up to 50 without any food. Okay. I'll search the Grocery & Gourmet Food category. Again, baby food is huge. Obvious why, actually. Diapers are popular too. You know what you need. You need a lot. And it's hard to get out of the house. Those single-cup coffee packets are popular. Pet food. Astronaut Ice Cream. Iffy gift baskets.

Back to that pet food:

Pack of twenty four, 5.5-ounces per can (total of 132 ounces)
With ingredients that are fit for human consumption
Made in a human food facility
Boneless, skinless, white breast meat chicken in a sumptuous gravy
Grain free product
All food ingredients are fit for human consumption

What are they trying to say?

I need to get back to my search. If you're searching too, please use this portal:



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* A deeper search reveals baby food — organic, of course — that comes in pouches. Do they out-green the glass jars? Eh! Who knows? Glass jars, you can recycle, but recycling uses fossil fuels. Pouches... must be plastic, but they roll up into nothing. My advice is: Buy what you like! The same goes for Christmas trees.

"[Y]our property belongs to you..."

"... until somebody with more clout wants it for something else, be it a 'vision,' or a moneymaking scheme."

"Since there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s..."

"... is it a good thing to tell people, years earlier, that they have this progressive degenerative brain disease or have a good chance of getting it?"

"Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole..."

"... which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab."

When people who did not celebrate Christmas or who did not identify as Christian filled out surveys about their moods while in the same room as a small Christmas tree, they reported less self-assurance and fewer positive feelings than if they hadn't been reminded of the holiday, according to a new study.

The university students didn't know the study was about Christmas, said study researcher Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Nonetheless, he said, the presence of the tree caused non-celebrators and non-Christians to feel subtly excluded.

"Cuba banned 'Sicko' for depicting 'mythical' healthcare system."

A WikiLeak.

A 1933 Washington Post headline: "Present Lame Duck Session Will Be Last."

David A. Fahrenthoid explains the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The trouble with lame-duck sessions began in 1801, when the outgoing Federalists used their last days in power to help appoint a bunch of judges. It flared up again in 1922, when President Warren Harding and the lame-duck Republicans tried to ram through unpopular legislation after their defeats.

Opponents said this was un-democratic: These sessions seemed to violate the ever-popular Washington rule that "elections have consequences." Finally, Congress passed - and the states ratified - the 20th Amendment.

Historians say lawmakers thought they were ending lame-duck Congresses forever.

"This amendment will free Congress of the dead hand of the so-called 'lame duck,' " Rep. Wilburn Cartwright (D-Okla.) said as it was debated in 1932.

But Congress follows the letter of the law, and the amendment only changed the date of the end of congressional terms. It's a lot earlier than it was under the original Constitution, but it's still far enough from the elections to give a modern Congress plenty of time to work its will on the American people who may have just decisively rejected them.

With a devastating electoral loss behind them and a 13% approval rating, Congress flouts the intent of the framers and ratifiers of the 20th Amendment.

"John Bolton eyes 2012 presidential run."

Shouldn't that be John Bolton mustaches 2012 presidential run?

"In the end, Marines in combat will treat sexual orientation the same way they treat race, religion and..."

"... one's stance on the likelihood of the Patriots winning another Super Bowl. I do not believe the intense desire we all feel as Marines to accomplish the mission and protect each other will be affected in the slightest by knowing the sexual orientation of the man or woman next to us.... I believe the reluctance many Marines feel about repeal is based on the false stereotype, borne out of ignorance, that homosexuals don't do things like pull other Marines from burning vehicles. The truth is, they do it all the time. We simply don't know it because they can't tell us."

Nathan Cox, an infantry captain in the Marine Corps.

"How did McConnell go from uncertain to cocksure in two days?"

"A confluence of facts and events helped McConnell convince senior appropriators in his own party -- people who, like he..."

... like he...

"... don't fundamentally oppose the earmarking process -- to back off the omnibus, according to a Republican leadership aide. Part of it was that, though bipartisan, the bill itself included funding for key Democratic priorities that in the current political environment no Republican supports, or wants to be accused of supporting. The omnibus included $1 billion in spending to implement the health care law -- a provision no Republican wanted to de facto support."

Captain Beefheart has died!

Don Van Vliet was 69. In his post-Trout Mask Replica days, he was a successful painter.



"A primitive genius."

Here he is on Letterman:



"If you want to be a different fish, you've got to jump out of the school."

AND: You should know "Trout Mask Replica."

AND:

Late in the 1970s, as Van Vliet rehearsed with yet another lineup, Devo's Mothersbaugh met his hero. He found him intimidating, yet childlike.

"Everyone in the band complained about what a pain in the ass he was, how ridiculous he could be at times," Mothersbaugh says. "But they all took care of him, and they all loved him, and they all respected him. And, uh, they were almost all acting like babysitters that they all loved but that frustrated the heck out of them."

Arm warmers.

You've heard of leg warmers. How about some arm warmers? The backs of my hands are always getting cold as I type up here in my remote outpost in the northland, with the thermostat set the way we like it — low.

And these are, seriously, gift ideas. If you don't like my ideas, at least don't forget my portal:

Judge Vinson: "People have always exercised the freedom to choose whether to buy or not buy a commercial product."

Hinting at oral argument that he may rule against the individual mandate in the Florida case — in which the governors and attorneys general of 20 states have attacked health care reform.

Larry King, Bill Clinton, and the "zipper club."

A little embarrassment on Larry King's last show:

The guests [included] former president Bill Clinton, fit and felicitous as piped in from Arkansas. The encounter was hampered by annoying pauses and delays caused by a slothful satellite - and by a fleeting bit of embarrassment involving the term "zipper club."

King said that he and Clinton were both members of that fanciful aggregation, an unfortunate reference considering that, earlier, [Ryan] Seacrest had clumsily asked King whether the fly on his trousers had a zipper or buttons. A bit belatedly, King explained that the "zipper club" is for men who've had open-heart surgery. "I'm glad you clarified that," Clinton said, with a forgiving smile.

AND: Here's the whole darn show. The Bill Clinton stuff starts at 26:00.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.