A day late and a couple of hundred billion dollars short.

In closed-door meetings since leaving the “fiscal cliff” talks two weeks ago, lawmakers and aides say the Speaker has indicated he is abandoning that approach for good and will return fully to the normal legislative process in 2013 — seeking to pass bills through the House that can then be adopted, amended or reconciled by the Senate.

"He is recommitting himself and the House to what we've done, which is working through regular order and letting the House work its will,” an aide to the Speaker told The Hill.

He should have been doing this all along but better late than never I suppose.

Of course this isn't simply about Boehner finally realizing he sucks at negotiating, it's also about the fact that the next two big showdowns (the debt ceiling and a Continuing Resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year) aren't likely to go any better for the GOP. Boehner's basically saying, call me when you're done I'm not going to get blamed for the next rounds of failure by myself.

Oh, you still think the GOP isn't going to cave on the debt ceiling and will go to the mattresses and shut down the government over the CR? Adorable.

I posted this yesterday at my little blog. I figured I'd spare you for a day from the most depressing part of this whole mess.

First, the concession the GOP got from the last debt ceiling hike was $1.2 trillion in cuts that have now been postponed. Assuming the next debt hike is in the same range that means weÂ’ll have to get another $1.2 trillion in cuts for a total of $2.4 trillion just to keep pace with the debt hikes.

Does anyone honestly believe thatÂ’s going to happen in two months when we couldnÂ’t find the first set of cuts in over 15 months?

So these “huge” $2.4 trillion cuts (that will never materialize) won’t even begin to touch the $16.5 trillion and growing debt we already have rung up.

And even in some fairy tale world where these cuts are made and are real, the Democrats will want more revenue as part of any deal (remember the $800 billion Boehner offered up instead of a tax rate hike? Now it will be in addition TO that hike).

And what leverage does the GOP have to get anything for a debt hike? The threat to not raise the ceiling? Well they blinked last year on that and they blinked at going over the cliff when the stakes were “only” tax hikes that could easily be undone quickly. Yet we’re supposed to believe the GOP is willing to hold firm on the ceiling, even if it means irreversible damage such as the “full faith and credit” of the US [technically what could happen is somewhat different from the political and market fallout], an interest rate spike that will balloon our out of control debt exponentially overnight and a global recession as the cherry on top?

ItÂ’s not going to happen and everyone knows it.

The last pressure point the GOP will have is the upcoming fight on a Continuing Resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year in September. The only leverage they will have then is the threat of a complete government shutdown.

After blinking on the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, do you really think they will shut the government down? Really?

This is why Boehner will be reelected Speaker today. Who wants to fight a battle to get to preside over that pending disaster. Oh sure, a bunch will run if by some miracle Boehner doesn't get a majority on the first ballot but run an active coup against him? Nope.

Don't think of the New Years' Day Disaster as the end of a long and horrible year for the GOP, think of it as practice for the real disasters that lay ahead.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:11 AM | Comments (307)
Post contains 676 words, total size 4 kb.

This year's champion is drstanly with 145 correct picks.

There was a tie for second place. Black Palm Syndicate and DaveinNC's Swag Picks both had 143.

It should be noted that DaveinNC was suspected of using PEDs. We'll never know for sure as his urine sample was left in the HQ fridge and someone "accidently" drank it.

The results for management?

Ben 134
JohnE 125
JWF 123
Andy 119
CDR-M 117
RD 112

Better luck next year RD, better luck next year.

Thanks for playing everyone.

Oh and Andy is running a NFL.com Playoff Challenge. You can sign up here. Assuming you have an NFL account. If not, register one and then click the link. The group is "AOS" and the password is "LOLRomo".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:30 AM | Comments (128)
Post contains 132 words, total size 1 kb.

• NYC Occu-Bomb Suspect: Hey, I'm Just A Sportsman Or Something
  
• NAACP President: Tim Scott Doesn't Believe In Civil Rights
  
• Illinois Dems Press Forward With Gun Control Bill That Bans Almost Everything
  
• Glenn Beck Tried To Buy Current TV But Was Rejected
  
• Al Gore Was Eager To Sell Current TV By Dec 31, Otherwise He'd Be Subject To Higher Taxes
  
• Abesent Fathers And The Newtown School Shooting
  
• Japan's Population Falls By Record In 2012 As Births Decrease
  
• The Argentinian Economy Must Be In Bad Shape If They're Saber-Rattling Over The Falklands
  
• December Gun Sales Set New Records According To The FBI
  
• Illinois On The Cusp Of Major Pension Reforms?
  
• Moody's, More Action Needed To Avoid A Downgrade
  
• Erdogan Talking Turkey With Kurdish Leader
  
• Debt Now 103% Of GDP
  
• How Corporate Tax Credits Got In The Cliff Deal
  
• Blue On Blue: CALPERS Seeks To Sue San Bernadino Over Missed Pension Payments
  
• The Fasted Man With A Gun Who Ever Lived Just Passed Away
  
• New York Kept Secret A Preliminary Report That Said Fracking Was Safe
  
• Supreme Court Takes Up Florida's "Grand Theft Real Estate"
  
• More Evidence That A Healthy, Normal Weight Is Neither
  
• What Is The Future Of Conservatism?
  
• ESPN's Hannah Storm Returns To The Air After Gas Grill Accident
  
• Iowa Paper Publishes Insane Anti-Gun And Anti-Gun Owner Op-Ed
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:02 AM | Comments (214)
Post contains 229 words, total size 4 kb.

As expected, the House will take up the Hurricane Sandy relief bill this week.

After initially bungling this from a PR perspective, I'm highly confident that they won't ultimately pass the entire pork-laden monstrosity that the Senate sent over in the last congress. Otherwise the PR mess was completely avoidable.

Related: I have 100 acres of prime Wyoming oceanfront property for sale. Cheap.

Posted by: andy at 02:38 AM | Comments (293)
Post contains 73 words, total size 1 kb.

The Last Words of Pilots

As transcribed from recovered cockpit voice recorders by the NTSB.

As you'd expect most are of surprise and confusion and a good amount of cursing but some (mostly foreign) seem rather fatalistic. I'm pretty sure mine would be some variant of "Fuuuuu###k!".

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:27 PM | Comments (784)
Post contains 725 words, total size 20 kb.

I don't do this because I'm any good at it.

I do this because it needs to be done.

Florida (3) and Louisville (21).

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:00 PM | Comments (284)
Post contains 28 words, total size 1 kb.

Synergy.

Al Jazeera on Wednesday completed a deal to take over Current TV, the low-rated cable channel that was founded by Al Gore and his business partners seven years ago.

Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms. Current is available in about 60 million of the 100 million homes in the United States with cable or satellite service.

Rather than simply use Current to distribute its English-language channel, called Al Jazeera English and based in Doha, Qatar, Al Jazeera will create a new channel, called Al Jazeera America, based in New York. Roughly 60 percent of the programming will be produced in the United States, while the remaining 40 percent will come from Al Jazeera English.

Some Current personnel will continue on with the Al Jazzera America channel, but most of its programming will be, ahem, original.

What can you say? The suitors found each other.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (535)
Post contains 185 words, total size 1 kb.

There used to be a time when the media was willing to entertain the possibility that Democratic politicians were lying, or at least fudging the truth. We all know that when someone quits office "to spend more time with his family," he was fired, for example.

The conservative media expressed skepticism about Hillary Clinton's concussion-by-falling, wondering if there wasn't more to the story -- like her attempting to evade testifying about Benghazi. (Which they've also decided we should express no skepticism about!)

The liberal media pounced -- because its role is no longer to question Democratic political authorities, or express any skepticism whatsoever about their claims, but to act as their Public Relations arm simply claim that everything a Democrat says is true -- "from a certain point of view," as Obi Wan might say. See, for example, this digest of the most egregious "fact checks" of 2012, where true claims made by Republicans are deemed false, because the liberal "fact" checkers don't like the implications made, and where false claims made by Democrats (especially Obama) are deemed "true," because, well. Let them explain.

Much of our method of flattering ourselves is by favorable comparison to others -- to look at others, deem what others do "bad," "stupid," or "crazy," and set ourselves up in opposition to that, thus reassuring ourselves that we are good, smart, and reasonable.

Apart from the surface-level bias at play -- the obvious intellectual dishonesty, where "fact" checkers invent the category of "true but false" for Republicans and "false but true" for Democrats -- there is a deeper, psychologically rooted bias at play. Because conservatives have been so "Otherized" by liberals, and so then because virtually anything a conservative does is definitionally bad, stupid, or crazy, a liberal insecure in his status or his intellectual ability engages in an unwitting game of Let Me Take the Exact Opposite Position and by so Reflexively Doing, Prove My Worthiness.

Thus, when a conservative expresses skepticism, the intellectually-insecure liberal must vehemently take the position of absolute guilelessness, absolute credulity. If a conservative doubts the word of a liberal politician, the insecure liberal demonstrates how rational he is by assuming -- nay, insisting-- that everything a liberal politician tells him is 100% true.

In an effort, then, to define themselves against the Other, they have taken an unfortunate tendency of the out-party to engage in conspiracy-theorizing (as the left engaged in under George W. Bush, by the way) and made themselves into reflexive skeptics against the skeptics, or, more accurately, reflexive paranoids against the ostensibly paranoid.

But this puts them in a remarkable, risible position, far more incredible and lunatic than any position they're seeking to define themselves against:
postulating, incredibly, that there is an alien species upon the earth, a species which looks human but in fact is otherworldly, and which simply does not have the human capacity for deception or self-dealing behavior, and this strange absolutely-ethically-pure alien species is commonly known as "Liberal Politicians."

Is the conservative paranoia about Obama being a Manchurian candidate with malice in his heart excessive and unhinged? Perhaps. But is the liberal reverse paranoia -- what is the word? -- that Obama is constitutionally incapable of selfishness, deception, and self-dealing any more reasonable?

It is in fact less reasonable: For we know many humans who are in fact selfish and dishonest, but we know of not a single person still living on earth who is by definiton incapable of either sin, to the point where, as their claims carry them, to simply question Obama's, or Hillary''s honesty is to give evidence of a form of mania.

What a remarkable transformation of liberal views on the ethics with which political power is exercised -- just 5-6 years ago they considered the theory that the American President had deliberately permitted the murder of 3000 citizens in order to secure a short-term political advantage a theory which, while unproven, was no strong mark against its proponent, to a new theory, upon the Apotheosis of Barack Hussein Obama, that the American President and his lesser ministers have simply not told a single untruth in their lives and to suspect them of doing so is a mark of lunacy.

Jim Treacher responds to those toadies who now claim, preposterously, that a liberal politician's word is always presumptively true in all details. And I see this admission of this counter-lunacy -- liberals attempting to knock down what they take as the lunacies of the right by postulating even greater lunacies -- in in the Washington Post.

Head injuries are no joke, but the backlash against those who initially questioned whether Hillary ClintonÂ’s concussion was for real seems like an overreaction, too; you donÂ’t have to be hateful to have wondered if she really had the flu and fell down right before she was supposed to testify about the security situation at our consulate that was really just a house in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed by terrorists in September.

After all, public officials are routinely less than forthcoming about their health, even if we do know more now than we did when Edith Wilson was secretly running the country after her husband WoodrowÂ’s stroke. Or when the public was protected from the sight of FDRÂ’s wheelchair. Or when John F. KennedyÂ’s presidential campaign flatly denied perfectly accurate, LBJ-inspired reports that JFK suffered from AddisonÂ’s disease.

...

I also canÂ’t get too outraged by the early skepticism that Hillary had a blood clot in her brain yet was also doing just great because those two reports donÂ’t seem to mesh. The latter certainly didnÂ’t match the expression of worry on her daughter ChelseaÂ’s face as she left the New York hospital where the secretary of state was admitted on Sunday.

And finally, it isnÂ’t as though Clinton has never shaded a fact in her 65 years....
[W]ithout dragging the ancient White House travel office scandal or the Rose Law Firm into this century, she’s still the same person who repeatedly described coming under fire on a runway in Bosnia. During her ’08 campaign, she was eventually forced to apologize for saying, ”I remember landing under sniper fire,” in Tuzla back in 1996. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” That never happened, though the greeting ceremony did.

She also points out that many of the exact same liberal fans of Hillary's, who give her such props for the Machiavellian play of letting Susan Rice destroy her career by carrying the false Benghazi claims to market, while she herself had other Duties Unspecified, are the same people who now insist that the girl just don't have a devious bone in her body, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a stone-cold nutter.

That's all level-headed enough. I find it strange at this point in human history -- when so much of it has been recorded and is so easily available to us, as are whole volumes about human behavior and our basically selfish impulses -- it has to be seriously contended, as a contrarian point of view, that yes, human beings tend to lie, and politicians tend to lie especially.

Even the Democrats, if you can believe such blasphemous words.

This, in the Age of Obama, is counted as a controversial point. I have to cite a Washington Post blogger admiringly for noting this for the record. We're actually debating this proposition right now.

So that's where we are.

This is a dangerous moment. I keep saying this, but I do think Tyranny is in the air. When the press decides that our Dear Leaders are above suspicion, and any suspicion is evidence of both mental illness and treason simultaneously, we're living on the cusp of Chavez-like times.

Dear Self-Proclaimed Rationalists/Empiricists,

You're doing it wrong. Please note this for your records.

Respectfully,

People Who Would Like To Know What's In the Kool-Aid,
Before We Drink It,
If That's Quite All Right By You

Posted by: Ace at 02:25 PM | Comments (236)
Post contains 1381 words, total size 9 kb.

One point he makes is that Obama insisted on rate hikes -- so that he later can insist on the deduction-reductions Republicans offered. That is, he'll get both.

And what did we get in return? Nothing.

And he Obama also did this to break the Republican Party, which he did.

He has some political victories. But Presidents are evaluated according to non-political "objective goods," as I've called them, things which are undeniably good no matter what your politics -- like prosperity.

We'll see how he comes out in the history books after the collapse he's engineered.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (245)
Post contains 123 words, total size 1 kb.

There's a 5pm leadership meeting to discuss the intention of 17 20 Republicans to block Boehner's re-nomination as Speaker.

The buzz is that he'll step down from the post.

Counter-Buzz: I just checked Hot Air -- someone from Boehner's office says he's not stepping down, and that that story is just made up.

If I had to reconcile the two, and find a way they both could be a little bit true, I'd guess that Boehner still wants to argue for the job, and doesn't want to undermine himself by declaring it a fait accompli. But that he has discussed stepping down as his own personal Plan B.

I don't know that. Just speculatin'.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (411)
Post contains 122 words, total size 1 kb.