And not Hillary Clinton. He didn't expressly mention her, but she's been on his mind lately.

This NYT article noted how much she's been in his mind, and his desire to begin getting his own name out there as far as a candidate for 2016.

[T]heir relationship has also been shaped by awkwardness and slights, real and perceived, that Mr. Biden and his political advisers have felt as Mrs. Clinton attracted outsize attention and influence in the Democratic Party.

Now their friendship is being tested anew, as curiosity grows about their possible presidential candidacies for 2016 and Mr. Biden finds himself once again frustratingly eclipsed by the former first lady, whom Senate colleagues are already endorsing and political action committees are springing up to support.

Mr. BidenÂ’s longtime political advisers grow easily exasperated about the subject and wonder how a sitting vice president who was highly engaged in the administration, especially on foreign policy, can be so easily overlooked in the presidential discussion....

“The undercurrent of ‘What about me?’ permeates from the top down in the vice president’s orbit,” one former administration official said.

...

Mr. Biden, 70, is keenly sensitive to perceptions about his political stature, and he is sending signals that he wants to be taken seriously in the 2016 conversation. He also wants to maintain maximum leverage within the Democratic establishment, especially with the Clintons, three people close to him said.

“Joe always says, ‘If you’re not on your way up, you’re on your way down,’ ” one of the people said. A former administration official aide agreed, saying, “He needs to make people think he has skin in the game in the future so that they treat him relevant now.”

Emphasis added.

It should also be noted that Joe Biden considers himself a Foreign Policy Genius, and would probably be shocked to find out that he's pretty much the only person who believes that bit of Old Man's Nonsense.

So the Intellect of the Democratic Party, kind of a grin with a body behind it (as Clint Eastwood remarked), announces that he's going to be doing this sort of thing and then, having openly announced his subtext, awkwardly does so.

Now that's what I call Master Diplomacy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 AM | Comments (306)
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The first draft of history. And when I say "first draft," I mean the one you do an hour before class when you're still half drunk from the night before.

AllahPundit writes more about this.

I don't know what to say about this, except that it's an example of Cocooning. People now choose what sorts of media inputs they will permit in their lives... and this applies to the media probably most of all.

One can get by in the media on a steady diet of Rachel Maddow, Huffington Post, Gawker, and Obama Speech iPods. Oh, one will miss the occasional Local Crime Story, but as one's coworkers are also missing that Local Crime Story, there's no one around to embarrass you for your ignorance.

Nidal Hassan was an Unhelpful Narrative for the left, and so it's simply not a Narrative at all. It is instead, deliberately, an incoherent mix of a few scattered facts with no story to unite them into the whole. The media began trying to forget Hassan from moments after his rampage ended -- the moment they realized he wasn't a Tea Partier, and therefore that his mass murder was a Local Crime Story -- and they've now succeeded in forgetting.

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (401)
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They don't call us the stupid party for nothing. The GOP this month has taken a winning proposition -- opposition to Obamacare -- and turned it into an embarrassing intraparty murder-suicide pact.

Avik Roy, writing at National Review, explains:

The original strategy of the shutdown shock-jocks was that the Republican-led House would pass a CR that would defund Obamacare. The Democrat-led Senate would pass its own CR that would fund Obamacare. The impasse would lead to a government shutdown, and the shutdown would be so scary to Democrats that they would eventually cave and agree to defund Obamacare.

There are a number of problems with this approach. Other than the obvious — that it would never work — it would allow the Senate Democrats to gut the Budget Control Act of 2011, a.k.a. the “sequester,” which has already achieved a remarkable amount of spending control and deficit reduction. As Stephen Moore noted in the Wall Street Journal last month, the sequester is “the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.”

This was the plan of Sens. Lee and Cruz that we've written about here for weeks, that we've talked about in the podcasts, that we've gone 'round and 'round discussing. According to the folks that Roy dubs "Obamacare defeatists," if Obamacare is not defunded now, the GOP can simply give up forever. They have to make this the political equivalent of a life-or-death situation because only in such dire circumstances can such a chancy gamble be justified.

In fact, the conservative argument is that there is no choice, that it must be done now or it will be done never because once insurance subsidies kick in, Obamacare could never be repealed.

As I have discussed several times, this is untrue. Delay the individual mandate and you delay the insurance subsidies . . . perhaps long enough to get the sixty Senate votes, plus a presidential signature to repeal Obamacare. Not even the conservatives admit we have those votes and signature now. Which makes their proposal lose-lose. Not only will their idea not lead to Obamacare defunding (or repeal or even delay), their idea will undo the sequester and saddle the GOP with responsibility for a government shutdown that Lee and Cruz insist they do not want.

House leadership, by contrast, has offered a plan that preserves the sequester and forces the Senate to take an up or down vote on Obamacare defunding.

Under CantorÂ’s approach, the House would simultaneously fund the government, including Obamacare, at sequester levels while also passing a separate resolution that would amend the CR to defund Obamacare. By using this mechanism, the House would force the Senate to vote on the defunding resolution, while preserving the sequester-driven spending caps, and also ensuring that any government shutdown would be the fault of Democrats in the Senate.

For his effort to defund Obamacare while preserving the sequester cuts, Cantor's strategy has been sneeringly labeled by the likes of Erick Erickson "the hug it out strategy." Sen. Cruz calls folks who support the plan "the surrender caucus." But, of course, all the namecalling in the world won't defund Obamacare. Nor will it prevent the disaster that conservative namecallers claim they want to avoid: the subsidies.

Which is why Cantor's plan has a second step, for when the Senate Democrats -- vocally supported by President Obama -- refuse to defund Obamacare even as polls show deepening opposition to the law.

Roy explains:

Subsequently, during the debt-ceiling negotiations, House Republicans would trade a one-year delay in Obamacare — including its unpopular individual mandate — for a fiscally comparable easing of the sequester spending caps.

Basically, itÂ’s a win-win. The Cantor plan would give conservatives an opportunity to persuade Senate Democrats to defund Obamacare and would require those Democrats to vote on defunding, whether they want to or not. If defunding fails in the Senate, the rest of the government remains funded, avoiding the shutdown that Cruz et al. claim they donÂ’t seek and preserving the sequesterÂ’s caps on discretionary spending for future negotiations over Obamacare.

To review: the Cantor plan would preserve the sequester, force Democrats to vote again for the ever-more unpopular Obamacare, and delay Obamacare implementation -- including the dreaded subsidies. As Roy says, this is a win-win.

Which is why conservative intransigence is so frustrating. They insist that the GOP do something self-destructive and slander anyone who won't get in line. That's not a formula for success. So why do conservatives require a desperate and futile action?

Roy's got two theories, a cynical one and a principled one. And you should click over and read them. I've stolen enough of that post. Go read the whole thing and then ask yourself why the GOP is struggling, despite a deeply unpopular president who seems only to support deeply unpopular policies.

I will say that Roy gives outside conservative groups way to much credit by suggesting that they're operating under a principled theory. Setting congressfolk aside (although, you know how much a dislike politicians), I do not believe that outside groups are as principled as they claim and I've got hundreds of strident fundraising emails stuffed in my inbox to call the question. These are folks who make bank by setting Republicans against Republicans and, indeed, two of the loudest voices calling for a shutdown showdown have spent more money this year on attack ads against Republicans than the official Democratic party apparatus: the DSCC, the DCCC, and the DNC -- combined.

So we have on the one hand a viable strategy for attacking Obamacare that holds off the disastrous subsidies despite the Senate and White House and that holds on to the successful sequester cuts. And we have on the other hand a murder-suicide pact in which conservatives shoot their fellow Republicans in the head, then turn the gun on themselves by means of a failed government shutdown that ultimately fails to defund Obamacare.

I mean, defeat is the anticipated conservative outcome here, right? Conservatives haven't suddenly gained faith in their fellow Republicans, have they? Are conservatives so certain that Republican House members will persevere through a shutdown that a majority of the public blames on them? I'm not. But, then again, I have always been a bit more cynical about government.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:28 AM | Comments (310)
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Four Reported Dead.

A gunman armed with a rifle and perhaps a handgun opened fire Monday at the Washington Navy Yard — killing at least four people and wounding at least six more, including a security guard and a city police officer, authorities said.

There are a lot of reports about the number of shooters and the number of dead and wounded. As always with breaking news like this, it is best to assume 50% "facts" being reported right now are false.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:48 AM | Comments (462)
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• NYT Discovers Voter Fraud
  
• Steyn: American Ineffectualism
  
• The Civil War In One Chart
  
• Obama Want To Pivot To The Economy
  
• Next Step In 3-D Printing? Print Your Own Drugs
  
• State Department Whitewashed Benghazi Interview
  
• 70 Federal Agencies Have Armed Divisions
  
• Obamacare Will Butt Into Your Sex Life
  
• New Book Disputes The Matthew Shepard Narrative
  
• Obamacare: Insurers Limiting Doctors, Hospitals
  
• Shooting At The Washington Naval Yard
  
• Are We Rome?
  
• Chris Christie, America's Most Overrated Governor?
  
• 500 People Still Unaccounted For In Colorado Flooding
  
• NYC Police Not The Most Accurate Shooters
  
• Government's That Control Healthcare Control Their Citizenry
  
• Indian Tribe Wants Nothing To Do With Jacka$$'s Who Tore Down The 9/11 Memorial At Middlebury
  
• Spooky Clown Terrorizing Northampton
  
• Awesome Photoshop
  
• Debating Immanuel Kant's Ideas Can Be Deadly
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (365)
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You remember that IRS scandal that Democrats have been desperately hoping would go away? ItÂ’s not going away. ItÂ’s pretty clear at this point that Lois Lerner deliberately targeted Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny (read: harassment) to hinder the Tea Party groups from organizing and raising money. That this was done to aid Democrats is pretty obvious. Ms. Lerner has been on a paid vacation from the IRS ever since the scandal broke. So far no punishments have been meted out -- to Ms. Lerner or anyone else at the IRS involved in the scandal.

Larry Summers withdraws his name for the position of Fed chairman. Theory A: Summers anticipated the beating he was going to get during confirmation and wanted no part of it. Theory B: SummersÂ’ boss Obama anticipated the beating Summers was going to get during confirmation hearings and wanted no part of it. This means Yellen is probably a lock, though in truth sheÂ’s hardly a better pick than Summers on the merits.

Bad history, worse policy.

Missed by both sides was that the rush into housing signaled something seriously wrong with the economy (which this reviewer wrote about for National Review Online in 20061). A purchase of a house doesnÂ’t make one more productive, it doesnÂ’t lead to software or other commercial innovations that drive economic efficiency, nor does it open foreign markets. Housing on its best day is a consumptive sink of wealth, and when housing was all the rage in the earlier part of the new Millennium, the fact that it was made it apparent that consumption of housing was detracting from investment in the productive parts of the economy.

Keith Hennessey and Ed Lazear present some thoughts on the financial crisis of 2008.

The Democrat war on the young. Yet young people continue to vote Democrat by a large margin. It passeth all understanding.

The cost of the Great Recession? About $30 trillion...and counting.

Four of every ten college grads don’t need a degree for their work. But then, increasingly, college is just a four-year vacation in between high school and adulthood. It’s not really intended to impart any real knowledge or skills, unless you major in the hard sciences or engineering. It’s a place to have fun, drink a lot, have casual sex, and attend a lot of leftist indoctrination courses disguised as “women’s studies” or “African American studies” classes.

WhatÂ’s wrong with Kansas? Well, one of the things is that they have a huge unfunded pension liability. It's not just "blue" states, folks. It's most of them.

Greek unemployment now at 27.9%.

California plans to hike the minimum wage to $10 by 2016; will act shocked, shocked when unemployment subsequently spikes. And when off-the-books jobs (which donÂ’t generate income taxes and tend to employ off-the-books people) start to proliferate.

Yet another ObamaCare success story.

Italy damned nearly bailed on the Euro in 2011. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:09 AM | Comments (163)
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Obama: Hey It's Just Style Points

President Obama says a tumultuous month as commander in chief, when his policy toward Syria took a number of unexpected turns, may not have looked "smooth and disciplined and linear," but it's working.

"I'm less concerned about style points. I'm much more concerned with getting the policy right," Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in an exclusive interview on "This Week."

Jonathon Tobin: No You Lost More Than Just Style Points in Syria

By demonstrating his lack of will to act on what he has rightly labeled a human-rights catastrophe, President Obama has not only secured the Russian base in Syria; he has sent the region a signal that the U.S. is a paper tiger.

...Had President Obama not played Hamlet about acting on his own authority to strike Syria none of this needed to happen. Several months ago the Russians feared they were about to lose the last vestige of their once-formidable sphere of influence in the region as Assad tottered. Now they are back in business and Assad is even deeper in their debt than before. Bolstered by victory in Syria, Iran also has good reason to be more confident about stalling or even defying the West on the nuclear issue. All this is something Obama handed to them free of charge on a silver platter. That isn't "style" Mr. President; it's substance. And the consequences will be suffered by the people of Syria, regional allies like Israel, and an American people who, despite their justified worries about trusting Obama with military force in Syria, will soon realize that American prestige and influence has never been so low since Jimmy Carter sat in the White House.

News You Can Use: How to Turn Fruit Juice into Cheap Homemade Booze

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:26 PM | Comments (477)
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David Brooks on Ted Cruz:

“What’s going on in the House, and a bit in the Senate, too, is what you might call the rise of Ted Cruz-ism,” Brooks said. “And Ted Cruz, the senator from Canada through Texas, is basically not a legislator in the normal sense, doesn’t have an idea that he’s going to Congress to create coalitions, make alliances, and he is going to pass a lot of legislation. He’s going in more as a media-protest person. And a lot of the House Republicans are in the same mode. They’re not normal members of Congress. They’re not legislators. They want to stop things. And so they’re just being — they just want to obstruct.”

My response:

MOAR TED CRUZ!!!

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Posted by: andy at 02:17 AM | Comments (183)
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I searched in vain for a pic of the elbows ...

Posted by: andy at 04:24 PM | Comments (314)
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Posted by: CAC at 01:06 PM | Comments (185)
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