If you have somehow gotten the impression that I’d be giving up on defunding, you’ve obviously been reading the wrong newspaper. Today I suggest you take a look at the  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s editorial page:

What the Congress must do now, if Mr. Bush continues to refuse the $50 billion with conditions, is simply to *pass no bill*, leaving the Pentagon to finance its activities with the $482 billion it has already been authorized. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and the contractors behind the scenes will undoubtedly squawk, and the Republicans will posture politically, but the Democrats in the Congress, whom the electorate has counted on since November 2006 to bring the war to an end, will just have to take the heat. [Emphasis mine]

More.

Today Bob Herbert takes his whack at the “Ronald Reagan didn’t use racist tactics” piñata. He scores a  direct hit:

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

Thank you Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman. Shame on you David Brooks.

So we all know that David Brooks is an idiot. We also know that he’s a liar. But it’s unusual to hear about it from “serious” figures in the SCLM. Paul Krugman is actually a serious person–in that his brain hasn’t decomposed into lima bean paste. He’s been in a back-and-forth with the the adjacent liar, Brooks, over the question of whether or not Ronald Reagan used racist campaign tactics. Krugman’s smack down response? It was all just an innocent mistake:

Paul Krugman is still reading Armando’s mind:

Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job – to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for – the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

Nancy Pelosi was for protests before she was against them:

Pelosi has had a long record of criticizing China. In 1991, she slipped away with two colleagues during a congressional tour and placed flowers at Tiananmen Square, where pro-democracy demonstrations had been violently suppressed two years before. Chinese guards briefly detained television crews filming the event.

Crossposed from the orange place

No, not a question for us, but Conservatives for themselves, at least, according to Paul Krugman.

Krugman’s provocative conclusion:

Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

This has been my opinion for some time, and today’s column gives every indication that Krugman’s next book will be a must read.

more

From Real Time with Bill Maher 9/28 (full transcript here)

here is the video.  Sorry, the embed is a little screwy. You’ll just have to search a little bit for the beginning.