Ultimately, I'm not as mad about the tax compromise as I thought I'd be because I think Obama won some pretty effective stimulus even though it preserves a tax structure that will continue to encourage wealth to accumulate at the top of the economy.

The President's fiscal commission has failed to generate a plan that won the support of 14 of 18 of its members, as directed.  Three Republican Senators on the commission voted for it, so the ideas in the commissions report might still egt an airing in the Senate but it won't be some up or down vote without amendments.  Which is fine.  I never understood why this issue should be treated differently than any other, screwy as I think senate rules are.

It seems that the mainstream reaction to the latest from Wikileaks has been something along the lines of, "this isn't new," by which the speaker means either that they already knew this stuff or always suspected it and that there's no value in having their suspicions confirmed by evidence.  If the speaker already knew, it just means they're fine keeping the public in the dark about how foreign policy is conducted.  But the second sentiment, along the lines of "didn't you always think Karzai was corrupt?" or "Didn't you always suspect that the Saudis would love for us to bomb Iran?" is reall

While I am of course completely against the TSA's unneccessarily intrusive scanning technology or patdown opt-outs, I think I'm a little sick of the sudden rise of Libertarians who were silent for years while the Bush administration decided to datamine through all of our emails, library records and phone conversations while sending undercover agents to infiltrate peacenik groups and other informal elements of civil society.