In case anyone is wondering

I haven't been posting because things haven't been worth writing about. I speak when there's something to be said, not merely to hear myself talk, and as of late the game has been laughingly simplistic.

Take this for example:

The House on Friday overwhelmingly rejected calls for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, a vote engineered by the Republicans that was intended to fail. Democrats derided the vote as a political stunt.

"Our troops have become the enemy. We need to change direction in Iraq," said Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Democratic hawk whose call a day earlier for pulling out troops sparked a nasty, personal debate over the war.

The House voted 403-3 to reject a nonbinding resolution calling for an immediate troop withdrawal.

"We want to make sure that we support our troops that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will not retreat," Speaker Dennis Hastert, R- Ill., said as the GOP leadership pushed the issue to a vote over the protest of Democrats.

^^^^Typical predictable politics. The GOP incorrectly tries yet again to tie in the war in Iraq with the "war on terror", and the Dems pull short on the wave of discontent they hope to ride to victories in 2006. Me making a pithy comment about this would be akin to bitching that there are insects outside, it's pointless, there is no benefit my thoughts could possibly give to understanding this, it's the most basic of the basic.

Give it a few more days.

Keep this in your head

Tim Cavanaugh, in the course of an analysis of Ah-nold's initiatives flopping, reminds us the problem is the game itself, not the players:

It's tempting to holler about greedy unions and power-mad Democrats who refuse to give an inch for the common good, but in the economy of political benefit, they're simply rational actors, protecting benefits that will almost certainly go to somebody else if they don't get them. Union leaders made much of Schwarzenegger's refusal to take a chunk out of "corporate" special interests, but this sort of blame-shifting misses the point: We are all special interests, participants in the game of taking government largesse in one form or another. It's not a paradox that we all love political reform in the abstract but almost always reject it in the flesh. That behavior is built into the system.

Popular government as we currently imagine it is nothing more than a war of all against all, fought with implications of violence rather than the classic bloodshed. Makes it no less idiotic.

"So, how's life on Mars?"

Matt Yglesias makes your eyes roll:

I've been trying to come up with the right thing to say about the current cover story in The Weekly Standard. It's by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, two guys I know personally and like a great deal, probably the best conservative writers out there today. And it's advocating a project I'm interested in -- transforming the Republican Party away from its late twentieth century libertarianism-plus-racism roots into something more like a continental Christian Democratic Party.

Waitaminute...."No Child Left Behind", "faith-based initiatives", the bone-headed medicare bill, trade barriers, subsidies, passing the Incumbent Protection Act (aka "campaign finance reform") -- all that encroachment at the hands of the GOP & he thinks THAT is "libertarianism"?

Well goddamn, I'd like to know what he would define as "moderate" then.