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I never blog about these things, but Tiffany and I just went to see this movie tonight at a free advance screening (it should be opening in limited release soon it is in limited release now). Boy, was it funny– the entire audience was pretty much laughing the whole time. Go check it out if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Dammmmn!

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A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Note that he didn’t say “No, there is no truth to this,” he said “I am not even going to comment on this,” which is exactly what they say when they know they probably can’t deny it flat out.

Some commentators are saying that Afghanistan is going to end up Obama’s Vietnam. This is a long stretch and the parallels aren’t there, period. It’s hyperbole.

That said, there are a lot of similarities between what’s happened in Afghanistan and the way things are leaning there, with US involvement in certain Latin American countries though… The original circumstances (robust presence of NATO and various other non-NATO countries as part of the coalition, plus the justification of 9/11) would seem to mitigate those comparisons at least at first, but even with that original broad-based coalition (the vast majority of which is no longer there), it’s turned into a situation where the net effect of our presence is propping up a narco-infiltrated corrupt regime with a thinly-veiled cloak of Democracy.

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A public option is more important than Olympia Snowe.

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A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.
[…]
On the issue that has been perhaps the most pronounced flash point in the national debate, 57 percent of all Americans now favor a public insurance option, while 40 percent oppose it. Support has risen since mid-August, when a bare majority, 52 percent, said they favored it. (In a June Post-ABC poll, support was 62 percent.)

As a frame of reference, 57% is roughly four percent higher than Obama got in the presidential election. Meanwhile:

As always, the legislative process is unpredictable, and the Senate is operating in isolation from the House. But with the public option potentially in the balance, Speaker Pelosi’s goal is this: present conservative Democrats in both chambers with a Hobson’s choice between a public option bill and a potentially more expensive Senate bill that may have no public option at all.

On Friday, the Washington Post ran with leaked CBO numbers, showing that House health care leaders have reduced the price tag of their bill by at least $100 billion. The numbers were preliminary–not reflective of the current state of the legislation, which is changing constantly–but they showed a definite downward trajectory in the overall cost of its reform plan.

Brilliant, if it works. Despite all the progressive complaints that anyone has against Pelosi, if she actually pulls this off, she’ll go down as one of the most effective speakers of the House in history.

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Does that suddenly make it legislation that has “bipartisan support”? Um, about as much as Michael Steele makes the Republican Party “diverse.”

I could care less about Snowe’s vote in favor of Baucus’ milquetoast bill and I doubt it will fool anybody into thinking the bill is bipartisan in any sense of the word, but I suppose it could have one bright side: if Democratic leadership in the Senate could use her vote in favor to push centrist Dems to support whatever the final bill looks like.

In other words, if Reid really ends up needing to whip super hard for votes on the final bill, he can go to the holdout Dems and say, “Look, are you really willing to go on the record as being more conservative than a Republican on this very Democratic piece of legislation?”

But who knows if that’ll happen. Reid has certainly disappointed time and time again, that’s for sure. Maybe with his re-election at stake next year he’ll be a better Democrat but it’s hard to say. With regard to Reid, I’ll also be interested to see what he puts together in conference committee when the various bills are combined. The Baucus bill is definitely the most conservative of all the bills that have come out of the myriad House and Senate committees, and Reid shouldn’t treat it as if it were more weighty than it is: it’s just one bill among many Democratic bills that have been passed by the various committees that have jurisdiction over health care.

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Update: One of the four runners our team was following won the race. Huh, how ’bout that?

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