House "Recalcitrant"?

CNN is breaking news of a possible deal for the payroll tax cut by referring to the House as "recalcitrant".  Hmm.  Wasn't the House begging for someone to negotiate with over this deal?  Wasn't the House saying two months was putting a burden on the pencil necks?  Weren't they asking Obama to bring his dog up for a talk and asking Reid to invite his members to leave the bar early and come back to town to join a House-Senate conference?  Begging them to do business the way Congress has always done it?   And isn't the deal now better than it was a few hours ago?   

No, Boehner isn't the best Speaker ever and the House played their game.  But to suggest they and only they were players is to wax silly.  Only a person who just flew in from Neptune would be surprised by any of this back-and-forth because divided Congresses always fight like children, and we've got a fairly juvenile leader leading the playroom.   After the deal passes they'll all engage in a circular finger-pointing contest, with the media off to the side all pointing at Boehner with the exception of "Faux News", who will be pointing to Obama or at Bo the Dog's possible AF One trip back from Hawaii for prop duty.   In two months they'll all play musical chairs again without anyone leaving their chairs.    

MORE  12/22/11

The general consensus seems to be that Boehner just committed the biggest boo-boo in political history.  At least at the WaPo:

The agreement represented a remarkable capitulation on the part of House Republicans, who had two days earlier rejected such a deal with Democrats as the kind of half-measure that their new majority was elected to thwart. And it amounts to a Christmas gift for President Obama, who attempted to paint his Republican opponents as willing to raise taxes for millions of Americans. Such an image could have cost the party politically just as it is gearing up to try to take back the White House and Senate in 2012.

That's the brutal truth, whether it's the truth or not.  The WaPo bashes Boehner by admitting that Obama was prepared to go to the mat to save a 2 month tax cut when in reality he's spent his entire presidency trying to raise taxes on a certain class of people he thinks have made enough money already, who will NOT be getting an increase to pay for this tax cut.  It was so crucial he was willing to use democrat operatives disguised as people, pizza, and even his own dog to get it done!   What did the American people win again?

The Dems now get two months to smear the Keystone pipeline so Obama can deny it, or alternatively Obama gets two more months of campaign contributions from both evil capitalists and nutty environmental wackos trying to affect policy before he approves it, or maybe uses a magic trick to delay it again.  Meanwhile the payroll tax cut can be framed not as gutting Social Security, but as the only moral way to fund it, which will require more taxes from rich people who've made enough already.

Why McConnell felt the need to take Reid's deal then embarrass Boehner is the real mystery here. Scuttlebutt says he was afraid of losing seats or somesuch, but it sounds more like a pissing match or a backdoor way to bring down the hated Tea Party.  Or maybe it just all came down to a bunch of congressfolks and a president who were willing to go to any length to save their 3 week vacation. 

On the AP's fight with bloggers

AP is now proposing to charge bloggers by the word to excerpt AP online stories and Allahpundit (the other AP) at Hot Air wonders why. Allow me to offer some thoughts.

1) Could it be a way to force bloggers into exclusively using direct links instead of blockquoted excerpts? If so, it sure would be easier for the AP to airbrush stories or change verbiage if they screw up. The bigger bloggers could pay but only the top few are making very much money and paying the AP would certainly erode their profit.

2) AP probably hates bloggers. Surely they're perceived as a threat and perhaps they hope this move will be copied by other media providers for a tag-team squeeze. Unfortunately for them the competitors are biding their time watching from the tall grass and laughing as the mighty AP takes a dump in their hat.

3) This will help Obama. It will be harder to prove media bias if people aren't quoting the stories. Most of the AP's impact comes from providing stories to the TV and radio mediums, anyway. But bloggers can ignite stories into the other mediums.

4) AP will continue picking on the edges of the blogoshere by going after little bloggers because they know the pajama crowd will be scared to death of a cease and desist order and won't have the money to defend a lawsuit in court.

All in all it's not surprising AP is doing this. It signifies a weakness of their once rock solid domination of how news gets fed to the public. Careers and reputations are testy things.

Speaking of bombings..

One of the commenters at JustOneMinute reminded readers that Larry Johnson, pictured at left and mentioned in the preceding post, was apparently once a supporter of Jayna Davis's "John Doe Number Two" theory. To wit:

"Looking at the Jayna Davis material, what's clear is that more than Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols were involved. Without a doubt, there's a Middle Eastern tie to the Oklahoma City bombing."

Does that make him an automatic kook? Does it suggest he performed a "Ritter backflip" by transfiguring from the Saddam-is-bad camp to the Saddam-ain't-so-bad camp as the political winds shifted? Or did Davis just drop his name out of context?

Not sure, and truthfully, don't care. What intrigues me is Oklahoma City. Call me a kook but the premise of state intelligence service involvement through proxy terrorists doesn't really sound that kookish. As serendipitous as this might sound, the CIA tried to illicit a coup and an old-fashioned assassination of Saddam in the same year, 1995. How many remember those agents being investigated by the FBI?

For the sake of contrast let's take a gander at the three failed car-bombs in the UK in the past 24 hours. Based on just televised coverage it's safe to assume the bombs were not of the same class used in the Murrah building, Khobar Towers, or first World Trade Center bombings. They also bear little resemblance to the daily car/truck bombs used in Iraq. Help from intelligence professionals familiar with ballistics surely might have enhanced the British devices, something we appear to be seeing in Iraq thanks to Iran's alleged meddling.

Running aside the well-known pitfalls of conspiracy theories as to motive, depth and breadth of conspiracy, wealth and fame potential, and personal vendettas, one still has to admit that some interesting dots exist. For example, just like 9/11 we were told not to worry, that the Murrah perps were lone wolves (probably disaffected right wingers fueled by talk radio) and therefore no foreign involvement was possibly possible. Yet they were rather adept lone wolves, weren't they? Pretty good for a first try, I'd say.

Ironically James Woolsey's name is listed on Davis's site as a supporter, which is interesting since he has some background with the man Davis believes taught Terry Nichols how to make quality bombs when both were in the Philippines, Ramzi Yousef. Or was it Abdul Basit Karim? Quite possibly Mr. Woolsey knows the answer to that question since he was dispatched to England twice in 2001 by the US Government to investigate:

Several officials said Woolsey's mission angered officials at the State Department and the CIA and left British authorities puzzled about whether he was representing the U.S. government.

Oddly enough he didn't come home and later write an Op-Ed for the New York Times on his trip, say for example, "What I found in England". Apparently some state secrets are more important than others.

Woolsey DID say this in a 2001 interview regarding the concept of lone wolves (remember, this man once led the CIA):

But the key thing is that a very fundamental misunderstanding takes place in exactly this statement, which is to assume that if someone is a terrorist he’s a sole-source contractor, that he works either with al-Qaida or with Iraq. That is, if I may say so, a particularly stupid and false assumption. There is absolutely nothing to keep these terrorists from working with al-Qaida and to have Iraqi government support for one or more aspects of the operation.

An inconvenient truth for some, so back to Hoyle. Alrighty then...do we call this misinformation, disinformation, or just a misunderstanding?

She remembers Nichols as “Terry” or “The Farmer” and doesn’t remember the name of the other American. She says, “They talked about bombings. They mentioned bombing government buildings in San Francisco, St. Louis, and in Oklahoma. The Americans wanted instructions on how to make and to explode bombs.

Must have been a coincidence that a ragtag bunch of disaffected zealots with very little bomb-making expertise created a blast similar to ones made famous by Islamic terrorist groups during the 90s. And what of the strange unanswered questions involving the mob informant dude? Dare we even go there?

Ah, perhaps nothing but good fiction after all. But as Glenn Beck points out on Davis's site, why wasn't there a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Oklahoma City bombing? What officially became of John Doe numero dos? Guess we'll just have to wait for the 9/11 Truthers to clear everything up for us. They are investigating this, right?