This Week, August 3, 2008:

GEORGE WILL: Beyond that, an awful lot of the ‘other’ he represents is the windsurfer, it’s John Kerry.  The crowning, crashing irony of this year is that the first African-American Presidential candidate nominated by either party has the disadvantage of being too upper crust.   That is, he’s Columbia University, he’s Harvard Law School, he’s too–

GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS: Arugula!

I was curious about this viewpoint, so I called Mr. Will up.  He kindly agreed to a brief interview.

ME: Thanks for talking to me, Mr. Will!  Big fan.

WILL: I like to dip my toe in the hoi polloi occasionally.

Will the nominee of the Democratic Party be decided by superdelegates?  There's something Al Gore can do about that.

Paul Krugman bops Obama on the head today in a column titled Played for a Sucker:

Lately, Barack Obama has been saying that major action is needed to avert what he keeps calling a “crisis” in Social Security — most recently in an interview with The National Journal. Progressives who fought hard and successfully against the Bush administration’s attempt to panic America into privatizing the New Deal’s crown jewel are outraged, and rightly so.

The fear, expressed by others in the Lefty blogosphere, is that accepting the Right's framing of a Social Security crisis puts the program in mortal peril.

In 1965, Martin Seligman conducted an experiment extending Pavlov's work on classical conditioning. First, he would expose a dog in a hammock to a harmless -- but painful -- electric shock while he played a tone. This happened often enough that the dog associated the tone with the shock.

Later, Seligman took the dog out of the hammock and put him in a small box. The dog was no longer constrained. Now, he played a tone as he electrified the floor. A normal dog in this situation would simply jump over a low fence to escape the shock -- escape was simple. But not for our dog.  He had learned that the tone and the shock were inextricably linked, that any attempts at escape were futile. He had learned to be helpless.

This is what has happened to Democrats.

Beware: wild speculation to follow... but it's speculation that is based on facts.

Why did Libby attorney Ted Wells say he was going to put Libby and maybe Cheney on the stand and then backtrack? It didn't help him with the jury and it sure didn't wash down well with the judge.

It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case.
- Washington Post Editorial, 3/7/07

Here the Washington Post practically transcribes the conservative talking point. Let's put this myth to rest. Fitzgerald did not come on aboard, discover that no prosecutable crime had occurred, and continued on -- Ahab-like -- until he finally landed an administration scalp.

Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have biographical stories today about Barack Obama's experience as President of the Harvard Law Review (The NYT story is better.)  As readers might know, the staff of the Harvard Law Review are chosen for their analytic and writing skills; they are the elite of their class and customarily go on to play prominent roles in politics, business, and the judiciary.  Once chosen, they elect a President to lead the publication.  Barack Obama was the first African-American to receive this honor.

Beating out Osama for top villain of 2006 is bad enough, but actually trouncing Satan?

I suggest Satan hire Tony Snow to get his message across more effectively:
SNOW: The Prince of Darkness is very pleased with how things are going in Iraq.
DAVID GREGORY: But all the mayhem over there is because of Bush's invasion.
SNOW: Well, that's your partisan spin, David.
GREGORY: Partisan!?
SNOW: Sure, there are other bit players, but the Devil is the ultimate inspiration behind the carnage. Look, we don't pay attention to polls. People might underestimate Satan's role now, but history will return him to his proper place among evil-doers.
HELEN THOMAS: Did Satan take a week-long nap while an American city went under water?
SNOW: (Sighs heavily, then exasperated... ) Satan sent the damn hurricane!
VOICE FROM THE BACK: I thought that was global warming.
(Snow throws his papers in the air and staggers off.)

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

So you can imagine how excited Glenn Reynolds might get if he discovered that a CBS magazine retouched an image to make Katie Couric look slimmer.

But there's a problem here... look at the supposed original photo on the left.  Compare it to this photo, which is the real original.  Yes, the CBS magazine doctored the photo to make Couric seem skinnier, but the site Reynolds links to has doctored it too!  Compare the CBS logo behind Couric.  The center should be round, not oblong.

Isn't ironic that those most indignant about photoshop alterations should stoop to it in order to more clearly expose it?

Alas.  News organizations try to make their personalities look better and right-wing sites lie.  My innocence is completely gone.

Some questions (and a poll) follow on the flip:

Here's a taste:

Read the whole thing.

• Right off the bat, he describes Social Security as a problem instead of a crisis.
  
• He backs off calling the President's proposal a "dead horse", but he stresses a bipartisan legislative process.
  
• In his most interesting suggestion, he speaks favorably of replacing the regressive payroll tax with a more progressive tax, a European-style Value Added Tax.
  
• He hardly even mentions personal accounts.
  
• Yes, he also has some wacky ideas about adjusting Social Security for sex and race, but in fairness he's talking about "thinking about these issues" rather than advocating them.  Ideas like that aren't going anywhere.
  

Let me sketch out what a Democratic position on Social Security might look like, and how it would be more likely to win than a 'just say no' strategy.

Details after the jump...

Read how she casts Don Rumsfeld as George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life... and puts a wicked twist on it.

• ACT will knock on the door of practically every household in Milwaukee... twice
  
• They are going to hire about 2,000 workers on the ground for election day.  The GOP brags that it will have a payroll of 65.
  
• The effort is very tech-savvy, with canvassers equipped with palm-pilots for recording information (and I've heard from other sources, sometimes playing short videos for voters)

Here's the answer.

Apparently I was not alone in my observation. I found this in the comments section of Kevin Drum's blog:

As a clinician, I noticed Bush had a lot of extraneous mouth movements. It looked definitely to me to be in the spectrum of tardive dyskenesia or some other bucofacial dystonia.

These types of movements are often seen in people on neuroleptic drugs (antipsychotics), as well as people using dopamaine agonist drugs (i.e. cocaine, methamphetamine, etc.)

As a clinician, I'd say Bush is medicated (with what I can't say) and showing signs of emotional lability.

That would also explain his strange belligerence.