For those of you not familiar with the trigger or not caffeinated enough to wade through Bruce Webb's excellent and informed diary on the topic, I offer the cynic's thirty-second guide to the trigger.

The trigger is a way to allow people to vote for Healthcare Reform without making any difficult choices.  It will unite the Bluest Dogs and the Reddest progressives under the umbrella of ducking an issue head-on.

The trigger is also a terrific way to ensure that literally hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be spent buying Congress and the agencies in charge of implementing the trigger.

This is one of the weirdest clips I've seen in a long time.  Weird for its honesty and for how close it comes to finally admitting that the Global War On Terror (TM) is really about hoping for another attack while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on excess military capacity.

After eight years of George Bush, I got very used to the whole "up-is-down" thing.  But the metaphysical truism in this exchange between Glenn Beck and Michael Sheuer is more like "up-is-purple".

Just watch.

Bob Hebert has a nice piece in NYT today.  It's a little on the sycophantic side for my tastes, but whatever.  One part of the op-ed piece that really struck me was this passage from a conversation between Obama and Hebert:

When asked about the sharp drop in the stock markets after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced an expanded bank bailout plan last week, Mr. Obama replied:

"I am not planning based on a one-day market reaction. In fact, you can argue that a lot of the problems we're in have to do with everybody planning based on one-day market reactions, or three-month market reactions, and as a consequence nobody was taking the long view.

When was the last time we had a leader who spoke in these terms?

Nate Silver, over at 538.com has a post up making a compelling case that we should essentially trust Obama and Geithner to get this thing right.  The crux of his argument is that they have every incentive to fix the economy and no incentive to cave to Wall Street or some other fantastic notion of insider influence-peddling.

I generally agree with his assessment, although I think there are different ways of conceptualizing the current crisis.  One concept is to get us back to where we were economically two years ago.  This presumably presages another economic collapse in 2011.  The other concept is to get us back to pre-Reagan economics both with its vicissitudes and its protections for the middle class.  That, to me, is the real question about Summers & Geithner.  Do they want late Bush II-era social and economic divides and credit-card living?  Or do they want a solidly middle-class country?  I'm not sure of the answer to this.

From Nate:

1. Nobody, absolutely nobody, has more incentive to get this right than the Obama Administration. If the economy collapses -- well, more than it already has -- then the Democrats get slaughtered in 2010, Obama is a one-termer, health care doesn't happen.

Point well taken.  Geithner is trying.  I will certainly give him that.

Amazing how often Israel "accidentally" hits U.N. targets ,isn't it?

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/i dUSTRE5053R720090106

Israeli tank shells killed at least 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international pressure on Israel to halt a Gaza offensive.

This was "friendly fire".  Is that correct?  Aren't friends people you, you know, don't kill?

Inane poll below.

If you ever need a quick downer, go over to OpenLeft and read something by David Sirota.  I tend to agree with a lot of what he says, mostly because I'm a pessimist by nature.  Sirota ain't happy with Obama these days.  His team of rival (singular) essentially pits the progressive image of Obama versus the center-right D.C. establishment.  

In this narrative, Progressives have been played somewhat by ponying up precious time and money to get Obama in office only to find out that he's a re-run of the triangulation and lukewarm centrism that is both unsavory and unnecessary at this time.  The counter-argument is that Obama is so overwhelmingly in control that his center-right team will actually help him hone his thoughts and skills to the point that mere mortals will shutter at his deft center-leftitude.

I'm not terribly comfortable with either narrative, but I do find surprising solace in the daily emails I still receive from David Plouffe.  There is apparently a coordinated effort to continue online fundraising and drawing Progressives into the fold.  Obama's team is urging us to get together to share our thoughts for the future and actually organizing Progressive causes into some sort of lasting force.  I find this interesting.

Minnesota Public Radio has photographs of some of the challenged ballots in the Minnesota recount.  It's a good look at some of the challenges and a tiny fraction of the BS facing ballot judges in Minnesota.  The strategy of both camps seems pretty obvious:  Use any pretense to challenge a ballot so that the ones that are even a little questionable seem like reasonable challenges.  It's a battle of attrition.  

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/feature s/2008/11/19_challenged_ballots/

And now:  Lizard People

That is, Henry Waxman is the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  No details yet.

See what kind of headline you can come up with.