Eric Ferguson

Perhaps the effort on the right to make the second war with Iraq appear to be some sort of success is just a visceral refusal to acknowledge having brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people while being very wrong about 911, WMDs, the reception we’d receive, pretty much everything. Certainly having neocons mark the anniversary with a panel of the guilty talking about how great they were lends a sense of deliberateness to the efforts to spin the war as a success, or at least claim it ended well as a result of “the surge." Whether it’s deliberate or just a reaction isn’t really the thing to be concerned about however. They’re trying to spin history. The story they hope is remembered is the war went poorly at first, but then the neocons came up with their brilliant “surge” and all came out OK. Can they really cover up one of the biggest blunders in US history? Yes. It’s been done before, after another contender for biggest blunder.

There is a dispute between the developers who worked on the Obama campaign and the political pros at the DNC over what to do with the tools developed for the Obama campaign. Essentially, the developers want to make the code open-source while the DNC wants to keep it proprietary."Open-source" means anyone can use the code and develop their own changes to it. My first thought was that this essentially means giving it away to the Republicans, and my reaction was, "Are you kidding!?!?" After giving it some thought though, looking at both sides ... are you kidding?!?! (reversing the order of the question marks and exclamation points makes it technically a different thought).

I don't take a decision to go over the fiscal cliff lightly. Economists think doing so will cause a recession. Since I'm advocating going over the cliff, I'd like to think the economists' are, um, skewed--- pardon the indulgence in a bit of post-election schadenfreude --- but the case for the projections being wrong is that it would be convenient for me if they were wrong. Another recession would mean a drop in government revenues that makes the federal deficit and state shortfalls even worse, unemployment would presumably go up, and since real people will gt hurt, it's just nothing to take lightly. Then why go over?

OK, the election is over. We got to bask in a pretty good result for a few days, but now it's time to get back to work. All that we really won was... no really, I mean it. What we really won hey, come on. We've got to... You know, it's been almost a week.