If it's true that the administration has settled on sending 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, you have wonder if the disconnect get any more pronounced?

Arianna Huffington:

He's instead going head-over-heels with the nation and Democratic Party into becoming a War President that has failure inscribed in the mission.

The jobs reality:

This has to get congressional approval for the funding. So, I guess we'll find out if the Democratic congress is as suicidal as the Obama administration is politically inept-- in proposing this escalation of never-ending war.

Next comes all the phoney talk about deficit-reduction, right?

This escalation is not even scheduled to start until June of '10 and shockingly, that's when Obama promised to have removed all of the troops from Iraq by if he won the Presidency. From this point till then, any takers that believe we will have exited more troops from Iraq than will have been inserted into Afghanistan by then? What a bait and switch!

The incomprehensibility of this escalation may be just the poison pill it takes to have the Democratic Congress to revolt against becoming the resident war-funding party. Would that Obama could be so lucky.

Congress already gave Obama the two brigades he campaigned on in the GE for Afghanistan earlier this year. It created much damage to the belief that Democrats were serious about reversing Bush's reckless course in the ME, and besides that, it's failed.

We need a revolt in Congress against this proposal. If the Democratic Congress goes along with funding this, I think there are going to be a lot of progressives that sit on their hands in '10 and believe they deserve to lose.

Rep Peter DeFazio told HuffPost's Sam Stein the other day:  "It is pretty embarrassing for a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress to be identified with total attention to Wall Street and nothing for Main Street & jobs."  

Just add War to Wall Street there.

Chase Whiteside and Erick Stoll of New Left Media are two of the best young filmmakers out there. This past weekend, they caught up with the Sarah Palin fan base in Columbus, Ohio during one of her Going Rogue book tour appearances. I'll repeat what I wrote in my post on American right-wing populism:

It is, indeed, bizarre that the dispossessed of this land should embrace the country club ideology of the Republican party but neither logic nor erudition are a defining quality of this crowd. While populism can be roughly defined as the call for the empowerment of ordinary people in all areas of life, its language is one of an us versus them. Its ethos all too often subsumed in vast conspiracy theories. It is a faith-based politics that spurns reason and eschews anything smacking of intellectualism and elitism. Theirs is a worldview defined by their own notions of what they believe to be "common sense" and they see nefarious plots afoot everywhere they look.

The other Sarah Palin story of note is her visit to the 91 year old evangelist Billy Graham in Charlotte, not so much for the visit but for the topics of conversation. Last week in an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News, Palin gave a rather odd response to a question on the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Walters asked Palin if she agreed with the Obama policy of discouraging further growth of Israeli settlements. Palin vehemently disagreed with current US policy and then added that "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead."

Music to one's ears if you are Benjamin Netanyahu or a Christian Dispensationalist. For the rest of us, it is yet another worrisome sign that Sarah Palin holds religious views based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and subscribes to end times prophecies. The Charlotte Observer cites Franklin Graham, a son of the elder Graham, as saying the Palin "quizzed him on the presidents he's known and wanted his take on what the Bible says about Israel, Iran and Iraq."

In the past at her Wasilla Assembly of God church, Palin has painted the current war in Iraq as a messianic affair in which the United States could act out the will of the Lord.

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

If anything Iraq has been the devil's errand.

. . . 34,000 according to McClatchy which is reporting that the President met with his national security team to finalize plans to dispatch the aforementioned 34,000 troops to Afghanistan. In late August, General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, had submitted his assessment and it is believed that he requested in the neighborhood of 40,000 to 50,000 more troops to conduct his counter-insurgency operations (COIN) against the Afghan Taliban.

Obama is expected to announce his long-awaited decision on Dec. 1, followed by meetings on Capitol Hill aimed at winning congressional support amid opposition by some Democrats who are worried about the strain on the U.S. Treasury and whether Afghanistan has become a quagmire, the officials said.

The U.S. officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and because, one official said, the White House is incensed by leaks on its Afghanistan policy that didn't originate in the White House.

They said the commander of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, could arrive in Washington as early as Sunday to participate in the rollout of the new plan, including testifying before Congress toward the end of next week. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry also are expected to appear before congressional committees.

As it now stands, the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y., and a Marine brigade from Camp Lejeune, N.C., for as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

In addition, a 7,000-strong division headquarters would be sent to take command of U.S.-led NATO forces in southern Afghanistan -- to which the U.S. has long been committed -- and 4,000 U.S. military trainers would be dispatched to help accelerate an expansion of the Afghan army and police.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to brief America's NATO allies after next week's announcement, and the allies are to meet again on Dec. 7 in Belgium to discuss whether some other nations might contribute additional troops.

The Monday evening meeting was the ninth that Obama has held on the crisis in Afghanistan, where the worsening war entered its ninth year last month. This year has seen violence reach unprecedented levels as the Taliban and allied groups have gained strength and expanded their reach.

A U.S. military official used the term "decisional" to describe Monday evening's meeting among Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Gates, Clinton, National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Eikenberry and senior U.S. military commanders.

The administration's plan contains "off-ramps," points starting next June at which Obama could decide to continue the flow of troops, halt the deployments and adopt a more limited strategy or "begin looking very quickly at exiting" the country, depending on political and military progress, one defense official said.

"We have to start showing progress within six months on the political side or military side or that's it," the U.S. defense official said.

The floor is yours.

Obama to Set Emissions Goals, the Right Wing Lies About the Contents of Leaked Scientist E-mails, and more

The last few days have seen two major stories in climate news: a rare policy pronouncement (or hint therefore of) from the White House and conservative distortion of some leaked British e-mails. Two smaller stories below the fold include continued negative fallout over the announcement that Copenhagen will not produce a legally binding treaty and two articles about Jewish action on climate change and the environment.

Administration to Set Emissions Goal

Although President Obama has yet to decide whether or not he will attend next month's Copenhagen climate conference, the White House did announce today that whomever it sends to Copenhagen will come armed with policy specifics. They weren't specific about just what those specifics will be, however. From the Washington Post:

The United States, under pressure from other nations as one of the world's largest greenhouse-gas polluters, will present a target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions at next month's climate conference in Copenhagen, Obama administration officials said Monday.

The development came as the European Union urged the United States and China to deliver greenhouse gas emissions targets at the long-anticipated summit, saying their delays were hindering global efforts to curb climate change...

The Obama administration has resisted talking specific numbers without the backing of Congress, which is not expected to pass climate legislation until next year at the soonest. The official would not offer details about the U.S. targets but said any U.S. goal will reflect the unfinished state of legislation on Capitol Hill and would not seek to get ahead of it.

A House-passed bill would slash heat-trapping pollution by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020. A Senate bill seeks a 20 percent reduction over the next decade, but that number is likely to come down to win the votes of moderate Democrats.

The CRU Hack

Receiving perhaps the most attention is the story coming to be known as "the CRU hack." In short, the computers of the (British) University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) were hacked and 13 years' worth of e-mails from climate scientists were illegally leaked. Some of these e-mails use juvenile language to attack fellow scientists, and others illustrate ways that some climatologists use to gussy up their PR and make the presentation of dry data, shall we say, more pretty. The e-mails are embarrassing on the personal level, but meaningless when it comes to actual science.

But as usual, the right-wing doesn't care about actual science, and are doing their best to distort both the content and the context of the stolen messages. The Australia Herald-Sun called the e-mails "proof of a conspiracy which is one of the largest, most extraordinary and most disgraceful in moderrn [sic] science." A staffer to Repub john David Vitter wrote in an e-mail, "This could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history... Nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud."

But what are the scientists themselves saying? Hardly the same thing as the Republican and tea party spinmeisters, that's for sure. From Real Climate, a leading science blog by climatologists from NASA, other government agencies, and several universities:

(The Real Climate excerpt, the rest of this story, and two more stories are all below the fold.)

One of the hallmarks of American political parties historically is that they are ideologically diffuse. In part this is due to the American political system which works against the rise of third parties and also provides strong incentives for ideological diffuseness within the two major parties. The first-past-the-post single member district electoral system, the separation of the executive branch from the legislative branch and the primary nomination system are the reasons generally cited by political scientists for combining to encourage the two dominant parties to "steal the thunder" of third parties and absorbing these as they rise. Under the US system, there is a strong incentive to create an electoral coalition within the parties and before elections rather across political parties and after elections as is the case in parliamentary systems common in the rest of the world.

But don't tell this to Michael Steele and the GOP because Republican leaders are circulating a resolution listing ten positions, effectively a litmus test, that Republican candidates should support to demonstrate that they "espouse conservative principles and public policies" that are in opposition to "Obama's socialist agenda." According to the resolution, any Republican candidate who broke with the party on three or more of these issues- in votes cast, public statements made or answering a questionnaire - would be penalized by being denied party funds or the party endorsement.

More below the fold from the New York Times.

From The Hotline's Erin McPike:

Ex-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) is headed to Palmetto Country next month for a two-day campaign swing.

Santorum, who has already visited IA, will stop in Spartanburg, Greenville and Hilton Head to campaign for Rep. Gresham Barrett (R), who is locked in a tough GOP primary for GOV.

[...]

Santorum has been openly toying with a presidential run in '12. He acknowledged that a trip to IA in late September was designed to gin up interest in his own political future.

Given the complete and utter rejection of Rick Santorum by Pennsylvania voters in 2006, it's pretty remarkable that he could believe he is a serious presidential competitor. Indeed, his 58.6 percent to 41.3 percent loss in his last reelection bid was the worst showing by a Senate incumbent since George McGovern lost his run for a fourth term in 1980 by a 58.2 percent to 39.4 percent margin. But if Santorum wants to make a go of it and Republicans do decide to make him their standard bearer in 2012, you're not likely to hear many complaints from those hoping for a second term for Barack Obama.

If the Republicans are to retake the House in 2010, presumably they should be able to hold onto seats they were able to win by 14 points in 2008. Or, then again, maybe not.

Lori Edwards' campaign for Florida's 12th Congressional district released a poll today boasting she's got the lead "despite the challenging political environment for Democrats going into 2010."

In a recent survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, Edwards holds a 4-point edge over Republican challenger Dennis Ross, 46 - 42 percent. But the poll has a MOE of +/- 4.9 percentage points.

[...]

This survey of 400 likely November 2010 voters was conducted November 17 - 19, 2009 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The survey is subject to a margin of error of approximately +/- 4.9 percentage points. The sample reflects the demographic composition of the likely 2010 electorate in this district. Party registration is 40 percent Democratic and 41 percent Republican.

That the Democrats are even competitive in Florida 12, let alone in the lead, sort of undermines the notion that their goose is cooked in 2010. Yes, John McCain only won this district by a 50 percent to 49 percent margin in 2008 -- but that does make this district significantly more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, which backed Barack Obama by 7 points in 2008. What's more, as alluded to above, Adam Putnam, the Republican Congressman vacating this seat, won reelection last fall by a fairly strong 57 percent to 43 percent margin.

At present, the Cook Political Report views this race as "likely Republican" (or only potentially competitive, and not yet competitive), and the folks at Rothenberg don't even see this seat as being in play. Yet the Democrat leads here.

This isn't to say that the prospects for the Democrats are all rosy. For instance, the decision by Dennis Moore not to run for reelection decreases the likelihood that the Democrats will be able to hold on to his seat (though the Republicans do still have to figure out a way to nominate an electable candidate in this swing district, which is not always easy for them; though they managed to nominate the more moderate Lynn Jenkins in the neighboring second congressional district in 2008, I wouldn't bet on a moderate making it though a primary in district 3 in 2010). Nevertheless, if things are so bad for the Democrats, how are they competitive, let alone leading, in the Florida 12 open seat race?

On Wednesday afternoon, I had the chance to speak with Colorado's Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, a candidate for reelection in 2010. During the interview, Ritter and I covered a number of issues, including clean energy, education reform, bringing new jobs to Colorado, and, of course, the politics of his reelection bid.

Overall, Ritter sounded very much like another successful Colorado politician I interviewed for MyDD several years ago -- Gary Hart -- in framing his reelection bid not as a choice between left and right but rather as a choice between the past and the future, a choice between looking backwards and looking forwards. This rhetoric served Hart well both on the statewide and national level, and has thus far worked will for Ritter. The following is a rush transcript of the interview:

Jonathan Singer: What do you see as the biggest issue people should be looking at in the Governor's race next year?

Bill Ritter: The biggest issue, I think, is how governors are able to create jobs, and the job creation that we're going to do is not just about job creation, it's about sustainable job creation, things that will last, things that are 21st century. And I think the biggest issue for us will be our success in doing that, being able to run on the things that we've already been able to do but how we're going to keep doing that. This is still just such a massive downturn. The protracted length of this recession is, I think, causing everybody to be concerned about 2010, and rightly so.

Singer: What are some of the measures that you're doing in Colorado to address the issue of jobs?

Ritter: We were already ahead of this, because we already thought that we had to do a better job even before the downturn of bringing in these 21st century industries, as I call them. On the energy side, that's the new energy economy; jobs in the energy world that involve renewable energy, that involve energy efficiency, that involve smart grid technology, that involve building out the transmission grid. All those are a part of it.