As the title to this post makes clear, my impressions of Peter Graves were more shaped by Airplane! than they were by Mission: Impossible. Airplane! is, in fact, a not-so-guilty pleasure in my family, and Peter Graves helped make it a tremendous success. His deadpan approach to comedy was brilliant, and the decision to include him in the movie was utterly inspired. He helped make Airplane! a success, and in doing so, helped give me and my loved ones a lot of laughs, and a lot of happy memories.

He lived a long and full life, but it ought to go without saying that we would have liked to have had him around for much longer.

R.I.P.

I am not a neoconservative myself, but that doesn’t stop me from being displeased over the way in which neoconservatives have been attacked and parodied for purely political purposes. It is one thing to take on the neoconservatives and their vision of the world in a straightforward and honest manner, and to use criticism to sharpen neoconservative thinking so as to ensure the most vibrant, and intellectually stimulating foreign policy discussions possible. It’s quite another to simply make the movement into one giant piñata for the purpose of thrashing it, thereby gaining partisan advantage.

Fortunately for the neoconservatives, Steven Cook has come out with a more honest appreciation. He is not a neoconservative either, and he criticizes the neoconservatives for various issues, but at least he is a good faith critic. And he acknowledges that the image of neoconservatives as a group that has gotten everything wrong simply doesn’t match the reality. As Cook writes, the neoconservatives got Syria, Iran, and democracy right, and they ought to be given credit for that.

The jury should still be out on the neoconservatives; not enough time has passed in order to properly judge their legacy. But in many ways, the neoconservatives have gotten a bad rap, and the bad rap has come from people who want to be able to profit politically from the perceived misfortunes of the neoconservatives. That’s unfair and dishonest, and it only serves to degrade the general foreign policy debate. Kudos to Steven Cook for resisting the temptation to just mindlessly pile on the neoconservatives. Hopefully, his writing on this issue will serve as an example to the rest of the punditocracy.

My friend, Neil Stevens, has just launched his new polling website. I plan to make it a regular websurfing stop, and so should you. Political junkies should and will find a lot at the site to satisfy their cravings.

Apparently, special deals in the health care bill are just fine, so long as they affect more than one state. I won’t be surprised if after a while, even that condition becomes negotiable.

No more evidence is needed to conclude that the health care reform effort has essentially turned into a farce. Nonetheless, more such evidence will likely be forthcoming.

It’s too bad that the White House didn’t spend more time working with people like Paul Ryan on how to responsibly reform health care. Instead, it spent time demonizing him for putting out a fiscal roadmap and for trying to offer alternative ideas on health care. Just about every Republican will remember the way the White House treated Ryan and those associated with him the next time a call for “bipartisanship” comes out from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Pi Day in 2015 will be awesome. But I really wish I were alive to see how Pi Day went down in 1592.

I suppose, as a fan of Rep. Paul Ryan, that I should be concerned that Krugman is going on, and on, and on about how bad the Ryan Fiscal Roadmap is; this is his latest post on the subject.

But then, I recall that Krugman doesn’t even seem to understand what he has written in his own economics textbook, and that he has a tendency to grossly mislead his readers when it comes to discussing the ideas of people Krugman doesn’t like. Remembering all of this, I think that I will put more stock in Ryan’s arguments.

Moody’s is ticked off:

Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be “downward pressure” on its triple A credit rating.

Examining the administration’s outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: “If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government.”

It projects that the federal borrowing is so high that the interest payments on government debt will grow to more than 15 per cent of government revenues, about the same by the end of the decade as the previous 1980s peak.

This time the servicing burden would be harder to reverse, however, because it would not be caused by high interest rates but by high debt levels.

Pierre Cailleteau, head of sovereign ratings at Moody’s, said: “The size of debt makes the US vulnerable to an interest rate shock . . . but the level of fiscal ambition is not one that secures for sure the [triple A] rating.”

Cue Krugman & Co. to step forward and tell us that really, we don’t have to worry about the budget deficit, and that in fact, we should be pushing for yet another budget-busting round of fiscal stimulus. Of course, if we follow Krugman’s advice, and lose our credit rating, he’ll make like Macavity and depart the scene of the crime. And yes, I know that the story states that we are in no immediate danger of a downgrade. But the warnings are increasing, and things are going to get a whole lot worse on the fiscal front down the line.

As such, dare we hope that the Obama Administration has finally gotten the message, and realizes that we are going down an unsustainable fiscal pa . . . oh, who am I kidding?

I suppose that I could get behind drug-testing in the chess world if only there were any drugs that could help one play chess better. And no, caffeine doesn’t count.

Maybe now, we can jail Internet surfers:

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, who is criticized by media freedom groups, called on Saturday for regulation of the Internet and singled out a website that he said falsely reported the murder of one of his ministers.

“The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done. Every country has to apply its own rules and norms,” Chavez said. He cited German Chancellor Angel Merkel as having expressed a similar sentiment recently.

Of course, merely because Angela Merkel might have said such a thing–emphasis on the word “might”–does not justify Chavez’s position. And it doesn’t take much to figure out that Chavez wants to curb any and all opposition on the Internet; he has no interest whatsoever in simply making the Internet a more factual forum.

The Penn reference is explained here. As long as I live, I will never understand why some in Hollywood are besotted with brutal and vicious dictators.

So much–again–for increased government transparency:

When he was a senator, Barack Obama pushed through a law setting up a kind of “Google-for-government” website — a one-stop-shop for tracking the $1 trillion handed out in federal contracts.

Obama said the new site would help create a more transparent government.

But now that he is president, Obama’s Office of Management and Budget is responsible for keeping up the website — and government auditors have found deficiencies.

A Government Accountability Office audit released Friday found broad compliance with the law establishing the spending tracker. But in some cases, information was missing or unreliable, the GAO said.

“Not everything that should have been reported was reported, and that which was reported was not always accurate,” David Powner, the GAO official who led the audit, said in an interview.

This is, of course, of a piece with other Obama Administration transparency failures.

Not exactly a record to be proud of:

Journalists have become a prime target in an Iranian government crackdown on the opposition following last June’s disputed presidential election, with 52 of them currently held — making Iran the top jailer of journalists in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The wave of arrests, which has only accelerated recently, has sent a chill through journalists in Iran at a time when the opposition is struggling to maintain its challenge against the government in the face of a heavy crackdown on pro-reform figures.

In response, a sort of “underground” journalism has emerged, said Reza Valizadeh, 32, who used to work for the state-run radio and television but who fled the country amid the postelection crackdown.

“We have a kind of guerrilla journalists, who wear masks, have no names, write under pseudonyms and send e-mails without mentioning their real names to news outlets outside Iran, or publish in weblogs with pseudonyms,” said Valizadeh, who now lives in Paris.

“A very, very bitter and black period awaits journalists,” he told The Associated Press.

Cue the Leveretts, who will doubtless be along shortly to tell us that Iranian journalists enjoy unparalleled freedoms, thanks to the great and good Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The chief excuse used to justify the Democrats pending use of reconciliation to pass a supplemental health care bill–once the Senate’s version is presumably passed by the House–is that since Republicans used reconciliation in the past, Democrats can use it too. And specifically, since Republicans used reconciliation for things like “tax cuts for the rich!”, Democrats can use it to pass health care.

James Joyner points out that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making this argument:

Almost every act passed under reconciliation (8/15) has in fact been a budget bill. And most of those that weren’t (5/7) were tax bills. The two outliers: The 1996 welfare reform act and the 2007 student aid package. Why those were passed under reconciliation isn’t made clear.

What’s also interesting is that the vast majority of these bills were absolute slam dunks. Most (8/15) were passed by filibuster-proof supermajorities, meaning that reconciliation wasn’t used as an end-around to avoid a cloture vote.

The argument that Republicans were more likely to use the process than Democrats is meaningless, simply reflecting the fact that Republicans have dominated the Senate over the period in question. Reconciliation was used six times during the Reagan administration but only once on a bill that didn’t have supermajority support. The Republicans controlled the Senate for all but the last of those votes. The Democrats then used it for two borderline votes. The Republicans used it for two slam dunks, one vote that didn’t quite have a filibuster-proof margin, and one 51-50 vote in which VP Cheney had to break the tie.

The bottom line is that using reconciliation as an end-around to avoid filibusters is exceedingly rare, having happened at most 7 times since 1980. Of those 7 cases, all were budget or tax measures. So, using reconciliation to avoid a supermajority on health care reform would simply be unprecedented.

(Via Megan McArdle.) Given this history, it should come as no surprise that there are objections to using reconciliation in order to pass a health care bill. And of course, no one actually believes that reconciliation would be used if Democrats had a 60-vote majority on the issue in the Senate. Reconciliation was specifically created in order to allow Congress to reconcile spending, revenue, and/or the debt limit with the governing budget resolution. While reconciliation allows the Senate to pass a bill without having to go through a filibuster, it was not created specifically for the purpose of avoiding filibusters. And yet, the Democrats plan to use reconciliation for precisely this purpose. Far from being employed as a budgetary policy best practice, reconciliation is now going to be employed as a “get out of the Senate free” card.