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I’m guessing that the dispatch of US forces to Australia, announced this week during President Obama’s Pacific tour, is not going to be a major topic on any of the so-called “Sunday shows.” I also acknowledge that I wouldn’t really know, since I don’t watch these shows or even get the significance they are assigned; all seems rather archaic to me. Still, I feel safe in guessing that Newt Gingrich or the “Supercommittee” will be much more-discussed topics, with “Marines to Oz” given minimal attention if any.

So I’ll fix this oversight, because I think it is an oversight and that it deserves a lot more discussion, along with all the related issues it touches.

As the BBC reports, essentially

Australia has agreed to host a full US Marine task force in the coming years, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced at a news conference with US President Barack Obama in Canberra.

She said about 250 US Marines would arrive next year, eventually being built up to 2,500 personnel.

The deployment is being seen as a move to counter China’s growing influence.

And, boy, is this just confounding, disappointing, dismal news for a bunch of reasons. (more…)

I’m working on a really long post, but I feel obligated to note this item here; it’s important and, in a way, will even tie in to the upcoming phonebook-length essay.

Browsing Cleveland.com today, I decided to see just what exactly Brent Larkin had written under the headline “Drawing the line on Democrat griping.” Had this been a work of, say, reactionary automaton Kevin O’Brien, I wouldn’t have even bothered, but I’ve found Larkin occasionally makes a fair point or two.

He does so, here. Said point is made in his usual crusty, crabby, how-distasteful-this-all-is way, but aside from the fact that I’m hardly one to talk, he does make a significant point all the same: Ohio’s Democratic Party seems to have invited the partisan redistricting heist of which they, and I, have been complaining so volubly.

Old man Larkin notes something I apparently missed in my normal indifference to Ohio politics, that “Last year, Democrats had a chance to take politics out of drawing new congressional boundaries and replace it with a plan that reeked of fairness.”

The plan would have amended the Ohio Constitution to create a seven-member panel to redraw those boundaries every 10 years. Republican and Democratic members of the Ohio House and Senate would have shared equally in the appointment of four members. Those four would have appointed the other three members. The support of five members would have been required for approval.

[The] proposal would have taken effect for this year’s drawing of new boundaries. It required voter approval, which would have been a near-certainty.

The Ohio Senate voted to put the plan on last November’s ballot, but it died in the Democrat-controlled House.

The hectoring editor emeritus goes on to list various reasons why the Democrats did such a silly thing. I would like to think they might offer up at least a token defense of their rejecting this reform, but having few illusions about the nature of politics even in parties I view relatively favorably, I expect that defense would be pretty thin. For what it’s worth, I’m not aware of anyone else even raising this point; presumably Democrats don’t want to talk about it because it makes them look bad, and presumably Republicans aren’t mentioning it because they don’t want to acknowledge the possibility that the current system which they’re exploiting is not the acme of fairness.

So, thank you, grumpy old newspaperman, for informing me of what everyone else finds inconvenient to recall. What can I say; this was an awful choice even if it hadn’t quickly rebounded to Democrats’ and democracy’s disadvantage. (more…)

As long as I’m asking rhetorical questions and making futile pleas, I’d like to add one more. Please stop doing shit like this:

Jeff Darcy phones it in (like much of the media)

Seriously, I know it’s hopeless to call for anything else but that doesn’t change the fact that this is fucking bullshit.

“Congress” is not the cause of America’s debt-ceiling time bomb. Republicans in Congress are.

In its official editorial on debt politics, The Economist does everything it can to pick at Democrats on this issue, and then having made those token efforts acknowledges that “…Mr Obama and his party seem a model of fiscal statesmanship compared with their Republican opponents.” Their generally conservative-leaning Lexington columnist goes further, calling this whole farce

a problem entirely of the Republicans’ own making. The reason for this crisis is that instead of just raising the debt ceiling in the customary way so that the government can pay the bills Congress has already run up, the Republicans decided to point a pistol at the American economy and threaten to pull the trigger if they did not get the spending cuts they wanted.

Seriously, what the fuck are the Democrats supposed to do, here? (more…)