Senator McCain nails it:

“The numbers are astonishing,” McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Congress is now spending money like a drunken sailor,” said McCain, a former Navy officer, “and I’ve never known a sailor, drunk or sober, with the imagination that this Congress has.”
He said growth of spending had been capped at 4 percent, but it was at least 8 percent higher. He said he will continue urging Bush to veto profligate spending bills. The president has not veto a single bill since he took office.
. . .
An example, he said, is a massive energy bill, which also has been put aside until Congress reconvenes.
“The administration originally supported an energy bill that would cost about $8 billion. This one is up to $24 billion, and the administration is still saying it’s one of its highest priorities,” McCain said. “I don’t know how you rationalize that.”

Ha ha. I don’t know how they rationalize it, but the explanation is simple–the energy bill got bloated with give-aways to campaign contributors and corporate cronies.

One frustrating aspect of watching Sunday-morning-type talk shows is watching politicians dance around direct questions and not get called out on it. It make you wonder what the point of the program is if politicians are allowed to trot out their standard talking points without being challenged.
Demagogue (via Eschaton) has a good example of a politician trying to perform a typical dance. Only this time she was forced to face several follow up questions. The result wasn’t pretty.
First, some background. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.) is one of the co-sponsors behind the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment (H.J.Res. 56), which reads:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

Several legal scholars, such as Jack Balkin have made a compelling argument that the proposal’s ambiguously-written second sentence could be construed as prohibiting states from not only recognizing gay marriage, but also from recognizing civil unions for same-sex couples.
As Demagogue chronicles, Rep. Musgrave was taken to task for this confusion on ABC News’ “This Week.” The entire exchange is worth reading, but here’s an example of typical politico-dodging:

STEPHANOPOULOS: [Asking Musgrave] “What about the language on legal incidence?”
REP. MUSGRAVE: “The intent of the Federal marriage amendment is to have a Federal definition of marriage and to prevent states from exporting gay marriage.”

When directly asked about specific language, Musgrave gives a wishy-washy response about some vague intent.
Finally, it comes to this:

REP. [BARNEY] FRANKS: “It’s not in here about states’ rights, Marilyn … Nothing in here allows Massachusetts to make its own decisions or Vermont on civil unions. You say it reserves these to states’ rights. It doesn’t say that anywhere in here.”
REP. MUSGRAVE: “We’ll discuss this through the process.”

Interesting. One might think that since Rep. Musgrave sponsored this thing, she should be able to discuss it now.
It seems to me that either: (1) Rep. Musgrave doesn’t understand her own proposal (it is after all only a constitutional amendment); or (2) Rep. Musgrave is lying about what this amendment effort is attempting to achieve.

I wasn’t going to comment on Bush’s Thanksgiving Day escapade, but people are making such a fuss over it that I will.
On one side people are using the trip to lob their usual charges of politicalization and whatever else opponents say about the guy in charge. On the other side people using this episode as an opportunity to heap lavish praise upon their guy.
How should one view the trip?
Here’s a thought: how about viewing it for what it was–a two-and-a-half-hour visit to show appreciation to some troops. Bush wasn’t on the front line leading the troops through enemy fire, nor was he broadcasting live to the Republican National Convention. He simply flew in, met some people, and flew back out.
Not only have the motives for this visit been over-analyzed and over-hyped, but so has the fallout. I actually heard one “military analyst” state that in one fell swoop Bush had changed the entire political situation in Iraq. Really? Simply by sharing turkey with the troops? If the problems in Iraq were that easily fixed, Bush should have been there a long time ago.
I can understand bloggers and political types dwelling on this story, because that’s the kind of thing they talk about. But why have the news networks been falling all over themselves on this? Granted the holiday weekend is a slow news period and all, but is this and Jacko the only thing left to talk about?
My guess is that the Washington press corps, which likes to perpetuate the illusion that they are on top of everything, is in disbelief that they got snookered by the White House. Imagine that–the most powerful man in the world being able to pull something off without the approval of his media entourage. I guess there’s still some sense of order on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yesterday N.Z. Bear floated the idea of breaking up his Ecosystem into smaller communities:

Here’s the vision: I’d like to see other Ecosystems created, each focusing on their own particular community within the weblog world. Perhaps there could be an Ecosystem for U.S. military bloggers; an Ecosystem for political conservatives (or liberals); an Ecosystem for bloggers writing in Portuguese. Wherever a community of interest exits in the Blogosphere, there might be an Ecosystem for it.
Some might argue that this would contribute to a fragmenting effect in the Blogosphere; isolating communities so that they only communicate internally among themselves. But I think the effect would be the opposite. By providing a focus and nexus for blog communities, I think such Ecosystems would make it easier for outsiders to understand them and sample the work of their bloggers. I know that I’d personally be more likely to genuinely spend time browsing through the blogs of the kinds of communities I note above if there was an easier way to find the most well-regarded bloggers working within them.
. . .
So, I am considering turning the Ecosystem code base into an open source effort, and inviting other bloggers to take up the mantle of running their own, individual versions of the Ecosystem, tailored to focus on the needs of their own communities. Each Ecosystem would be completely self-contained and independent, but they would all rely upon the same open-source code base, to which I will continue contributing — and others would be encouraged to enhance and modify as well. And each Ecosystem could also use the peripheral features I’ve implemented over time, such as the New Weblog Showcase, to further highlight the work within their own communities. Looking into the longer term, perhaps methods could be developed to share data between Ecosystems — the most obvious application of which might be to create a mega-Ecosystem that rolls up data from all of them.

In this region we already have a quasi-Ecosystem with the Rocky Top Brigade. True, it doesn’t (yet) have the computer coding in place to rank blogs. But Volunteer bloggers enjoy many other benefits of being part of a smaller community.
We also have a number of prominent blogs. According to my quick glance through the Blogosphere Ecosystem (undoubtedly I missed some), the RTB has:

1 Higher Being
3 Playful Primates
8 Large Mammals
4 Marauding Marsupials
7 Adorable Rodents
6 Flappy Birds
8 Slithering Reptiles
4 Crawly Amphibians
1 Flippery Fish

Not bad.

The Resonance weather observatory has just detected a rare November snowfall outside its Knoxville, Tennessee headquarters; the first of the season.
How long is it until spring, anyway?
UPDATE: The snow didn’t last long. We got just enough for it to be visible on the grass.