The San Francisco Chronicle's reporting a federal grand jury indictment of a man who threatened to kill the President and his family in an email.  Details sparse

Mark Blumenthal tackles a subject long near and dear to my heart - there is no overwhelming support for the public option because most don't even know what it is.
Drives me nuts each time I hear "the people demand a public option"

Regular readers may recall my lament that despite the many, many times pollsters have asked Americans to react to descriptions of the so-called "public option" in health care reform, very few have attempted to probe the depth of Americans' knowledge about the proposal.

The point of debate is often whether Americans "want" a public option. These arguments sometimes get expressed in the context of representative democracy. "65% of Americans are begging Congress for an inclusive public option," wrote one Daily Kos diarist a few weeks ago, yet "our Representatives in the Senate are REFUSING to give The People what they overwhelmingly want." Poll questions like the one cited by the diarist typically measure how Americans react to a brief description of the Public Option concept. Those are helpful, but if Americans are really "begging" for a public option, we might also want to measure how many know what the public option is before hearing the pollster's description.

Unless I've missed it, the only effort to tackle this question was an opt-in internet panel survey sponsored by AARP (an organization that has not taken a formal position on the public option) and conducted by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates. They found that only 37% of their adult sample could correctly identify the Public Option from a list of three possible choices. As Nate Silver pointed out, if the respondents had picked randomly, a third (33%) would have chosen correctly.

Don't get me wrong. I favor a public option of some kind. But supporters are only fooling themselves with such talk.

Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up for a Democratic Central Committee fundraiser at the Fairmont Hotel in SF. What an idiot.  Imagine Nancy Pelosi wandering into a CPAC bash

The rest is history. Willie Brown reports:

Arnold Schwarzenegger at Democrat Fundraiser 

By now, I'm sure you've all seen or heard about the cell phone video of our state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano yelling out for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to "kiss my gay ass."

And as usual when something this bad happens, everyone is pointing the finger at me.

Yes, I was the emcee at the Democratic Central Committee event. And yes, I did invite Arnold to say a few words.

But the truth is, the first I knew about Arnold's presence was when committee Chairman Aaron Peskin leaned over and said, "Hey, your buddy is coming in through the door."

"You gotta be kidding me," I said. "What would the governor be doing here?"

Beats me, Peskin said, but you should introduce him.

I did, and with that, Ammiano became the Democrats' version of Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson, leading the chorus of boos before he and his buddies walked out.

To be honest, by that point you couldn't tell who was walking in, who was walking out or much else, because people had been drinking since 5 in the afternoon.

After the dinner I went to the bar and I got a tap on the shoulder.

It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed by what had happened. The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, "Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?"

"Picking up stuff for my column," I replied.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/11/BAFF1A39BI.DTL#ixzz0TduMvCNK

The poll also shows that former Congressman Tom Campbell, a moderate, has pulled into a tie with Meg Whitman for the GOP nomination.  I suspected that Meg's recent stumbles could help Campbell more than the base conservative Poizner still running a distant third. Whether this holds or not - 9 months in politics....

Poll: Brown up 20 percent on Newsom

State AG now has a huge advantage over the S.F. mayor in guv's race. On GOP side, dark horse Campbell runs even with Whitman.

A prisoner of war abandoned on the field of battle

Her likely 2010 Republican Senate running mate, Carly Fiorina, isn't going to like this one bit- if she gets that far, which now seems increasingly unlikely:

Meg Whitman, the 2010 GOP gubernatorial candidate already on the defensive for her embarrassingly poor voting record, once endorsed and actively supported Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the most proudly liberal politicians in California.

Whitman not only endorsed Boxer and donated the maximum $4,000 to the junior California senator's 2004 re-election campaign, but the former eBay CEO also served on an exclusive committee of Technology Leaders for Boxer in her re-election battle against Republican California Secretary of State Bill Jones, according to election records obtained by The Chronicle.

Whitman supported GOP nemesis Boxer in '04

MoveOn & R.E.M. Video: We Can't Afford to Wait

Never been and probably never will.  Three days in the Nevada desert isn't my idea of fun and it would require more medication than I am willing to take just to survive.

Still, I can't deny that the Burning Man is totally cool.  I'll just go virtually every Labor Day weekend

Burning Man 2009: Ninety Four Pic Slideshow

That's what the Guardian (UK)'s reporting

Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks

• US to adopt much tougher line over Iran's nuclear ambitions
• Israel to freeze construction of settlements on West Bank
• France and Russia offer to host Middle East peace conference

Thought provoking, even compelling analysis at TruthOut

  The Third Stage: Being There

    All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.

    Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."

    This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

    This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.

Israel just doesn't get Fourth Generation War.  It's been 35 years since the vaunted Israeli military won a military contest. In 2006, Hezbollah chased the Israelis out of Lebanon for the second time and has emerged politically and militarily stronger than before the invasion.

Once again, predictably and as predicted, Israel failed to achieve any of its war aims in the Gaza Offensive and emerges both internally and internationally weaker than before it launched its offensive

Read more »

Of the spending cuts the Gang of Nelson made, I challenge anyone to name one more ludicrous or counter-stimulative than the $40 Billion in state budget assistance.  What planet is he living on?  Whatever stimulative impact remains in the bill, a substantiall portion of it is being wiped out in state budget cuts right now, and the worst is yet to come as this in today's Los Angeles Times report from the Real World demonstrates

States' only option now is budget pain

Healthcare, parks, schools: Politicians' proposals to close budget gaps would hit where it hurts. Even zoo animals may not get a break.

Reporting from Atlanta and Las Vegas -- They have plundered reserves, enacted hiring freezes and engaged in all manner of budgetary voodoo to shield us from the pain.

But now state governments -- reeling from a historic free fall in tax revenue -- have run out of tricks. And Americans are about to feel it.

Ready fire aim.

All the "leading lights" - Jindal, Crist. Palin's lobbying McConnell this weekend.  The single most important parts of the package are those which provide countercyclical help to states and localities in every state now in the grips of serious budget crises.

GOP govs break with party over stimulus

Most support economic plan that got no Republican votes in U.S. House

[HT Juan Cole for the London Review of Books link]

Within an hour of the Mitchell announcement today, J Street hit my box with a Thank You Mr. President" email

I looked to see where MJ was

Asleep at the switch?