I'm almost writing this post just to record this moment in intertubes history. Here's Glenn Greenwald on whether the Fort Hood shootings were terrorism:

But if one accepts that broadened definition of "terrorism" -- that it includes violence that targets not only civilians but also combatants who are unarmed or not engaged in combat at the time of the attack -- it seems impossible to exclude from that term many of the acts in which the U.S. and our allies routinely engage. Indeed, a large part of our "war" strategy is to kill people we deem to be "terrorists" or "combatants" without regard to whether they're armed or engaged in hostilities at the moment we kill them.

Spencer has a great piece at the Washington Independent that includes a bunch of interesting nuggets on the progression of Afghanistan strategy (which, contrary to recent reports, has apparently not been

It’s easy to get caught up in the daily machinations behind health care reform – how many votes the vile Stupak amendment limiting reproductive rights was able to secure, what kind of payoffs will be necessary to buy the assent of conservative Democrats in the Senate, the latest threat from the festering ball of bitterness and resentment that is Joe Lieberman. But what Democrats need to do more than anything else is take a deep breath, step back, and look at the long term.

Over the weekend, Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey, became the latest "enabler" of Islamic terrorism, warning that the Ft. Hood shooting could cause a backlash within the armed forces and praising the Army's diversity:

“I’ve asked our Army leaders to be on the lookout for that,” General Casey said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union. “It would be a shame — as great a tragedy as this was — it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.”

As Ezra noted earlier this week, much of the reason that American health care is so expensive is because we pay so much per-unit of care, whether it's a prescription or a CT scan. In order to insure health care remains affordable and that reform is sustainable in the long term, these costs need to be brought under control -- a point conservatives, to their credit, have repeatedly raised. Democrats have tried to address the issue by trying to extract savings and price-control measures from groups like the drug industry, given the federal government's buying power through entitlement programs like Medicare.

David Brooks has a column on the independents in the wake of Tuesday's election, deploying his usual technique of communing with them via stereotypes -- "They’re looking for a safe pair of hands." The piece is economically unserious and also follows the time-tested pundit model of demanding politicians follow public opinion when it suits Brooks' views but lauding as courageous those politicians who

And it's official: We've broken into the double digits with 10.2 percent unemployment. That brings me to our favorite beginning of the month chart, above and here, which includes the all important U-6 number.