Friday Open Thread

Welcome to the Friday edition of your open thread. Today Free Radical’s birthday stove is installed! I can’t wait to try it out but we’re going to Philadelphia for the weekend to celebrate his birthday. We won’t get to try it out until next week.

Joe Lieberman says that the votes to repeal DADT are there. The Defense Authorization bill will come up after Thanksgiving.

In a show of resolve, a baker’s dozen of Democratic senators, led by Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, held a news conference to proclaim that they had secured the votes to authorize repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gay soldiers.

But the senators said that the crucial support of Republicans would hinge on whether Senate leaders allow a relatively free-flowing debate on the military policy bill that includes the language authorizing repeal of the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military – and they urged the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, to do so.

In other news, John McCain is still an a-hole.

Yesterday in Congress, Republicans tried to cut funding for National Public Radio (NPR). The vote failed.

House Democrats on Thursday shot down a G.O.P. attempt to roll back federal funding to NPR, a move that many Republicans have called for since the public radio network fired the analyst Juan Williams last month.

Republicans in the House tried to advance the defunding measure as part of their “YouCut” initiative, which allows the public to vote on which spending cuts the G.O.P. should pursue. But their push was blocked, 239 to 171, with only three Democrats voting with a united bloc of Republicans.

Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican who is set to become majority leader in the next Congress, said the vote showed Democrats had failed to learn the lessons of this month’s midterm elections.

Did you know the lesson of the election was that people want to cut funding for NPR? Yeah, I didn’t either. I think it’s going to be a long few years.