Reading Spencer Ackerman’s “three cheers for a law enforcement approach to terrorism” it strikes me worth mentioning that one distorting factor in this conversation has to do with budgets. The president’s budget request for the FBI was $7.9 billion dollars which was a big increase. Of that, $2.6 billion is for counterterrorism activities. By contrast, we’re spending $3.6 billion per month in Afghanistan. Total DOD spending is over $600 billion annually. The CIA’s budget is classified, but it’s much larger than the FBI’s.

Which is to say that in America when you shift something from a “crime” paradigm to a “war” paradigm, you gain access to a lot of extra money. This means there’s a difference between asking “what would happen if we left this up to law enforcement” and asking “what would happen if we dealt with this by increasing law enforcement’s capabilities.” And this is about more than dollars and cents. There are, for example, a finite number of Americans with relevant foreign-language capabilities.

I’m slow on the uptake about this whole “negro dialect” business but it’s a reminder of how weird political apologies get to be. It’s good that Reid apologized, but at the same time you can’t really apologize for being the sort of person who’d be inclined to use the phrase “negro dialect” and it’s more the idea of Reid being that kind of person that’s creepy here than anything else. Doesn’t seem likely to help Reid’s already troubled re-election campaign.

Jeff Young has a must-read piece based on an interview with Andy Stern in which the SEIU leader shares his latest thinking. He remains opposed to the excise tax on unusually costly health insurance plans, but at the same time seems reconciled to its inevitability. He also offers this:

Stern expressed strong frustration with the Senate and with those centrists — without calling any out by name — and hinted that labor unions and their members, who contributed with money and effort to winning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, would be less motivated next time around.

“Democrats were given a gift that they have squandered,” Stern said. “If this is the way the Senate is going to do business when they have 60 votes, they’re pretty much guaranteeing a self-fulfilling prophecy that they won’t have 60 votes.”

Later in the piece, Stern hints at the direction of what I think would be the most reasonable compromise on the excise tax issue:

One problem with that approach, Stern said, is that approach presumes the high premiums are equivalent to excellent benefits, which is not always the case partly because of the widely varying costs of medical care and cost of living in different regions of the country. Some people pay “Cadillac costs for Chevy benefits,” Stern said.

The specific example of regional variations in costs doesn’t strike me as hugely compelling, but the general point that plans can have variable costs for reasons other than generosity of benefits is reasonable. Henry Aaron’s proposed modification that would “base the tax on high-cost plans not on each company’s actual cost, but on the cost of each company’s plan as applied to a population of standardized age distribution” would be a good idea and would meet some of these concerns.

What do you get when you mix “war on drugs” hysteria, “war on terror” hysteria, Cold War thinking, and Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen? Nothing good:

For her part, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen cited DEA reports that demonstrate a Venezuelan connection in a new alliance formed between the FARC and al Qaeda, in which the oil producing nation plays the part of a “massive airport for the use of the traffickers.”

“It is no surprise that Hugo Chávez allows Venezuela to serve as a massive airport for the use of traffickers. In fact the DEA has said that all the planes captured in West Africa left from Venezuela,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

She explained that the recent arrest of three African agents of al Qaeda after a drug smuggling operation showed a new panorama of cooperation between Islamic extremist groups and those of South American narco-guerrillas.

As Joshua Keating explains what actually happened here was that some DEA guys posed as FARC members and made a deal with three Africans. It’s not clear that the Africans are really tied to al-Qaeda, though they might be. But it’s absolutely certain that the fake FARC guys are not tied to Venezuela since . . . they’re not really FARC guys at all. If I pretended to be a conservative member of congress from Florida and went out and bought some drugs, that wouldn’t show anything at all about the drug consumption habits of Florida conservatives. This isn’t even remotely complicated.

Woo playoffs! Woo players who get paid money in exchange for their work! I think the Bengals and the Eagles will win. Trying to mentally prepare myself for the unusual idea of rooting for the Eagles.