From the Washington Post:

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) appears to have secured the 60 votes needed to move an $848 billion health-care reform bill to the Senate floor for debate.

After days of indecision, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) — the final Democratic holdout — announced Saturday afternoon that she has decided to support a procedural motion to break a GOP filibuster. Reid now expects all 60 members of his caucus to vote yes at 8 p.m. Saturday, clearing the way for amendment deliberations to begin after the Thanksgiving recess….

Two other undecided Democrats, Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (La.), also announced their support in the final hours before the Saturday vote.

So Boose my man, this week’s Friday Evening Travelin’ Music is dedicated to you, courtesy of the inimitable Miss Nina Simone. And don’t worry, bro, I’ll be standing right there beside you when the deed gets done.

The ceremony, that is.

A few days ago, Fox was also trying to make a big deal about Obama’s bow to the emperor of Japan. The poll suggests that seed fell on barren ground.

The question:

When the president of the United States is traveling overseas, do you think it is appropriate for him to bow to a foreign leader if that is the country’s custom or is it never appropriate for the president to bow to another leader?

The response:

Yes, bow when it is the proper custom: 67 percent
No, it is never appropriate: 26 percent
Democrats: Yes, 84 percent; Never, 9 percent
Republicans, Yes, 53 percent; Never 40 percent
Independents: Yes, 62 percent; Never, 30 percent

And unlike movie zombies, the growth phenomenon that once defined the metro region is not going to spring back to life. In Atlanta and most other places, the sprawl era that began with post-war Levittown, N.Y. and eventually redrew the American landscape and mindset has now passed into history.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the suburbs created by sprawl will disappear or even decline. To the contrary, for many they remain great places to live and raise a family, and that won’t change. Once the economy recovers, a lot of suburbs will resume growth through infill development and increased density, although they will become increasingly urban in the process.

However, the conversion of vast tracts of far-flung greenspace into suburban housing — that has ended. The larger postwar demographic trends, economics, lifestyle choices and government subsidies that drove that trend have all petered out, and without them, large-scale sprawl will end as well.

The evidence of that transition is stark. Today, if you fly over or drive around the outer suburbs of metro Atlanta, you’ll find tens of thousands of vacant lots, cleared and ready for houses. Many of those empty lots — some complete with paved roads, sewer, water and utilities — will never see development and are destined to be reclaimed by nature, reverting to pasture or forest.

The industry that generated those lots has vanished as well, never to reassemble in such numbers. The mortgage brokers who stood ready to close loans in those subdivisions are instead collecting unemployment or selling shoes. The developers who bet their futures on those home lots have gone bankrupt, and the Hispanic carpenters and laborers who would have built them have gone, disappearing as quickly and mysteriously as they appeared. Many of the commercial banks that financed those projects have also gone under.

Now, it’s tempting to dismiss all that change as the temporary result of a deep recession. If that were true, the sprawl industry would likely reassemble once the economy picks up. But it won’t.

Even before the recession hit, the sprawl model of growth was showing serious strains in metro Atlanta. Admittedly, it was hard to see at the time. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, reported that from July 2000 to July 2008, six of the 15 fastest growing counties in the country could be found here in the 28-county Atlanta metro region.

By the end of that eight-year stretch, however, the Atlanta boom had cooled considerably. By July 2007 to July 2008, none of the 15 fastest growing counties were in metro Atlanta. The only two metro counties to even make the top 50 were Forsyth at No. 16 and Paulding at No. 40.

The boom machine, however, was too busy making money to notice that slackening of demand. By July 2007, almost 240,000 lots were coming on line for development in north metro Atlanta alone, according to Metrostudy, a real-estate data and analysis company. This, in a market where annual new home sales barely averaged 30,000, even during the boom.

What accounts for that shift? A lot of it is the free market at work. Younger people forming households of their own are more interested in urban living than in recreating their suburban upbringing, and many older Americans are also looking to downsize their living arrangements. The rising cost of commuting and energy to heat and cool large homes are having an impact as well.

Government’s declining ability to subsidize farflung suburbia has also had an effect. In Atlanta and other areas, the transportation infrastructure needed to shorten commuting times and thus extend the suburban model still farther from the core is no longer practical or affordable; it has become a struggle just to service already developed areas.

For a while, the flood of easy mortgages, cheap immigrant labor and big profits disguised those profound changes taking place nationally. Here in metro Atlanta, it disguised something else as well.

Long before the recession began, the metro region’s job-creating capacity was already more myth than reality. A lot of people were moving here, but jobs weren’t. According to Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University, by 2008 the 28-county area had produced an average of just 1,400 premium-paying jobs a year since 2002.

No doubt many of those jobs were generated by the sprawl industry, the result of a boom that we now know to have been based on a false foundation. Metro Atlanta’s economic challenges, in other words, aren’t likely to end when this terrible recession does.

As part of its most recent national poll, Public Policy Polling asked the following question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?”

Overall, 26 percent of the Americans polled said they believed ACORN stole the election for Obama. That number is troubling enough, but the number among Republicans polled was shocking. According to PPP, just 27 percent of Republicans said they believed that Obama won the election legitimately, while 52 percent said ACORN stole it.

I don’t know how many Democrats believed that the election of George W. Bush in 2000 was illegitimate. It was a substantial number, especially in the days and weeks right after the election, but I don’t think it was ever anything near 52 percent. And even though the claim was groundless, the strange events of 2000 — the fiasco in Florida and the controversial involvement of the Supreme Court — certainly gave liberals more reason to doubt than conservatives have today.

The fact that only 27 percent of Republicans are willing to accept Obama’s election as legitimate is outrageous. In fact, I refuse to take it on face value. I suspect that a lot of those people just don’t want to admit the legitimacy of Obama’s election and presidency, and ACORN gives them an excuse for not doing so.

But still … how petty. That’s ridiculous.

Jesse Jackson

Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan, who made credible runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, has long since ceased to be a force in the conservative movement. His appeals to racial resentment became a little too transparent, and his need for the spotlight drove him to say and do things that embarrassed his party. In recent years, Buchanan has been quoted and cited far more often by liberals, who cast him as a convenient if outdated caricature of the right, than by those on the right who used to support him.

Buchanan has a close counterpart on the left: Jesse Jackson. Three years younger than Buchanan, Jackson also ran credible campaigns for his party’s nomination. He too has been left behind by changing times, with his own appeals to racial resentment increasingly rejected by those who once turned to him for leadership and inspiration.

Over the last 15 to 20 years, Jackson has allowed himself to become the conservatives’ favorite black man, the political figure who too often parodies the causes he once effectively championed. His decline is his own damn fault, but like Buchanan, his need for the spotlight, to be seen as still relevant, drives him to say and do stupid things anyway. And out of respect for his past accomplishments, a lot of people on the left have been reluctant to call him on it.

Jackson’s most recent outburst — his statement last night in a public forum that “You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man” — will no doubt be seized upon by conservative critics, and understandably so. It’s an insulting and pretty stupid comment, an acid flashback to the ’60s that tries to make a policy issue a test of racial loyalty.

The target of Jackson’s attack, U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, a Democrat from Alabama, responded well:

“One of the reasons that I like and admire Rev. Jesse Jackson is that 21 years ago he inspired the idea that a black politician would not be judged simply as a black leader. The best way to honor Rev. Jackson’s legacy is to decline to engage in an argument with him that begins and ends with race.”

The transition from raging lion to aging lion can be difficult, and Jackson has not handled it with grace.

So when I saw a Hanson column headlined “Circling Sharks Smell American Blood,” I figured I knew what to expect: yet another conservative condemnation of Obama’s performance on his Asia trip, in which observers all over the world noted a more humble approach to geopolitics and America’s role in the world.

For many on the right, such an argument is no doubt tempting. However illogicially, it offers a way to project the blame for America’s relative decline onto one person — a man who they already hate for other reasons. And while Hanson indulges in a bit of that, he also acknowledges that there is something much deeper going on, with its roots and blame going back decades and implicating leaders of both parties.

Add it all up and there is a growing sense that America is in fact hemorrhaging — as both friends and enemies abroad smell blood in the water. The president through conciliation and concession — not to mention constant talk — is trying to superficially restore the influence we once earned by virtue of our economic power and self-confidence in our exceptional past and singular values.

But being both loud and vulnerable is not a winning combination, since political influence and military power are ultimately predicated on economic strength.

The United States needs to re-establish itself as financially credible and responsible so that when we lecture — about everything from global warming to Iranian nukes — we do so from a position of strength. That means we need to stop borrowing other nations’ money.

America also can’t afford to keep importing high-priced oil that we won’t produce at home. And we should stop promising ever-more government entitlements to ever-more voters that we can’t even begin to pay for.

For as we continue in our self-indulgence, a more defiant world seems to be saying that the old rules of the game have changed. In response, America should keep quieter abroad — and try finding a bigger stick.

I’d quibble with some of Hanson’s assessment — it is geologically impossible, for example, for the United States to produce enough additional oil here at home to significantly alter our strategic need for overseas sources — but at its core, he’s right. Our relative position in the world has indeed changed, for reasons that long predate Obama. The challenge for the new president is two-fold: Address the underlying causes of that decline, from fiscal irresponsibility to military overreach to energy dependence; and manage that changed reality both out there, in the world beyond our borders, and here at home as well, where the image of an American colossus astride the world will not be surrendered easily.

The truth is that we will never again be the unrivaled unipower we were in those years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall; that was an historic anomaly, and could not have been sustained regardless of our policies. No such power imbalance ever lasts long; countervailing powers always arise. However, with sacrifice and effective leadership, there’s no reason whatsoever that we cannot continue to vigorously defend our national interests and remain a powerful force for progress on the world stage.

On the other hand, if we don’t respond with sacrifice and effective leadership — and how we define those things is a subject of valid debate — events will take a different course. The global power structure is rearranging itself, as it does periodically throughout history.

For America and the world, much that was once settled is now up for grabs.

The U.S. trade deficit with China was roughly $60 billion in 1998, the year before we reached the accord granting China permanent normalized trade relations. Over the following decade, it ballooned to $268 billion, and tens of thousands of U.S. factories closed down. The trade deficit is the major reason China is awash in dollars — about 800 billion of them — and has become our largest creditor. And it is the major reason why boosting consumption in the United States, in an attempt to reverse the recession, has the peculiar effect of boosting production and employment in China just as much as if not more than happens at home….

So as we try to rebalance our relationship with China, let’s not entertain any illusions that our growing dependence on that nation was the result of an unalterable tectonic shift in global power. Our economic elites wanted the higher profits that came with cheaper Chinese labor. They prevailed, and today we are floundering to clean up their mess.

Sgt. Chris Head holds his 11-month-old son Wyatt after a send-off ceremony Tuesday afternoon at Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville. Head's unit, the 802nd Ordnance Company of the U.S. Army Reserve, is being deployed today to Afghanistan. AJC photo by Hyosub Shin

I was struck by this photo on the front page of the AJC’s Metro section today and thought I’d post it here, just as a reminder. There’s an awful lot happening in that photo.

Stephen Hawking

It’s a good thing that physicist Stephen Hawking was born in Great Britain, with its nationalized health care system. Because if he lived here in the United States, with its gaping holes in health-care coverage, he’d probably be dead or shuttered away in a human warehouse by now.

Just ask Kenny Whitey. He’d tell you all about it.

If he could.

Whitey is a trucker who was seriously injured on the job. Now his workman’s comp company has gone out of business, leaving him and his family out of luck and out of options. As the Gainesville Times reports:

“Overall, Whitey’s medical bills total around $47,000 per month.

“He just started physical therapy three weeks ago. The doctors said that they saw a 2 percent improvement. When you have a brain injury, 2 percent is a lot of improvement and now we don’t have any way to pay for that,” Pat Whitey said.

“The van company that has been transporting him to his appointments isn’t being paid now, and we can’t expect them to keep working for free. And the nurse agency told us last week that we have 14 days to figure out what we’re going to do. Everyone has been holding on, but we just don’t know how we are going to pay for everything.”

(H/T to Hillbilly Deluxe)