President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia this year appeared to unravel on Tuesday as a Senate Republican leader moved to block a vote in what could be a devastating blow to the president’s most tangible foreign policy achievement.

Mr. Obama had declared ratification of the New Start treaty his “top priority” in foreign affairs for the lame-duck session of Congress that opened this week. But the chances of winning the two-thirds vote required for passage of the treaty appeared to collapse with the announcement by Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and the party’s point man on the issue, that the Senate should not vote on it this year.

“When Majority Leader Harry Reid asked me if I thought the treaty could be considered in the lame-duck session, I replied I did not think so given the combination of other work Congress must do and the complex and unresolved issues related to Start and modernization,” Mr. Kyl said in a statement. The senator added that he would continue to negotiate with administration officials for a possible vote next year.

A failure to approve the treaty in the departing Senate could undermine Mr. Obama’s broader campaign to curb nuclear weapons and eventually eliminate them. The treaty, which would trim American and Russian strategic arsenals and restore mutual inspections that lapsed last year, was supposed to be the first, and easiest, step in a long-term effort to bring an end to age of nuclear arms....

Mr. Kyl’s announcement shocked and angered the White House, which learned about it from the news media. Both parties had considered Mr. Kyl the make-or-break voice on the pact, with Republicans essentially deputizing him to work out a deal that would secure tens of billions of dollars to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons complex in exchange for approval of the treaty. After months of negotiations and the addition of even more money in recent days, the White House thought it had given Mr. Kyl what he wanted.

Cute. In fact, what "Mr. Kyl" wanted was to string the President along for as long as possible before handing him an embarrassing political defeat. Kyl was never negotiating in good faith -- which the White House should have known from past negotiations with the GOP "point men". Their goal is not to reach an acceptable agreement. Their goal is to waste as much of the President's time and political capital as possible.

Sen. McConnell has already stated the GOP's top political priority for the new Congress: "Deny Barack Obama a second term in office".

That's it. That's their agenda. The White House shouldn't waste its time "negotiating" with these people. They hate Obama much, much more than they love America. If they can even be said to "love" America. They're willing to see it burn, all of it, rather than see Obama succeed in any issue.

Kyl's action now makes clearer why former Democratic pollsters Caddell and Schoen floated the nonsensical suggestion that Obama announce that he won't run for re-election:

Forgoing another term would not render Obama a lame duck. Paradoxically, it would grant him much greater leverage with Republicans and would make it harder for opponents such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) - who has flatly asserted that his highest priority is to make Obama a one-term president - to be uncooperative.

It's nonsensical only until you realize who the authors are carrying water for. Senate Republicans are essentially holding the country hostage. They're demanding that Obama announce he won't run as a precondition to carrying out the business of the nation.

That's one more negotiation Obama shouldn't fall for.

Making me take my shoes off in the security line is one thing. But we are a nation of sheep if we put up with this sort of thing. Laughably, TSA reps say that Americans can ride the bus if they don't want to be strip-searched at the airport. But unlike Greyhound, the airline industry is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, and taxpayers should have a say in how much humiliation air travelers should have to endure.

They down a few drinks (at the office, of course) and decide to go see a movie. After rejecting Zorba the Greek, The Guns of August and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, they wind up drunkenly laughing their way through a Japanese monster movie.

It's a hilarious scene, but I was surprised Matthew Weiner allowed so big an anachronism to slip into his otherwise meticulously-researched series. Generally speaking, any pop-culture reference in Mad Men is carefully chosen.

For instance, if you took a time machine to New York on December 31, 1964, you could have gone to the movies and seen Zorba the Greek, The Guns of August or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- were all released during the last two weeks of December 1964. But the movie they actually saw, Gammera The Invincible wasn't even released in its native Japan until a year later, and didn't make its way into American theaters until December of 1966.

I suspect the problem here was that there weren't any giant monster movies in New York theaters on December 31, 1964 (Godzilla Vs. The Thing was released in mid-September, and had probably finished its first-run theatrical release by New Year's Eve). And the sight of a giant, fire-breathing turtle attacking Tokyo was probably too much for the producers to resist.

More importantly, I suspect the producers figured it was just a generic monster movie and nobody would notice.

Unfortunately, for me, there are no generic monster movies.

And I always notice.

The videocassette rental giant began offering on-demand viewing on home computers in its waning days.

Too little, too late, the Blockbuster critics hooted. But at least Blockbuster tried to change.

As a sidebar -- or perhaps a bookend -- to the Blockbuster story is the story of Fotomat, which made a very aggressive effort to remake itself in the late 1970s.

They are pretty much forgotten now, but Fotomat drive-through kiosks were once ubiquitous. They were little yellow booths that stood in parking lot of every shopping center in America, or so it seemed. They offered what was (in the early 70s) lightning-fast photo processing: 24 hours, as opposed to the couple of weeks you had to wait dropping your photos off at the drugstore.

Perhaps recognizing that one-hour photo shops would soon displace them, Fotomat embarked on a daring experiment in 1979. The idea was to use their existing infrastructure of kiosks for movie rentals, an infrastructure that just happened to cover the suburban areas where VCR market penetration was highest.

Of course, very few people owned VCRs in 1979, and the major studios were just starting to experiment with licensing a few titles to pre-recorded tapes. A couple of entrepeneurs had already tested the waters of video rental, usually in the form of mail-order "clubs" that required steep annual membership fees.

So Fotomat's concept was really quite brilliant, but unfortunately its system was too complicated: you took a paper catalog, made your rental selection, called a phone number to reserve your tape, picked it up 24 hours later, then had five days before you needed to return it.

That model failed, but it wasn't long before another succeeded: the video rental retail shop. That, of course, was a model that worked brilliantly.

Until it didn't.

The video rental market had gotten started in such little shops, and in the beginning, business was good. On a Friday or Saturday night in the early 80s the place had been able to clear a grand or more.

Although weekend business was still brisk, by the time I came along things were clearly in decline. That was because VCRs had saturated the market, and the novelty of movie rental had worn off. The days when people would walk in and rent three or four titles at a go were over.

One day I told my boss about a video store that had opened near the freeway -- a gigantic place. "It's got a billion titles," I said, exaggerating slightly for dramatic effect. "It's beautiful. It's clean. All the movie boxes are in plastic slipcases. They're going to crush us like insects."

My boss smiled tolerantly and patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "People will never abandon their neighborhood video store". Within a couple of years he was out of business, as were nearly all the small-time video proprietors. Mammoth operations like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster and Title Wave took over.

And so it was fashionable throughout the 1990s to bash the big chain retailers like as soulless, corporate philistines. What did they know or care about the movies they rented?

But reading about Blockbuster's impending bankruptcy made me feel a twinge of regret.

The age of the dinosaurs has ended, but the dinosaurs, in retrospect, weren't so bad.

This was brought home to me while looking for an old movie for the Horror Incorporated Project. In the old days it would have been easy enough to drive over to Blockbuster and grab a copy. But I realized I hadn't been in a Blockbuster for years; my habits had changed. Gone were the days when I browsed the rows of plastic snap-cases, without any particular movie in mind.

Now I fiddled with Netflix queues, or clicked through Netflix on-demand titles, or opened the on-demand menu on the TV.

There is still a Blockbuster Video in my neighborhood, but I'm not even sure what goes on there.
Last time I checked they still rented DVDs, but much of their floor space was devoted to selling used discs. This was because the store, in trying to keep up with customer demand for the latest red-hot video release, would buy thirty copies of the same title. After a few weeks, the demand slackened, and the store was stuck with dozens of copies of the same movie (back in 1987, of course, videotapes were never sold -- because the retail price for a commercially-produced cassette was often $100 or more).

Because so much space is taken up with selling used DVDs, the rental selection had diminished considerably. I doubted they would still carry the obscure movie I wanted. While I could place it on the top of my Netflix queue, I'd have to find the movie I currently had out (I've had it out for months), return it, and wait a few days for the new one to arrive. It wasn't on Netflix On Demand. And Redbox, which has become the rental option of choice these days, only carries the two or three dozen most popular titles.

So it finally dawned on me that offbeat and obscure movies are less accessible today than they were twenty years ago, not more accessible.

The fact that the movie I was searching for was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man should not be counted against me. You go live in your dreary little world, sad sack. I'm doing fine in mine.

I hadn't seen a copy of PopSci (as it now irritatingly markets itself) for many years, but I picked one up at the doctor's office the other day.

In what I guess is a modern-day version of WW, we now get -- well, you guessed it. A cartoon that will teach you how to spend twelve hours building an impractical solution to a ten-second annoyance.

Except now it's gone high-tech. Here's what I mean:

Yep, all the guy had to do is buy $40 worth of electronic components to build a voice amplifier so that he could alert the guy ahead of him that the light is green. Why didn't he just tap his horn? Or yell?

We also don't see the next few panels, where our hero tries this on a gun-toting paranoiac with anger-management issues.

Um, maybe because they're filibustering it?

Maybe because they declare that the extension has to be deficit-neutral but that tax cuts for the rich don't have to be?

Maybe because they don't offer any changes to the bill that would make it deficit-neutral, but simply declare their opposition?

Maybe because these "supporters" are saying things like this:

"Continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said during a floor debate this spring.

Republican Rep. Tom Price of Georgia said on CNN on Monday that some economists had warned there could be a "moral hazard" in prolonged aid to jobless Americans.

I know these clowns have to spin for their own side, but you have to ask yourself: who the hell are they trying to convince?

I think we face something we've never faced before in the country -- and that is, we're now governed by people who do not like the country, who do not have the same reverence for it that we do. Our greatest threat (and this is saying something) is internal... That word 'payback' is not mine, [but] it is exactly how I think Obama looks at the country: It's payback time... There's no question that payback is what this administration is all about, presiding over the decline of the United States of America, and doing so happily.

Liberals accused Bush of all kinds of things during his two terms in office -- stupidity, arrogance, incompetence, mendacity. But they never accused him of treason, nor of a deliberate campaign to destroy the country.

You might argue that Limbaugh is an entertainer, not a serious political commentator. And I'm sure that's what Limbaugh will argue when some crackpot picks up a gun and decides that it's his patriotic duty to shoot the President of the United States.

But I fear that what we're seeing here is the same climate that produced the Oklahoma City bombing: a daily torrent of apocalyptic lunacy and conspiratorial rubbish, refreshed daily by an opportunistic gang of sunshine patriots. And it's aimed right at the most radical and unstable elements in our society.