Must Reads

Marcus Cederstrom: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

Digby: Straight Up Racism, No Dogwhistle Necessary

Ezra Klein: Who will get the ‘Recovery Presidency’?

Andrew Sullivan: How Obama's Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics

Robert Reich: The Romney Tax Loophole

Ruth Marcus: Mitt Romney’s miserly concern for the poor

E.J Dionne: Republicans keep moving Obama to Europe

Our blast from the past comes courtesy of loyal reader Chris U. who wants to remind us all of Newt Gingrich's political past, sans revisionist history.

John E. Yang: House Reprimands, Penalizes Speaker

They Really Do Try, Don't They?

I never cease to be amazed at the unadulterated spin from conservative pundits and columnists who look for any opportunity to blame President Obama for pretty much anything. It's almost as if they think they're speaking to or writing for a Fox News audience with no worry about being called to account for the obvious disingenuousness they spew. Markets down? Obama's fault. Greece in financial disarray? ...Damn that Obama. Scrapping the balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year due to high winds? ...OBAMAAAAAA!

The latest example of this comes from Washington Post opinion columnist Michael Gerson. Mr. Gerson has absolutely no problem blaming the failed Supercommittee debacle on the President. Titled "Obama Let the Supercommittee Fail," Gerson blames indifference on the part of the President for a group of twelve grown adults (yes, I'll include the Republicans on the committee as "grown-up") not coming to an agreement with a looming $1.2 trillion in cuts across the board. But amazingly, Gerson believes, or would have his readers believe, that the "supercommittee failed primarily because President Obama gave a shrug."

So what if Republicans wouldn't budge on actual revenue increases in a balanced combination with spending cuts? So what if their ultimate $300 billion tax increase offer was connected to a basic repeal of the Affordable Care Act which took over a year to pass and a privatization of Medicare? The real problem was that "these were the ingredients for a deal. But only a president can mix them and apply the heat." Yep, Obama is the cook that stirs the pot and self-motivation for 12 of an elite 100 members of our political system is of no consequence. ...Damn Obama!

The disconnect is the fact that Gerson knows that Republicans would have never agreed to anything, as witnessed by the moving of the goalposts farther and farther to the right. Ezra Klein analyzes:

If by "at fault" we mean "unwilling to compromise," we can do better than listen to the self-serving remarks of the players. We can look hard at the movement in the actual plans...

The final Boehner [/Obama] plan envisioned tax reform that would generate $800 billion in new revenues and bring the top rate down to 35 percent. In the supercommittee, the highest Republicans ever got on taxes was the Toomey plan's $300 billion, with envisioned a top rate of 28 percent. So on taxes, it's fairly clear: The supercommittee Republicans were far to the right of Boehner.

On the Democratic side, Obama eventually insisted on somewhere near $1.2 trillion in tax reform or, if the revenues were to move lower, on much less in entitlement cuts. In the supercommittee, the Democrats offered a plan with less than a trillion dollars in tax reform -- and more entitlement reforms than Obama was willing to agree to.

Boehner had about $150 billion in Medicare beneficiary cuts in his opening bid in the negotiations with the president, and he went down from there. In the supercommittee, Baucus offered $200 billion in Medicare beneficiary cuts...

These steps toward compromise by the Democrats, who swallowed hard in a serious effort to get something done, were far more than anything Republicans offered. Does it surprise anyone that Republicans would take a step further to the right in an effort to sink any deal and let the usual Republican "Obama can't get anything done" talking points continue? This has been their strategy from the start. And Gerson knows this. But why point the blame at a deadlocked "supercommittee" when you can just blame the President?

I won't bore you with anymore detail in Gerson's column (you can read it for yourself to get the full frontal asshattery) except for one line. Gerson asserts that the President "is simply in over his head." This was the same accusation hurled at President Obama on the supposed failed stimulus to stop our economy from hurdling over a cliff. Sorry for the bad timing, Mike, but maybe you should read the latest CBO report:

The economy would have been in much worse shape without the 2009 stimulus — which increased employment in the third quarter of this year by as many as 3.3 million full-time jobs, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office...

...The CBO figures released Tuesday estimate that the stimulus package raised the gross domestic product this past quarter by 0.3 percent-1.9 percent.

Yep, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted by this "in over his head" President is still stimulating the economy a year after its "end." We now know the recession we found ourselves in was much deeper and dire than anyone had estimated and had the stimulus been even larger, we might be in even better shape today. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good villain story, right Mr. Gerson?

Will Everyone Please Calm Down?

I was out of earshot of the televisions and the cable "news" outlets today (thankfully) and therefore out of earshot when the hair on fire freakout happened with a story based on those famous "anonymous sources" leaked that President Obama was ready to sign off on a $3 Trillion debt reduction deal with no increases in revenue. IEEEEE!!! Run into the streets with torches and pitchforks! Obama is selling out the poor! We knew it! He's not going to raise taxes! IEEEE!...

I found out when one of my faithful readers sent me an email with a link taking me to the Washington Post article and it's ridiculous first paragraph (emphasis mine):

President Obama and top House Republicans are deep in negotiations over a far-reaching plan to save $3 trillion over the next decade through sharp cuts in agency spending and politically painful changes to popular health and retirement programs, but without any immediate increase in taxes, Democratic congressional leaders reported Thursday.

Step away from the keyboard and take a breath. And think logically.

Why on earth would President Obama, while in a position of negotiating power as can be proven by poll after poll, just decide to give up on tax revenue increases when he and the administration have stated unequivocally that any part of a "grand bargain" would have to include tax revenues?

After reading the article, it sounds like a fake story designed to sabotage talks and put President Obama on the defensive since he's been getting favorable poll numbers on this issue. No one is being quoted, no one is taking ownership of these rumors, yet everyone is asking about it. Funny that.

According to my reader, he heard Oregon Congressman Pete DeFazio on the Thom Hartmann Show today tell Hartmann that Jared Bernstein had said the White House is catering to the independent voters who are worried mostly about the deficit, so there will be some cuts to "The Big Three," namely Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security "because Obama doesn't care where the money comes from." Of course, DeFazio wasn't at that meeting, and frankly, though I like DeFazio, that story sounds like a bowl full of shit to me.

News to DeFazio and anyone else not paying attention: the White House already has the independent vote. Independents don't trust the GOP led House in Congress.

Since the beginning of these talks, there has never been a time when the President or any of the White House spokesmen have ever denied that a grand bargain would include looking at restructuring Medicare and Social Security to strengthen them for future generations without making cuts to benefits. How this is interpreted at cuts is beyond me. Does cutting money to Medicare (like the ACA did by $500 billion in terms of fraud and abuse) equal automatic cuts in benefits?

From teabaggers to firebaggers, how does anyone know that this is the super secret "Obama wants to be Reagan" position without details? And how do you assume that position when everything you've heard from the White House is contrary to that line of thinking? When the fact that anything that would resemble trying to pass $3 Trillion in cuts with no revenue increases would never, ever pass in Congress?

But hey, this story did the job that it was supposed to. It filled another news cycle on a stalled story and caused the collective freakout of the MSM, the professional left, the Democratic politicians in Congress and the Twitterverse. It took the beltway insiders by storm. It caused President Obama to call a meeting of Democratic leaders of Congress - all based on a rumor.

David Broder Dies at 81

HuffPo: David Broder, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post political columnist whose even-handed treatment of Democrats and Republicans set him apart from the ideological warriors on the nation's op-ed pages, died Wednesday. He was 81.

...Broder, an Illinois native, was familiar to television viewers as a frequent panelist on NBC's "Meet the Press" Program. He appeared on the program more than 400 times, far more than any other journalist in the show's history.

Rrrruhh?!

Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain issued high praise for President Obama's Wednesday address that honored victims of the Arizona shootings.

..."Our political discourse should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so," McCain writes. "It probably asks too much of human nature to expect any of us to be restrained at all times by persistent modesty and empathy from committing rhetorical excesses that exaggerate our differences and ignore our similarities."

In all seriousness, I am glad that someone in a leadership position* in the Republican party actually came out to praise President Obama's address in Tucson. After hearing some positive response from the right regarding memorial service speech, most of them immediately went into their usual tones, completely missing the message.

While that was expected, it's good to see not only a prominent Republican, but the one man who has seemed the most bitter and contrarian after his 2008 presidential defeat, be the one to openly join the President in his message of civility.

(* When I say leadership position, I mean someone of seniority and stature, not an official position. Especially after seeing the newly elected Speaker of the House reject the notion that he can tell Birthers within his party occupying House seats to knock off the nonsense.)

What's Going On at the Washington Post?

The Washington Post is long removed from it's Woodward and Bernstein/Watergate days.  In the last couple of days alone, its editorial staff is shocked to discover that perhaps the new Republican majority in the House isn't as serious about debt reduction as they claim, despite their own journalists reporting on the hypocrisy, post an online poll asking the reader to prioritize issues that Congress should tackle while completely omitting "job creation" or "economy" as one of the choices until long after the poll was made available thereby skewing the numbers, and now publishes an article about Estonia's growing economy and their success story while they are in the middle of recovering from a depression.

Maybe Judith Miller should apply for a job there.

Olbermann Takes On Koppel, False Equivalency

Keith Olbermann responded to criticism from Ted Koppel in a Washington Post opinion piece lamenting the "death of real news." Shorter Keith: If it's the death of journalism you're ruing, you should have thought of that when you ignored the run up to Iraq and its aftermath instead of remaining silent for objectivity's sake. Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow didn't do that.

Quote of the Day

It is disingenuous for mainstream purveyors of incendiary far-right rhetoric to dismiss groups such as the Hutaree by saying that there are "crazies on both sides." This simply is not true.

...there has been explosive growth among far-right, militia-type groups that identify themselves as white supremacists, "constitutionalists," tax protesters and religious soldiers determined to kill people to uphold "Christian" values. ...we should never forget that the worst act of domestic terrorism ever committed in this country was authored by a member of the government-hating right wing: Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

It is dishonest for right-wing commentators to insist on an equivalence that does not exist. The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite.

~ Eugene Robinson, Washington Post

Quote of the Day

"The Rahm Emanuel that Obama hired is the poster child for the timid, pseudo-pragmatism that is inimical to the idealistic Obama agenda so many excited voters responded to last November. And it's a pragmatism that is absolutely killing the Democratic Party in the long run, because American voters have an intrinsic distrust of politicians they see as tacking with the polls or shying away from a fight."

~Dan Froomkin on the latest Obama administration sabotage and the recent Washington Post love affair with Rahm Emanuel.

Palin Wrote What?!

Escuse me while I wipe the tears from my eyes. I haven't been able to stop laughing at this statement: "Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post." Seriously? C'mon. Her name may be on it, but anyone who's paid any attention to Sarah Palin over the last 9 months has to realize that this did not come from the pen of Palin. Especially on the heels of her rambling resignation "speech" less than two weeks ago which began, "Hi Alaska."

Ezra Klein expounds on her op-ed explaining her cap and trade opposition:

It's probably a bit kind to say that Sarah Palin "wrote" this. There are no words in all capital letters. There are no sports metaphors. There is nothing at all like "*((Gotta put First Things First))*." The stylistic and grammatical tics on display in last week's speech are totally absent. Sarah Palin signed her name to this. Or at least let someone else do so.

But that's not all that's missing. The term "global warming" is absent. So is "climate change." It's a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon at everything but never mentions fires, or a column that condemns surgeons for sticking sharp things into people but never mentions illness.

You could no more argue with this op-ed than you could drive a car made out of candy.

We've obviously not heard the last of Sarah Palin. She is now putting her name to op-eds in the same paper as Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson.

I do have one question: who wrote that op-ed for her?

Froomkin Hired by HuffPo

According to Glenn Greenwald:

...[Dan] Froomkin to be [Huffington Post's] Washington Bureau Chief and regular columnist/blogger. Froomkin will oversee a staff of five reporters and an Assistant Editor, guide The Huffington Post's Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page. I learned last night of the hiring and spoke to both Arianna Huffington and Froomkin this morning.

...Froomkin was fired by The Washington Post a little more than two weeks ago after writing an online column for almost six years that was one of that newspaper's most popular.

The old media establishment keeps having heart palpitations every time another newspaper goes down failing to realize that boneheaded moves like these are causing their demise.

Stenographers to Liars

posted by Armadillo Joe

Considered against the backdrop of the kerfuffle between Nico Pitney and Dana Milbank this week (appropriately covered by Broadway Carl's DBOTW yesterday), Dan Froomkin's firing makes perfect sense. The big, fat, well-trained and meekly compliant traditional media is accustomed to strolling the cocktail party circuit in Washington D.C. like some roly-poly dog at a suburban pool party trolling for scraps off the grill. They fear anything that threatens to muss up that really cozy deal they've got for themselves wherein they unquestioningly re-print the lies of those in power in exchange for "Access" which gives them the panache to be blow-dried media celebrities which gets them on the list to receive the lies which they re-print, etc...

Now, whether those lies bore out or not, whether they proved correct or not on a factual level (to say nothing of the underlying rightness and wrongness on a moral level) was less important than taking all possible measures not to upset the very lucrative, reputation-enhancing apple cart. So Milbank gets his knickers in a twist because a DFH (a blogging DFH, popular with the rabble) gets to speak with the president over a room full of people who have scraped and bowed and crawled through shit to be among the soulless but powerful chosen few. All that guy ever did was talk to a people in Iran, collect sources, do his homework and act like he was a journalist or something. He never actually ate a cocktail weenie at any cozy little Washington parties, so he's just a nobody and a show-off who won't play ball.

And the Dirty Fucking Hippie Dan Froomkin (I mean, hell, look at the guy) simply never wanted to play ball either, which was fine when the captain of the red team was in the White House because Froomkin got to be a sop to all his fellow DFH's on the Inter-Webs while Very Important People went about the Very Important Business of Running The World.

But even after one of his moonbat lefties took the White House and all those DFH's invaded Congress, he continued to have -- you know -- standards, evenly applied, as though he had proved right about torture and Iraq and the economic meltdown and the domestic surveillance and all those Establishment-types had been proven wrong. Over and over and over again.

Hey, man, your guy's in office now -- ease up, OK? You're making us look bad.

So he had to go. And he does go. He goes out in a blaze of glory.

And he names names:

I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn't have and credibility he didn't deserve.

[...]

The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney's lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby's lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn't as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it's now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don't know.

Will somebody hire this guy, please?

Douchebag of the Week: Dana Milbank

President Obama's press conference last Monday afternoon apparently ruffled the feathers of Washington press insiders when he called on The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney for a question regarding Iran. Anyone following Pitney on a regular basis knows that he has spent the last two weeks trying to contact Iranian protesters on the ground through various technological means, like Twitter and Facebook.

When called upon, Pitney asked, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian. We solicited questions on tonight from people who are still courageous enough to be communicating online. And one of them wanted to ask you this: Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of -- of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?"

Pretty pertinent question, don't you think? Well Dana Milbank didn't. In fact, Milbank probably didn't even hear the question because he was so incensed that a mere blogger would be called upon instead of, well the Washington Post's Dana Milbank for example, perhaps to ask about President Obama's bathing suit paparazzi photo again. Titillating.

Milbank immediately took to his blog after the press conference and inaccurately "reported" the exchange between Pitney and the White House and spent the rest of the week trashing President Obama and his "staged" press conference, while Pitney continued the work of a real journalist getting as much information as possible from sources literally on the streets of Iran.

Staged press conferences, Dana? How quickly we forget Jeff Gannon. Or is that James Guckert? How quickly we forget the cabal of Fox reporters and conservative pundits doing the bidding of the Bush White House; an exclusive little group including the repugnant Neil Boortz and the crying lunatic, Glenn Beck.

Pitney then appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources, in an apparent "pre-arranged, staged" ambush flanked on either side by Milbank and the Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter, to accuse him of "collusion" with the White House, but Nico held his own, called Milbank out on his bathing suit silliness and slapped the whiny little bitch into next week.




According to multiple sources, at the end of the segment Milbank leaned in to Pitney and said, "You're such a dick." Perhaps if Milbank would do some actual journalistic work instead of the equivalent of a political gossip column for a newspaper who's credibility is continually fading (see: Dan Froomkin firing), maybe he'll get called on to ask a question. As long as it's not: "President Obama: Boxers or briefs?"

The Washington Post's faux reporter, Dana Milbank: Douchebag of the Week.

_______________
Adding... I would be remiss not to remind readers of the staged news conference conducted by FEMA during the California wildfires in October of 2007, and this dipshit Milbank is seriously going to call Pitney a staged White House plant? Fuck you, Dana.

This just hasn't been the Republicans' week

Cross-posted by Fraulein

Coming hot on the heels of "Bobby" Jindal's spectacularly awful performance in delivering the GOP response to President Obama's recent address to Congress, now we have news that "Joe" the "Plumber"'s recent Washington book signing event was something of a dud:

About 11 people wandered into the rows of seats set up hopefully in the basement of a downtown Border's bookstore to hear Joe speak. Joe addressed them from behind a lectern and with a microphone, but that seemed unnecessarily formal.

Even the Washington Post can't keep the snark in check on this one. Classic:

It's fair to say Joe's appearance at Borders at 18th and L streets wasn't eagerly anticipated. People just kind of shuffled over when Joe strode in with Thomas N. Tabback, the co-author of "Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream." Annie Hickman, a young woman whom Wurzelbacher called "sweetie" during a brief Q&A, was browsing when the PA announced that Joe was in the house. "I'm missing pottery class for this," she said.

You know what I especially love about the rise and fall of this gormless nitwit? The fact that he, like so many other intellectual midgets before him, has been hailed by the Republican party as the embodiment of a "real American." As if those of us who, for example, manage to pay our taxes and speak in coherent sentences, should by all rights pack up and move to France. The irony is breathtaking: this guy is somehow the real thing, according to the right-wingers, yet he goes by a fake name and lied about being a licensed plumber. It's as if there was a Women Who are Proud of Having Real Boobs organization, and they appointed Pamela Anderson as their spokesperson. Makes no sense. Just ain't right.

Luckily for the rest of us, it looks like old "Joe," or Sam, or whatever the hell his actual name is, is about to shuffle off into the obscurity he so richly deserves.

Cross-posted at Purple Ink

Obama Fights Back - Washington Post Editorial

This is something we're not used to seeing from Presidents. I can't remember if President Bush wrote anything, speeches, editorials, a book report on "My Pet Goat"?

President Barack Obama took his pen to paper and wrote an editorial regarding the economic struggle that we find ourselves in and the urgency of passing the Economic Recovery Bill currently in the Senate in the Washington Post today.

In recent days, there have been misguided criticisms of this plan that echo the failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can meet our enormous tests with half-steps and piecemeal measures; that we can ignore fundamental challenges such as energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject these theories, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change. They know that we have tried it those ways for too long. And because we have, our health-care costs still rise faster than inflation. Our dependence on foreign oil still threatens our economy and our security. Our children still study in schools that put them at a disadvantage. We've seen the tragic consequences when our bridges crumble and our levees fail.

Now, some will say that this is beneath the President. Why is he writing editorials in the Washington Post? The answer is because he can. I don't know if it's my perception or if the media is following Obama with a fine tooth comb, but I don't ever recall any President having or maybe wanting this much media access to bring his message directly to the American people. There he was on all the nightly newscasts answering for the Daschle withdrawal. Have you ever seen anything like it? With this President the words, "The buck stops here," isn't just a funny little catchphrase. He actually means it.

Some will suggest that the editorial sounds like fearmongering. I vehemently disagree. The President's editorial isn't fearmongering if there is truth to it. There are no false qualifiers here, no deception, no lies to persuade. We are in deep, deep trouble and every day we wait it gets worse. There is no falsehood to that. There's a difference between laying out the dire circumstances for all to see and fearmonging to scare up votes by saying something like, "...if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States." See the difference?

I also disagree with those who think that President Obama didn't have to send this message. So far, this recovery bill has been based on the framing of the argument. The Republicans have framed the debate on this bill as "pork laden." Rush Limbaugh calls it "porkulus" in front of 14 million weekly listeners. (And he certainly know something about porkulus.) The GOP has capitalized and zeroed in on a fraction of one percent of the recovery bill for their political advantage and framed the entire bill it as a pork laden wish list. They public thinks it looks like pork because the Democrats are sitting back while the Republicans, with the blatant or inadvertent help of the media, are framing it as wasteful spending. And if the public gets that perception, then that's what they'll believe because the media is never wrong. Where is the rebuttal from Democratic leaders explaining why these measures are in the bill?

$200 million for Medicaid on contraception will save $60 billion in government medical costs in the future. Sounds like a good investment. $21 million for the National Mall will put arguably thousands to work to repair the crumbling foundations of our national monuments. But the GOP calls this "$21 million for grass." The list goes on and on, and instead of the Democratic leaders rebutting these ridiculous pork notions, they are either nervously wringing their hands in silence or aren't getting the air time to rebut. The only Congressman I saw defending contraception was Robert Wexler (D-FL), who explained it rationally and logically on Hardball with Chris Matthews. And when he was done, he still got a "I don't understand what you're talking about," from an obtuse Phil Gingrey, the same Congressman who's apologized to Rush Limbaugh for his brief moment of clarity.

Maybe the President did make one mistake. In the interest of bipartisanship, President Obama compromised too much; he backed off to a fault with initial GOP resistance and it was perceived as a validation of Republican complaints. But what happened? After he accommodated them, House Republicans rejected the bill anyway. And the more it went on, the more we saw the political endgame that they would have rejected it no matter what the President did just to send a message.

Well, now it's the President's turn to send a message. It's the Democratic leaders' turn to send a message and make the obstructionists decide that if they really want to fight this thing, they're going to have to filibuster for it. No pansy ass cloture votes. Make them filibuster.

The only mistake the President made regarding the Washington Post editorial was not going far enough. This was a statement that needed to be made on prime time television in front of a national audience.

Must Reads

Joe Conason: Obama's Shrewd Choices

Robert Pear, NY Times: Bush Aides Rush to Enact a Safety Rule Obama Opposes

Ceci Connelly, Washington Post: US Health Care -'Not Getting What We Pay For'

Economically Sound

Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America. AIG loses 50% of its stock value. The Dow loses another 300 points today.

John McCain today: "The fundamentals of our economy are still strong."

But it doesn't stop there. Donald Luskin, a self proclaimed economic advisor to John McCain wrote the following on the economy in Sundays Washington Post. We're not just a "nation of whiners," according to Luskin, we're "a nation of exaggerators" as well.

I wonder if Luskin is wishing his article hadn't been printed right about now?

UPDATE (9/16/08 6:50am):

John McCain thinks we're stupid. In response to McCain's "fundamentals are still strong" quote regarding the economy while he was stumping yesterday, Barack Obama shot back from his campaign by asking, "What economy is John McCain talking about?!" Looking for a way to squirm out of his gaffe and since he is in full liar mode anyway, McCain said he was talking about "the American worker." Those small business owners and entrepreneurs, they're what he meant by the fundamentals. Yes, as the the Dow closed -504 points yesterday, McCain thought he could cast blame on Obama and how he doesn't believe in the the American worker.

Oh, and Sarah Palin started using the "Bridge to Nowhere" line again that she stopped using while in Alaska. I guess she doesn't realize that "national spotlight" includes Alaska where she was able to reign in obscurity until cynically chosen to be the GOP running mate.

Spies R Us

As if our Constitutional rights haven't been pissed upon enough, here comes another doozy.

U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules
More Federal Intelligence Changes Planned

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

... law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists. They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

...Michael German, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the proposed rule may be misunderstood as permitting police to collect intelligence even when no underlying crime is suspected, such as when a person gives money to a charity that independently gives money to a group later designated a terrorist organization.

Excuse me while I go vomit.

Surprise! Surprise!

Petraeus: Iraqis Not Making "Sufficient Progress"

Well slap my ass and call me Sally! More proof that the surge "worked."

Petraeus, who is preparing to testify to Congress next month on the Iraq war, said in an interview that "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or in the provision of basic public services.

The general's comments appeared to be his sternest to date on Iraqis' failure to achieve political reconciliation...

And before you go making up excuses about reduced violence, blah, blah, blah, let us not forget why we started the surge in the first place.

George W. Bush, January 10th, 2007:

I've made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq's other leaders that America's commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people -- and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: "The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation."

...A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation's political life, the government will reform de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.

Our purpose for the surge was to give the Iraqi government more time to get its shit together. That hasn't even begun to happen. In fact, while our troops were dying over the summer, the Iraqi Parliament took a vacation. A fucking vacation! The surge has not worked. No benchmarks met equals failure.

George McGovern Calls For Impeachment

In Sunday's Washington Post, former US Representative, Senator, WWII veteran, and 1972 Democratic nominee for President George McGovern wrote an op-ed calling for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Excerpts from:
Why I Believe George Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

...American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law...

...Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster [New Orleans/Hurricane Katrina] in U.S. history.

...Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

This case has been made before (not by those in the Democratic leadership, unfortunately) but it's nice to hear it from someone who lived through and was very close to Watergate.

Of course McGovern was swiftboated in 1972 as well. The ghoul that never dies wrote during the 1972 campaign that an unnamed democratic senator told him, "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot," the Senator said. "Once middle America - Catholic middle America, in particular - finds this out, he’s dead."

McGovern never shook the label of candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid" and lost in a landslide. The intrepid reporter who wrote the story? Bob "Nosferatu" Novak.