Must Reads

Gin and Tacos: An Open Letter to Tim Pawlenty

Joe Conason: Republicans revive a debate they lost, badly

Chez Pazienza: The Notorious "Big"

Glenn Greenwald: The lynch-mob mentality

Derrick Z. Jackson: The double standard at CBS

Ezra Klein: It's just you, Democrats

Gail Collins: No Holds Barred

President Obama's Weekly Address - February 6, 2010

Opening Doors for Small Business

The Complete, Unedited Bill O'Reilly/Jon Stewart Video...

... in which Jon Stewart reveals who the real pinhead is. What I don't understand is why Bill-O (to his credit) would allow the full version of the interview to be posted online for an easy comparison of what actually made the show and further shows his thin skin. The aired interview was more heavily edited than a James O'Keefe ACORN video.

This Is Just Embarrassing

This is an actual political ad.



Carly Fiorina was fired by Hewlett-Packard. Now we know why.

And They Want To Be Taken Seriously, Part 2

Martha Johnson is voted in UNANIMOUSLY, 96-0, after a political waiting game.

The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to confirm Martha N. Johnson as head of the General Services Administration, nearly 10 months after she was first nominated to head the federal agency.

Upon assuming office, Johnson "will become the first permanent Administrator of the General Services Administration in nearly two years."

Earlier in 2009, Johnson was unanimously approved by members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. But a single senator, Republican Kit Bond from Missouri, has used his symbolic 'privilege' to hold up consideration of Johnson's nomination since last summer. The delay was meant to pressure GSA administrators to approve a $175 million federal building project in Kansas City.

ADDING... Party of fiscal conservatives, indeed.

Shelby Blocks All Obama Nominations In The Senate Over AL Earmarks

Maverick!

Then - John McCain, October, 2006: "The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, 'Senator, we ought to change the policy,' then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it."

That time has come.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates: ...said Tuesday that he supports President Obama's decision to seek the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy prohibiting gays from serving openly in the military and has appointed a "high-level working group" to figure out how to do it.  

..."I fully support the president's decision," Gates said. "The question before us is not whether the military prepares to make this change, but how we ... best prepare for it. We have received our orders from the commander in chief and we are moving out accordingly."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen: "I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy that forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens," Mullen said. "For me, personally, it comes down to integrity -- theirs as individuals and ours as an institution."

And now what does the Arizona maverick, who may be fighting for his political life this November, have to say about it?

McCain declared himself "disappointed" in the testimony. "At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," he said bluntly, before describing it as "imperfect but effective."

What a pillar of integrity is John McCain.

President Obama's Democratic Question Time

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression -- we don't tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don't put in place any insurance reforms, we don't mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they're doing now because we don't want to stir up Wall Street -- the result is going to be the same. I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place."

...if our response ends up being, you know, because we don't want to -- we don't want to stir things up here, we're just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don't know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don't know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us."

Lieberman Strikes Again!

Nothing shows human compassion, understanding the rule of law and foreign affairs more than an elected official who is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee making waterboarding jokes.

On foreign affairs, I understand what Guantanamo has come to mean in world opinion. But we can fix that, without closing Guantanamo.

All we have to do is change its name. How about calling it the Richard B. Cheney Resort and Rehabilitation Spa?

I bet the water sports will be really great.

I'd be happy to make Joe Lieberman a reservation.

And They Want To Be Taken Seriously

Markos Moulitsas at the Daily Kos just tweeted about a new Republican poll he's still scouring over.  Here are a couple of stats via Twitter:

Just got back big poll of 2,000 Republicans. Gotta digest it, but 39% of them want Obama impeached.
~ 63% think Obama is a socialist, only 42% believe he was born in US, 21% think ACORN stole 2008 elections.
~ Actually, on the "ACORN stealing 2008 election for Obama" Q, 21% say yes, 55% say "not sure"
~ 53% think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Obama.
~ 23% want to secede from US.
~ 73% think gay men and women shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schools
~ 31% want contraceptives outlawed

This is a national poll taken by 2,000 Republicans. And this party wants to be taken seriously. But I suppose this is what happens when you watch nothing but Fox News Channel all day and Glenn Beck is your hero.

I'm sure he'll wrap this up in a post. Stay tuned.

Quote of the Day

"I think almost every American here pays much less in taxes than you ought to. I'm going to go back and try to raise the taxes of most of the people who attended here."

~ Congressman Barney Frank while in attendance at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

McCain Economy Would've Been No Different - UPDATED

If things had turned out differently on a November night in 2008 and we had the pleasure of a McCain/Palin administration, the record deficit would have been the same or perhaps worse. So says John McCain's former economic policy advisor.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin argued that under McCain's stewardship economic policy would have been strikingly different than under Obama -- with a much smaller stimulus bill and government expenditures going down as opposed to up.

But the former Congressional Budget Office director did acknowledge that, even with these changes, the country "probably would still have a record deficit" as is projected under the Obama administration.

And we all know why.

...many of the deficit problems the current administration faces today are traced directly back to the policies of its predecessors. This, indeed, seems to be implicit in Holtz-Eakin's acknowledgment.

In December 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that the then-$1.4 trillion annual deficit run by the government under Obama had much to do with the Bush administration's package of tax cuts, the wars it launched in Iraq and Afghanistan and its response to the recession.

I wonder if McCain would have "blamed it on Bush"?


UPDATE (4:15pm): Of course, no sooner does President Obama release his budget than The Maverick gets busy twiddling his thumbs to come up with this asinine tweet:



Maybe he should have spoken to Holtz-Eakin...

Colbert at the Grammys

This was the highlight of the show (for me anyway).



ADDING... Congratulations to Stephen Colbert's Grammy win for Best Comedy Album.

Cartoon of the Day

Colbert Rips GOP Response to State of the Union

I don't know if too much was made of this subject as I've been burning the candle at both ends and haven't had much time to watch the Pinheads of Punditry this past week. But I was a little taken aback by the obvious theatrics of the GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union.

Seriously? They went down in flames with Bobby "Mr. Rogers" Jindal that last time out, so they thought, Hey why not just have a live, partisan audience of our own? I'm sure they would have settled for an applause track if they could have gotten away with it, but instead did the next best thing: pretend a white guy who'd been in office for eleven days was the president. And top it off with as many diverse faces behind him while he spoke to an all-caucasian crowd as possible. That's a great idea!

Thankfully, Stephen Colbert took it upon himself to point all of that out.

President Obama's House Republican Conference Remarks

Enjoy the smackdown.




(C-SPAN has disabled embedding for this particular video, so clicking on the photo will send you to their site where you can watch the full conference remarks and the questions and answers that followed.)

Must Reads

Bob Cesca: Progressives vs. The President

David M. Herszenhorn: Fact Check: Obama and House Republicans

Howard Zinn: How I Want to Be Remembered...

Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman: Justice Official Clears Bush Lawyers in Torture Memo Probe

driftglass: Where Yesterday Has Been Exiled

Matt Taibbi: Populism: Just Like Racism!

Eric Boehlert: So who's going to fact-check PolitiFact?

Norman Lear: Dear Rush...

Home of the Brave, My Ass

ter⋅ror⋅ism  [ter-uh-riz-uhm] – noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization.

The reluctance and pitiful backtracking of political figures opposed to having the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York is proof that the terrorists have already won. Cowards like NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who beat his chest not two months ago in favor of having the trials in Manhattan, Senator Chuck Schumer, and countless others citing the cost and inconvenience as a factor is an ass covering tactic.

And those worried about the financial cost of the trial to New York City should petition that part of the tab be picked up by the federal government.  Besides the fact that in my opinion, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's expensive plan including rooftop snipers, random vehicle checkpoints and a virtual shutdown of lower Manhattan is over the top and only breeds fear in those who were running scared to begin with.

The story of how prominent New York officials seemed to have so quickly moved from a kind of “bring it on” bravado to an “anywhere but here” involves many factors, including a new anxiety about terrorism after the attempted airliner bombing on Christmas Day.

...“This will be one more stroke for Al Qaeda’s propaganda,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

No one whined about the cost of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. No one complanied about the inconvenience in the Richard Reid case. But now the KSM fiasco, which began with simpering masses of flesh not wanting Guantanamo detainees "setting foot on US soil", as if they had some kind of magical powers to break out of supermax prisons, has escalated to ridiculously epic proportions and ultimately, money did the talking.

...New York real estate executives were raising concerns with the Obama administration, according to Mr. Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Spinola said he had received calls and e-mail messages from the board’s members. Residential real estate brokers were “going berserk,” as he put it, worried that they would no longer be able to sell apartments downtown.

Commercial brokers feared they would not be able to lease office space.

Screw justice if it's going to affect the bottom line, right? Patriots indeed.

President Obama's Weekly Address - January 30, 2010

Reining in Budget Deficits

J.D. Salinger Dies at 91

"There is a marvelous peace in not publishing," J.D. Salinger told The New York Times in 1974. "Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

NY Times: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.

Fuck You, Michael Bloomberg

Then:

“I support the Obama Administration’s decision to prosecute 9/11 terrorists here,” Bloomberg said. “It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered. We have hosted terrorism trials before, including the trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.”

Bloomberg expressed no concerned that the trial will make the city a bigger target for terrorists.

“I have great confidence that the NYPD, with federal authorities, will handle security expertly. The NYPD is the best police department in the world and it has experience dealing with high-profile terrorism suspects and any logistical issues that may come up during the trials,” Bloomberg said.

Now:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has changed his mind about holding terror trials in his city, saying they should be conducted in a more secure location.

..."It's going to cost an awful lot of money and disturb an awful lot of people," Bloomberg said at a news conference Wednesday. "My hope is that the attorney general and the president decide to change their mind."

You fucking coward.

You know what? I'm not even going to excuse Bloomberg with cowardice. This is political CYA right after this fuckball was elected to a third term (by changing the term limits law)  and spending $108 million on his re-election campaign when he has absolutely no real skin in the game. The cost of extra security will be completely forgotten once Khalid Sheik Mohammed is convicted and shows proof positive that our justice system works.

As a New Yorker, I want to see KSM tried at the scene of the crime. It would be an appropriate and  fitting end despite way 9/11 has been handled so far, with Osama Bin Laden "wanted dead or alive" debacles, invading a country that had nothing to do with the worst terrorist attack on US soil, interminable delays on the construction of a new complex at Ground Zero, and even the remains of 9/11 victims possibly being used to fill potholes because of the haphazard way the clean up took place, thanks to Rudy Giuliani.

So fuck you,  Mike Bloomberg for being a snivelling, little, poll watching coward.