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.