Must Reads

Diane Farsetta: Pentagon Rejects Its Own Pundit Program Whitewash

Margaret Flowers, M.D.: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer Health Care

Jim Hightower: Populism is not a style, it's a people's rebellion against corporate power

Glenn Greenwald: If the US Does It, It's Not Torture - The NYT's Definition of Blinding American Exceptionalism

Digby: Exceptional Dissonance

Hilzoy: "I Don't Believe I've Ever Met A Homosexual"

Rude Pundit: Big Gay Friday

Obama's Accomplishments?

The next time someone tries to tell you that Barack Obama is all words and no substance, just let them know that they're lazy. If they really wanted to know what he's accomplished, all they'd have to is hit a computer and Google it.

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings does quite nicely with the list below. I suggest you print it out and keep it in your wallet for future reference when speaking to a Hillary supporter or a McCain wingnut who comes up with the false "substance" argument.

...I follow some issues pretty closely, and over and over again, Barack Obama kept popping up, doing really good substantive things. There he was, working for nuclear non-proliferation and securing loose stockpiles of conventional weapons, like shoulder-fired missiles. There he was again, passing what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" -- though not as strong as Obama would have liked. Look -- he's over there, passing a bill that created a searchable database of recipients of federal contracts and grants, proposing legislation on avian flu back when most people hadn't even heard of it, working to make sure that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were screened for traumatic brain injury and to prevent homelessness among veterans, successfully fighting a proposal by the VA to reexamine all PTSD cases in which full benefits had been awarded, working to ban no-bid contracts in Katrina reconstruction, and introducing legislation to criminalize deceptive political tactics and voter intimidation.

This doesn't even begin to discuss the success he's had at bipartisan legislation that most cynics think is impossible to acheive.

...bad bipartisanship is the kind practiced by Joe Lieberman. Bad bipartisans are so eager to establish credentials for moderation and reasonableness that they go out of their way to criticize their (supposed) ideological allies and praise their (supposed) opponents. They also compromise on principle, and when their opponents don't reciprocate, they compromise some more, until over time their positions become indistinguishable from those on the other side.

This isn't what Obama does.

Definitely read the longer complete post.

UPDATE: I Refuse To Buy Into The Obama Hype (now a supporter)