This coming Tuesday will be a referendum on Obama. This coming Tuesday will not be a referendum on Obama.
So there.
This man was nominated to be George W. Bush's U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security on Rudy Giuliani's recommendation.This month, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon went to Washington to introduce As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, his autobiography that, according to the Moon-owned Washington Times, "recounts the joys and challenges, the teachable moments and the monumental experiences of his life - much of it spent as a spiritual leader".
The newspaper reported that Moon received "congratulatory greetings" from Senator Joe Lieberman, former secretary of state Alexander Haig and former president George H W Bush, "hand-delivered by his son Neil Bush".
Consider the precedent that would be set if a major piece of social legislation were to be passed with a states' rights provision. Imagine, for example, if Franklin Roosevelt had signed the first Social Security law with the proviso that any states with Republican governors and legislatures could exempt themselves from its coverage...
That issue was settled in the realm of economic policy during FDR's second term, after enough new Supreme Court justices were seated to uphold the New Deal measures an earlier conservative majority had struck down. In the area of civil rights, Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress put an end to the doctrine of states' rights.
President Obama didn't have to go to Dover. George W. Bush never went we're told. Obama could've stayed back at the White House and kept some distance from the war--almost suggesting it is the responsibility of the former president. But instead he chose to put himself firmly in front as the Commander in Chief. He chose to create an image that will likely endure through his presidency and as part of his legacy. What a dramatic contrast to images from the last presidency of George W. Bush flying over Katrina or "Mission Accomplished" day.
Unfortunately, although it is only a few hours since the president returned from Dover, we should expect that the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks of the world will start whining about the president's visit accusing him of exploiting the event. Their script is so predictable that I can write this just after 9 AM with confidence that they'll do it. But our president should always be reminding the American people of the sacrifice our troops make.
I don't doubt that the number of H1N1 cases out there is being hyped. And for many of the same reasons that AIDS was—and still is—hyped in Africa. Everything in Africa's called AIDS. The reason is they get aid money for it. AIDS is the biggest pile of-the biggest pot they throw money into.
Maybe it was just lousy timing, but many customers of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina are ticked off at the mail they've received recently from the state's largest insurer.
First, they learned their rates will rise by an average of 11 percent next year.
Next, they opened a slick flier from the insurer urging them to send an enclosed pre-printed, postage-paid note to Sen. Kay Hagan denouncing what the company says is unfair competition that would be imposed by a government-backed insurance plan. The so-called public option is likely to be considered by Congress in the health-care overhaul debate.
"No matter what you call it, if the federal government intervenes in the private health insurance market, it's a slippery slope to a single-payer system," the BCBS flier read. "Who wants that?"
Plenty of people, it turns out.
Indignant Blue Cross customers have rebelled against the insurer's message, complaining that their premium dollars have funded such a campaign.
Sarah Palin is the owner of a small marketing business called "Pie Spy" that was founded during her last few months as Alaska governor, according to financial records released on Tuesday.
...the controversial radio host slammed Obama as "this little boy, this little man-child president whose primary job, if you will, in life has been leisure. This guy is more practiced at leisure than anything else."
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
Sen. Lieberman has long been known to cultivate the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, which provide jobs in his home state and contributions to his campaign fund. But he has literally been sleeping with one of their Washington representatives ever since his wife, Hadassah, joined Hill & Knowlton last year. The legendary lobbying and PR firm hired her as a “senior counselor” in its “health and pharmaceuticals practice.”
This news marked Hadassah Lieberman’s return to consulting after more than a decade of retirement. “I have had a life-long commitment to helping people gain better health care,” she said in the press release announcing her new job. “I am excited about the opportunity to work with the talented team at Hill & Knowlton to counsel a terrific stable of clients toward that same goal.”
It would be uplifting to imagine that Hill & Knowlton—after spending the past decade as a defendant in tobacco class-action lawsuits because of its role in propaganda disputing the deadly effects of smoking—is now devoted to improving everybody’s health. More likely, the firm remains devoted to improving the profits of its clientele, which has historically included Enron, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Saudis, Kuwaitis, American International Group and Boeing.
When a senator’s wife works for one of the capital’s largest lobby shops, appearances tend to matter. In this case, something happened immediately that didn’t look very good.
Beck: Did you ever read Pravda?
Laffer: I did read Pravda, as a matter of fact.
Beck: Did you read that? Where they're like, 'What is wrong with the Republicans?' We're watching what happened to Russia -- Pravda gives us more truth than the American press!
"I don't see how you can be president without relying on the Almighty," he said, referring perhaps to Dick Cheney. "I can tell you that one of the most amazing surprises of the presidency was the fact that people's prayers affected me. I can't prove it to you. But I can tell you some days were great, some days not so great. But every day was joyous."
"America is in trouble. When your grandchildren ask you why you didn't do something [to save America], be able to tell them you voted for Doug Hoffman."
Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party’s big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.
The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties.
So coach Brad Childress dressed up like a female flight attendant, high heels, wig, blue hose, wig...and still a beard on the flight.
I'm told Childress had given a little lecture earlier to the team, reminding them to show the utmost respect to all flight attendants.
Those whose battle cry is "Give the generals what they need" are actually saying "Give the generals what they want" -- which is not responsible policymaking. President Obama's protracted review of all the options is precisely the right approach. We have gone to war in a hurry once too often of late.
The war in Afghanistan is eminently more winnable than was Vietnam. The Taliban is far from universally liked or admired. Still, the war will require more than a significant commitment of troops and, of course, money...But the ultimate in realism is for the president to gauge himself and who he is: Does he have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to continue to be an unpopular war? Will he send additional troops, but hedge by not sending enough -- so that the dying will be in vain?
CNN, which invented the cable news network more than two decades ago, will hit a new competitive low with its prime-time programs in October, finishing fourth – and last – among the cable news networks...
...CNN’s programs were behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but even its own sister network HLN
Separate helicopter crashes killed 14 Americans in insurgent-wracked Afghanistan on Monday, the U.S. military said. It was one of the deadliest days of the war for U.S. troops.
I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that [Afghanistan] report before they handed it off to Obama.
In the United States, three banks hold almost 34% of the nation's deposits, four banks issue 50% of the country's mortgages, and the five largest credit card lenders control 74% of the market. These companies have a stranglehold on our wallets. And as we've seen, when they make bad decisions, they can take the whole economy down with them.
Iraqi hospital officials say at least 91 people have been killed and 250 wounded in twin car bombings that appeared to target government buildings in downtown Baghdad.
The powerful blasts went off less than a minute apart Sunday in parking lots near the headquarters of the Baghdad provincial administration and the Ministry of Justice building.
There were so many wounded that even civilian cars were pressed into service to bring the casualties to area hospitals.
Appliance maker Electrolux announced Friday that it would close two Iowa plants by spring 2011, putting 850 people out of work as operations are moved to Mexico.
Electrolux Major Appliances North America [ed. Swedish company, but North American Division apparently made the call] said it would close the Webster City plant by early 2011 and a smaller facility in Jefferson by late 2010.
"So why do you beat up on people if you already know? I don't know, because I don't beat up on 'em. I refuse to participate. I don't like it, so I don't do it," Thomas said during an appearance before law students at the University of Alabama.
"The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults," Teena D. Moody, the study's first author and UCLA researcher, said in a statement.
In Playbook today, Mike Allen reports that “friends and associates” are encouraging Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to run for president in 2012:
“Ailes knows how to frame an issue better anybody and that’s what we need now,” says one Ailes friend who is encouraging him to run. Frank Luntz, for one, tells Playbook that Ailes could be a force if does it. “I have known Roger Ailes for 29 years,” says Luntz. “No one knows how to win better than Roger.”
No reason to suspect media bias at all. Not. one. reason.
Alex Cook at Gawker reaches Pareene level accuracy with this pithy summary of what this laughable prospect is really all about and how only a complete tool like Mike Allen could fall for it and push the notion:
But here's the joke: The White House's decision to delegitimize Fox News isn't intended to delegitimize Fox News. It is intended to elevate them into a political force, to fill the vacuum in the GOP leadership. By spinning a "White House v. Fox News" narrative, they've managed to temporarily supersede the "White House v. GOP" narrative, thereby making Fox News the de facto political opposition. Which is what both sides want: Fox News for money and viewers, and the White House because they like the idea of having an opposition that is noxious, untruthful, combative, angry, emotionally unstable, and subject to an unyielding financial incentive to be ever moreso. In that meta-world of jujitsu message wars—if you were trapped, Tron-like, inside Allen's foul mind—an Ailes candidacy makes perfect sense.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been booked for yet another Sunday talk show appearance this weekend — this time on CBS’ Face The Nation. Despite a “wildly unsuccessful presidential campaign” last year and his comparative irrelevancy in the U.S. Senate, this will mark the 15th time McCain has appeared on a Sunday talk show since January.
Defend Fox from whom? Fox's flagship 6 o'clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I'm not on.)Well, it must be empirically true then.
Research 2000 for Daily Kos, New York's 23rd District, 10/19/09-10/21/09, Likely Voters, MoE +/- 4%
Bill Owens (D) 35
DeDe Scozzafava (R) 30
Doug Hoffman (C) 23
As promised earlier in the week, DK polls the contentious three-way battle in upstate New York to replace Republican Congressman John McHugh. Our findings, as it happens, mirror fairly closely the results of the other public poll (PDF file) in the race, which was released last week by Siena College.
Democrat Bill Owens is rapidly becoming the beneficiary of a brutal schism between the GOP and movement conservatives, and it is growing more plausible that the Democrats may pick up yet another House seat as a result.
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa – A woman surprised by a man in the front room of her home near Council Bluffs grabbed a plastic toy bat and hit him repeatedly until he ran out the front door.
A Minnesota man has pleaded guilty to driving his motorized La-Z-Boy chair while drunk. A criminal complaint says 62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson told police he left a bar in the northern Minnesota town of Proctor on his chair after drinking eight or nine beers.
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Peale said she got a chance to talk with both Laura Bush and George Bush.
“I saw Laura, and she looked up and said, ‘Pat, I can’t believe you came all the way from Gainesville,’” she said.
She and some companions also managed to get a few photos with both the Bushs.
George Bush, stopping by to talk for a moment with Peale and some of his Crawford neighbors, made a promise, she said.
“He said, ‘We love you and we’re going to be seeing a lot of you now,’” Peale said Bush told them.
Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors and wannabe arms dealer (he saved Missourians from having to make the hard choice between a pickup truck and an assault rifle this summer by giving away free AK-47s with purchase of a truck), is now claiming that he's canceling his Kansas City Chiefs season tickets because the NFL supposedly blocked Limbaugh's attempt to buy the St. Louis Rams.
Muller told the Cybercast News Service that Limbaugh was the reason he first went to an NFL game. Muller claimed that he heard Limbaugh endorse the NFL on his radio program in the '80s. Muller supposedly talked to his wife, and they "gave up everything in our life at the time [so] we could buy two season tickets, no more dinners out, nothing."
Judge revokes Bernard Kerik bail, sends ex-NYPD top cop to jail for trying to taint jury pool
"Those poor people, so incredibly rich and so white."
Dr. Daniel E. Fass, another chairman of the [Obama fundraising] event who lives surrounded by financiers in Greenwich, Conn., said: "The investment community feels very put-upon. They feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown."
More than half of Republicans either say President Obama doesn't love America or say they aren't sure of his feelings toward the country he leads.
That's according to a new national poll due out tomorrow from Public Policy Polling. The firm gave TPMDC an early look this afternoon.
PPP polled 766 registered voters nationwide. Of the GOP respondents, 27% agreed that Obama "loves America," 48% disagreed and 25% said they weren't sure.
House Democrats are aiming to scale back the cost of their health care bill to well below President Barack Obama's preferred price tag by giving the government a strong hand in selling insurance in competition with the private market.
Obama has sought to spend no more than $900 billion over a 10-year period. The initial cost of the House bill was more than $1 trillion. On Tuesday, House Democratic leaders received a new cost estimate of $871 billion from congressional budget umpires who measured a robust version of a so-called public option for health insurance
Nothing, not even a train, could stop Kenyan Simon Sawe from winning the Des Moines Marathon for the second time.
Sawe was leading countryman David Tuwei by 10 seconds when, after a left turn onto the final stretch on Southwest Fourth, he stared right at a train passing on the road.
"Nobody is prepared for that scenario," said Sawe, the inaugural champion in 2002. "I couldn't believe it. It was a long train."
Tuwei caught the 40-year-old Sawe and the two waited ... and waited ... and waited for the train to pass. Third-place Geoffrey Birgen had nearly caught the two leaders when the train finally crossed the street about 40 to 50 seconds later.
Stewart Nozette, 52, was arrested this afternoon at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington by counterespionage agents from the FBI's on suspicion that he was meeting with agents from the Israeli intel group known as the Mossad...
...An 18-page FBI affidavit, signed by Special Agent Leslie G. Martell, says Nozette in January 2009 told a colleague "that if the United States government tried to put him in jail" on an unrelated matter, Nozette would move to Israel or another unidentified foreign country and "tell them everything" he knows.
Nozette helped develop the lunar Mini-RF probe which recently helped confirm the presence of water on the moon. He's responsible for bombing the moon, folks!
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public...
But in a sign of the fragile coalition politics that influence the negotiations in Congress, Obama's approval ratings on health-care reform are slipping among his fellow Democrats even as they are solidifying among independents and seniors. Among Democrats, strong approval of his handling of the issue has dropped 15 percentage points since mid-September.
"Who is Barack Obama, I dunno, I can barely type out a cogent paragraph, but if I keep on publishing the same thing it might start to make sense, sensible 'Village House-Liberal' that I am."
John Stossel made his first appearance as a FOX News employee today on The Live Desk with Martha MacCallum and Trace Gallagher.
Gallagher asked Stossel why he joined the FOX family: "The health care story is one of the reasons," Stossel said. While still with ABC News Stossel said he'd produced an hour-long healthcare special, but, "I could not get it on the air at ABC. They were doing Michael Jackson stories. Fox covers the news, so finally, the freedom to talk about a few things I know about."
And, as is par for the course for John Stossel, he missed the truth…by….that….much:
Update from an ABC News insider: "John knows full well that he did not produce an hour on healthcare. It was a five minute retread of a piece that had been done a year earlier.
He's such a perfect fit for Rupert's empire.
Washington, D.C.: I think that one of the best points made in the last few weeks in this White House/FOX kerfuffle was made by the Daily Show. There was a big gay rights march in D.C. last weekend and FOX spent about 4 minutes on it, compared with literally weeks and weeks of coverage of a similarly-sized march by the Tea Partiers, complete with live on-the scene coverage. I was surprised you didn't touch on this at all. It's a perfect example of even though FOX does "news" during the day, that "news" is driven by conservative talking points.
Howard Kurtz: You mean that Fox News devoted more attention to the tea-party protests (cheered on by some of its hosts) than to the gay rights demonstration? That is truly shocking.
"Oh thank goodness balloon boy was safe...LET'S GET HIM!"
"Oh thank goodness Balloon Boy is safe, let's get Wolf Blitzer! (metaphorically)"
And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."
So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was... unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.
In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."
...the [Obama] White House is "getting very arrogant and slippery in its dealings with people, and if you dare to oppose them, they're going to come hard at you and they're going to cut your legs off."
Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli says he knew more about the controversial “salons” the paper had planned than previously has been reported, including the fact that they were being billed as “off-the-record” to potential sponsors.
Rising Hegemon
