The pitbull in lipstick is back!

She’s “tired of hearin’ the talk talk talk” but Palin wowed Tea Party Nation Inc. with nastiness for fun and profit
JOAN WALSH
salon.com
SATURDAY, FEB 6, 2010

Eric Hoffer didn’t live to see Tea Party Nation, but I always think of his most famous quote when I’m forced to deal with it: “”Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

I’m not sure the Tea Party cause is a great one, but it’s an influential one, and it degenerated into a racket lickety split, in less than a year. This weekend’s gathering in Nashville splintered both the Tennessee and the national Tea Party movement, as local go-getter Judson Phillips set up the once-anticipated “convention” as his own for-profit business. We’ll have a first-hand report from the racket that paid Sarah Palin more than $100,000 to speak Saturday night. But I can’t help weighing in.

Wow. This was the Palin we saw at the 2008 Republican convention, the snarling pitbull in shimmery lipstick. I know journalists aren’t supposed to use words like mean and dumb, but I can’t help it. Palin is one of the meanest people on the public stage today. She wallows in it. She loves it! Also? Possibly one of the dumbest. But mean works, and so does dumb. And so do lies, and there were many mean, dumb lies in her speech.

How rich that she read her talk in a sing-song voice as she ripped Barack Obama for using a Teleprompter. Once she left the speech for the Q&A, she really went off-message, as well as nearly off-English. (Even though it looked like, at one point, she was reading answers off of her hand.) “They’re not knowin what are we gonna do if we don’t have Tea Party support” was one of my favorite head-scratchers, a great echo of “when Putin rears his head.”

But it was also in her brief Q&A that she made one comment she might regret, if anyone in the Republican Party ever held her accountable. She told the crowd her husband Todd — according to recently released emails, the non-elected former governor of Alaska — is “much too independent” to be a Republican, because he’s even “more conservative” than she is. What a great way to revisit the controversy over Todd’s membership in the secessionist Alaska Independent Party! Remember how Palin dogged poor McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, trying to get him to denounce Salon’s reporting on the Palins and AIP? She tried to get Schmidt to lie and say her husband checked the AIP box on voter forms mistakenly, and he refused. Now she’s bragging her husband isn’t a Republican because he’s so “independent.”

She lied about rejecting stimulus money for Alaska (apparently she rejected a small home-weatherization project, which as it is sounds kind of mean for the governor of Alaska.) She lied about Obama’s position on terrorism and the Christmas Day would-be bomber. She mixed up Alaska and America at least once. It was hilarious to hear her denounce political “talk, talk, talk” and also brag about the job she did as governor, when in fact she quit that job to talk, talk, talk, for money, at wine shows and for-profit tea parties and of course for Fox News.

I have to say, I’ve been assuming Palin probably won’t run for president, and that she quit her job as Alaska governor to cash in on her fame. I now feel pretty certain she’s trying to do both. She’s certainly looking like a grifter, and cashing in at the for-profit Tea Party Nation event, and taking questions from the increasingly despised Phillips, may hurt her politically. But it’s now pretty clear to me that in all her narcissism, she thinks she can get rich and run for president at the same time. And who am I to say she can’t, given the delusions of her right-wing supporters?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/02/06/palin_speaks

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

The President Obama we voted for

I’ll let a smart friend explain why Obama beat the GOP and won back his base, at least for a glorious day

Joan Walsh
salon.com
January 31, 2010

Like a lot of people I had to work Friday — as in, do my job as editor here at Salon and not just watch television. But I kept my eye on President Obama’s engagement with the House GOP at its annual retreat as best I could.

I am just going to assume my inability to even mentally rebut those Republican doubters as well as Obama did was because I was preoccupied with other work. I know I’m lying about that, but it’s late on Friday, so please forgive me. My brain is still seared by the way I saw him respect, rebut and sometimes rebuke the GOP today. On facts as well as on points.

I wasn’t optimistic about Obama’s plans to attend the House GOP gathering. I thought it might be more of his wrongheaded bipartisanship. I didn’t raise a ruckus; it was his Friday to spend the way he wanted to. I just didn’t expect much.

But like a lot of people in both parties — especially the House GOP aides who set it up and let the TV cameras roll — I was honstly blown away by Obama’s performance. Like a lot of Democrats, I was very happy to see him engage and question and answer — and at times kick some ill-informed and obstreperous GOP ass. I tried not to ask where this fighting man had been for these last months; he was clearly that president we voted for and I thought better late than never.

Mike Madden captured it all in (near) real time here. My friend Melissa Harris-Lacewell rewound the film for us, back to her Chicago days with Obama the law professor, to remind us how he and why he pulled today’s feat off, here. She, and I, didn’t expect someone who fulfilled all of our progressive political dreams when we voted for him in 2008. But we did expect him to tangle with — and defeat — his antagonists, politically, rhetorically, intellectually, sometimes morally, far more often than he has this year. So today was a relief and a revelation for a lot of us.

I am looking forward to seeing a whole lot more of this president in the coming months. Everyone who wants bipartisanship should be calling for monthly sessions like this. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Republicans aren’t. GOP Rep. Mike Pence told Hardball’s Chris Matthews, shortly after his draining session with the president, that he’s not anxious for a rerun.

I’d like to see monthly prime-time Q&As with the president and Congress: with Senate Republicans, as well as with Congressional progressives. Imagine Obama going head to head with public option proponents the way he did with the GOP today. I’d be rooting for his antagonists on that one, but it would be great political theater.

I don’t expect Republicans to clamor for more of the drubbing they got today, but Democrats should push for that kind of engagement. I’d sacrifice prime time presidential speeches and press conferences for the give and take of regular Obama/Congress sessions. Any engaged American would. Why wouldn’t the GOP?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/01/29/obama_and_the_house_gop

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Teabaggers Upset With Palin

MARIO PIPERNI
MARIO PIPERNI dot Com
January 27, 2010

Wingnuts are unhappy with Palin.

…when Palin announced last week that she would campaign for McCain in his reelection primary battle against ultra-conservative former congressman J.D. Hayworth, some of her most vocal supporters were outraged that she would endorse McCain, who they see as a Republican in Name Only (RINO).
Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin wrote on her blog that “Tea Party activists are rightly outraged by Sarah Palin’s decision to campaign for McCain, whose entrenched incumbency and progressive views are anathema to the movement.”
On his radio show yesterday, Fox News host Glenn Beck told a caller upset by Palin’s move that “This Sarah Palin thing really bothers me.” “I am absolutely no fan of John McCain,” Beck said. “I want to have another sit down with her. How does she believe he is a good man when everyone in his organization trashed her?”

People just don’t seem to get Palin. They’re failing to understand that she has no convictions. She’s not really interested in much of anything except promoting the Palin Corporation. Health care, the environment, fiscal policies, terrorism, foreign policy, bank bailouts, John McCain, teabaggers, conservatism…if anyone believes that Palin spends any serious time pondering any of these, they’re either delusional or just haven’t been paying attention.

She doesn’t care. She has no real knowledge or understanding of any of the major issues and that is plenty fine with her. What she does understand is that there are enough simpletons out there to keep her gig at Fox going, to buy her books and to pay out $250 to hear her blabber on matters she is clueless about. And in the shallow world of Sarah Palin, that is all that truly matters.

http://mariopiperni.com/palin-watch/teabaggers-upset-with-palin.php

Copyright 2010 MARIO PIPERNI dot Com

After the Massachusetts Massacre

Frank Rich
Op-Ed Columnist
The New Yorks Times
January 23, 2010

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

Politically, no other issue counts. In last weekend’s Washington Post/ABC News poll, 42 percent of Americans chose the economy as the country’s most pressing concern. Only 5 percent picked terrorism, and 2 percent Afghanistan. Obama’s highest approval ratings are now on foreign policy and national security issues — despite the relentless hammering from the Cheney right — but voters don’t care.

Does health care matter? Not as much as you’d think after this yearlong crusade. In the Post/ABC poll, the issue was second-tier — at 24 percent. Obama has blundered, not by positioning himself too far to the left but by landing nowhere — frittering away his political capital by being too vague, too slow and too deferential to Congress. The smartest thing said as the Massachusetts returns came in Tuesday night was by Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “Obama took all his winnings and turned them over to Max Baucus.”

Worse, the master communicator in the White House has still not delivered a coherent message on his signature policy. He not only refused to signal his health care imperatives early on but even now he, like Congressional Democrats, has failed to explain clearly why and how reform relates to economic recovery — or, for that matter, what he wants the final bill to contain. Sure, a president needs political wiggle room as legislative sausage is made, but Scott Brown could and did drive his truck through the wide, wobbly parameters set by Obama.

Ask yourself this: All these months later, do you yet know what the health care plan means for your family’s bottom line, your taxes, your insurance? It’s this nebulousness, magnified by endless Senate versus House squabbling, that has allowed reform to be caricatured by its foes as an impenetrable Rube Goldberg monstrosity, a parody of deficit-ridden big government. Since most voters are understandably confused about what the bills contain, the opponents have been able to attribute any evil they want to Obamacare, from death panels to the death of Medicare, without fear of contradiction.

It’s too late to rewrite that history, but it may not be too late for White House decisiveness. Whatever happens now — good, bad or ugly — must happen fast. Each day Washington spends dickering over health care is another day lost while the election-year economy, stupid, remains intractable for Americans who are suffering.

On the economic front, Obama needs both stylistic and substantive makeovers. He has stepped up the populist rhetoric lately — and markedly after political disaster struck last week — but few find this serene Harvard-trained lawyer credible when slinging populist rhetoric at “fat-cat” bankers. His two principal economic policy makers are useless, if not counterproductive, surrogates. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, was probably fatally compromised from the moment his tax lapses surfaced; now he is stalked by the pileup of unanswered questions about the still-not-transparent machinations at the New York Fed when he was knee-deep in the A.I.G. bailout. Lawrence Summers, the top administration economic guru, is a symbol of the Clinton-era deregulatory orgy that helped fuel the bubble.

The White House clearly knows this duo is a political albatross. After the news broke that 85,000 more jobs had been lost in December despite some economists’ more optimistic predictions, Christina Romer, a more user-friendly (though still academic) economic hand, was dispatched to the Sunday shows. This is at best a makeshift solution.

Obama needs more independent economists like Paul Volcker, who was hastily retrieved from exile last week after the Massachusetts massacre prompted the White House to tardily embrace his strictures on big banks. Obama also needs economic spokesmen who are not economists and who can authentically speak to life on the ground. Obama must also reconnect. The former community organizer whose credit card was denied at the Hertz counter during the 2000 Democratic convention now spends too much time at the White House presiding over boardroom-table meetings and stiff initiative rollouts instead of engaging with Americans not dressed in business suits.

When it comes to economic substance, small symbolic gestures (the proposed new bank “fee”) won’t cut it. Nor will ineffectual presidential sound bites railing against Wall Street bonuses beyond the federal government’s purview. There’s no chance of a second stimulus. The White House will have to jawbone banks on foreclosures, credit card racketeering and the loosening of credit to small businesses. This means taking on bankers who were among the Obama campaign’s biggest backers and whose lobbyists have castrated regulatory reform by buying off congressmen of both parties. It means pressing for all constitutional remedies that might counter last week’s 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate campaign contributions to buy off even more.

It’s become so easy to pin financial elitism on Democrats that the morning after Brown’s victory the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee had the gall to accuse them of being the “one party who bailed out the automakers and insurance companies.” Never mind that the Bush White House gave us the bank (and A.I.G.) bailouts, or that the G.O.P. is even more in hock than Democrats to corporate patrons. The Obama administration is so overstocked with Goldman Sachs-Robert Rubin alumni and so tainted by its back-room health care deals with pharmaceutical and insurance companies that conservative politicians, Brown included, can masquerade shamelessly as the populist alternative.

Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.

The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”

Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24Rich.html?th&emc=th

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

The Democrats Need to Find Some Spine and Pass This Bill

Bob Cesca
Political Writer, Blogger, and New Media Producer
The Huffington Post
January 20, 2010

In the 1998 midterms, Democrats actually gained seats. A rare thing for the president’s party to pick up congressional seats in a second midterm election. Nevertheless, the Democrats won the day and Republicans lost a net five seats.

Take a guess how the Republicans responded. Naturally, they freaked out like infants and demanded that the party shift to the center, you know, where it’s safe — abandoning their congressional agenda in lieu of safe, small beans policy. Then they waited for all of the Democrats to be seated before they moved any votes to the floor. You know, just to be fair.

Wait, no. That’s what the Democrats are doing in the aftermath of the Massachusetts special election.

The Republicans, in the days immediately after being “thumped” in the midterms, didn’t make pee-pee in their big boy pants. They didn’t freak out and reevaluate their agenda or crawl back to moderate Democrats for additional support.

The Republicans impeached the president.

Before anyone was sworn in, the Republican House of Representatives voted to impeach President William Jefferson Clinton on December 19, 1998.

Hey, Democrats. Do you like apples?

Now, I’m not suggesting that the Democrats should suddenly race around trying to quickly remove Republicans who have engaged in nefarious underpants parties. (I’m looking at you, John Ensign — who voted for impeachment, by the way.)

I’m just suggesting that the Democrats find their mysteriously vanishing spines, and right quick.

While I’m fully aware that the Senate requires 60 votes for cloture, especially when the Republicans have opted to filibuster everything, there are other solutions. The Democrats still hold an 18 seat margin in the Senate. They hold a gigantic 78 seat margin in the House. They lost just one seat yesterday to an empty shirt who, for some reason, thought it would be awesome to auction off his daughters on live national television last night. Weird and creepy. Anyway.

And the legislation we’re talking about passing here has nothing to do with removing a president from office because of something which, honestly, seems more like the marital rule these days rather than the exception. This bill is about providing affordable, life-saving health insurance to 30 million Americans and ending a cycle of abuse at the hands of a corporate cartel.

Instead, the Democrats plan is to wait until Scott Brown is seated and their 60 vote supermajority is gone, leaving them with one less option. They’re waiting up. They’re literally sliding an extra ace across the poker table to the sweaty, drunken degenerate on the other side. Here, we thought you might need some help, Biff. I’m sure you’ll return the favor.

This, of course, is just plain dumb. If and when the tables are turned, don’t count on the Republicans to return the favor. In 1998, they used a similar opening to impeach the president — how can anyone seriously expect they’ll behave differently in the future?

Nothing will ever motivate the Republicans to join with the Democrats in a spirit of bipartisanship. And, beyond Congress and in terms of swing, independent and Obama-Republican voters, they’re either going to like or hate the health care reform bill. How it’s passed isn’t really going to matter at this point, especially after enduring the long, painful legislative push through the sausage casing.

But okay. The president and certain Democratic members of Congress want to wait until Pimpin’ Scott Brown is seated. So be it.

Here’s the only real way to pass a serious, stable health care reform bill at this point. You’ve probably heard this discussed today already, but Senate leadership and the White House ought to cut a deal with House leadership to pass the Senate bill as-is, then guarantee that House-friendly amendments reflecting the “conference” negotiations — and maybe a public option — will be passed via reconciliation and signed immediately following.

This way, the core legislation won’t sunset or be shredded during a reconciliation proceeding. The basic bill will be stronger and more sustainable, while the extras will be subject to the dicey, potentially shoddy 50-vote simple majority. Still not great, but better than allowing the whole thing to be beaten all to hell and potentially abandoned down the road due to the Byrd sunset rule.

The bill passes, the House is satisfied, and the president’s pledge to wait for Brown to be seated is honored.

That’s the fair-minded and complicated solution. Here’s what a stronger party would do, with both 30 million uninsured Americans in mind, not to mention its own political fortunes. They’d use the nuclear option. Roll back the threshold for cloture to 57 votes, or just kill the filibuster once and for all. The downside is some near-term political blowback, and Fox News will totally explode. But that might be fun to watch. However, the biggest of the caveats here is that the Democrats will surely be the minority party again and will definitely miss having the filibuster as a tool.

But not only would the nuclear option help to pass health care reform, but it could also help to pass finance regulatory reform, climate legislation and even things like a repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. No matter what anyone says, Republicans will not vote to repeal DOMA. And, despite their bullshit populist teabagger rhetoric, they won’t vote for additional regulations against Wall Street.

Suffice to say, there won’t be any nuclear option. But a party that cares about the agenda it sold to the American people — an agenda which overwhelming majorities mandated in 2006 and 2008 — would feel an obligation to pass that agenda through any legal, constitutional means possible. Or, you know, it could sit back and let that agenda, and health care reform with it, fail. A course of inaction that could lead to a Republican majority in November, and then, ironically enough, the inevitable congressional investigation and impeachment of the president.

Political weakness and unrequited accommodation, these days, only begs further, forced and irreparable political weakness.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-democrats-need-to-fin_b_430570.html

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Massachusetts the first “Yellow State”

BocaGuy: The truth hurts

Tuesday’s Five Lessons for the Democrats

Aaron Zelinsky
Articles Editor, ‘Yale Law Journal’
The Huffington Post
January 20, 2010

On Tuesday, the Bay State shook Capitol Hill to its core. Much ink will be spilled dissecting Mr. Brown’s come-from-behind victory of Red Sox 2004 proportions.

Here are the five lessons Democrats should learn from this special election:

1) There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. The Democrats got caught sleeping. Ms. Coakley ran a lackluster campaign which failed to energize even the bluest of the blue. Replacing the Lion of the Senate with Adlai Stevenson in a skirt was no plan for victory. (In truth, that’s unfair to Mr. Stevenson, who was at least a certifiable egghead). In November, every Democratic candidate must campaign hard. The Democrats need candidates who want to run, not just those who want to win.

2) Calm Down. There will no doubt be an orgy of hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and teeth-gnashing within the Democratic Party. However, the Democrats shouldn’t act rashly: they are still the governing party, and governing takes a cool head. Most of all, Democrats shouldn’t make glib off-the-cuff remarks that could come back to haunt them. The Republicans will record every angry public internecine statement and replay them ad nauseum in November.

Expressing anger at the voters is a particularly bad idea–that won’t play well with anyone. While this election is undoubtedly a major setback for the Democrats, they still have large majorities in both houses of Congress and control the Presidency. All is not lost.

3) Compromise Is the New Change. Democrats need to get results. Having the “magic 60″ made the Democrats overconfident, and enabled the outer reaches of the party to demand more than was politically feasible.

In truth, a filibuster-proof majority isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask the last President who had one: Jimmy Carter. There are Republicans the Democrats can, and should, work with. Senators Graham, Snow, and Voinovich have a record of bipartisanship that the Democrats should tap.

4) Narrative Counts. Mr. Brown did an excellent job of setting the dominant narrative of the campaign: a lone man driving his truck, fighting against the massive Democratic machine. The Democrats did not effectively counter this narrative and so lost the all-critical paradigm-battle.

To put this in familiar terminology of our common cultural touchstone, Star Wars: In 2008, the Democrats made the election all about The New Hope. In 2010, The Republicans turned the Massachusetts election into Return of the Jedi (with Mr. Brown’s pickup truck as a stand-in for the Millennium Falcon). The last thing the Democrats want is for voters to think November 2010 is The Empire Strikes Back.

5) The Republicans Aren’t as United as They Appear. To listen to some Democrats, the Republicans are a vast conspiracy, moving in synchronized lockstep discipline. The Democrats should not forget that the Republicans are deeply fractured.

Mr. Brown managed to assemble an impressive coalition of Tea Partiers, Republicans, and moderate Democrats. However, there are strong centrifugal forces at work in the Republican Party. The more extreme members of the Republican Party will be emboldened by this election and will attempt to swing their party hard right. The Democrats should court the middle. Even Mr. Brown will have to tack center if he hopes to be reelected in 2012; he can only ride his constituent’s agita so far.

There is one American politician who would have been unsurprised by Mr. Brown’s election. James Madison recognized that in a country as vast and complicated as the United States, governing coalitions were inherently unstable, composed of a variety of conflicting constituencies. For centuries, the ebb and flow of support has been a natural consequence of holding power. It’s no coincidence that midterm elections tend to go poorly for governing party. This is not the end for the Democrats; dealt with properly, it’s a chance to recalibrate effectively.

The Democrats must recognize that Tuesday’s election is only Armageddon if they make it so. Now is not the time for recriminations and anger; it’s time to govern.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-zelinsky/tuesdays-five-lessons-for_b_429160.html

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

EVERYONE IS STUPID EXCEPT TV NEWS

Bob Cesca
Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog
January 18, 2010

On Morning Joe just now, Tom Brokaw was complaining that Americans don’t know what’s in the healthcare reform bill. Scarborough laughing the background. As if this is the fault of the Democrats and the president.

You know what, Mr. Brokaw? This is your fault, sir. You and your colleagues.

The television news media has a responsibility to explain policy and, specifically, this legislation to the American people, and the television news media has failed in lieu of the Letterman and Tiger Woods underpants party. The television news media has failed in lieu of manufacturing “smackdown” drama. The television news media has failed on so many levels to deliver the readily available details of healthcare reform to the American viewing public.

So when you guys sit around and bullshit about how people don’t know anything about policy, don’t blame anyone but yourselves.

http://www.bobcesca.com/blog-archives/2010/01/everyone_is_stu.html

Copyright 2010 Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog

Smiling Scott Brown slurs Obama

Joan Walsh
salon.com
Saturday, Jan 16, 2010

Who is Scott Brown, the man who could realistically replace Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, and launch a Republican resurgence that points to the end of Barack Obama’s presidency? He got off one of the great lines of recent campaigns when he was asked in a debate about taking Kennedy’s seat and said, “With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.” He’s right, and Democrats including Brown’s opponent Martha Coakley have been moronic to act like he’s wrong.

Brown is also a cipher who’s backed by right-wing Tea Partiers and Birthers while trying to dodge the association. He’s shrugged off connections with the Tea Partiers while attending a fundraiser they held for him; check out their Facebook page organizing against Obama’s visit Sunday. Brown poses as a reasonable Republican, but told a reporter during the Republican National Convention that he wasn’t sure President Obama was born within wedlock. In the interview he looks like the same smarmy dude who’s now backed by the right wing but posed for a Cosmopolitan centerfold. You can watch the exchange here:

Now Obama himself is forced to come to the Bay State to campaign for Coakley, in a race that shouldn’t be close. Smart political observers say Obama only decided to show because he knows Coakley can and should win. But even if she does win, this race shouldn’t have been close. What should this tight race tell us?

First and foremost, it tells us that the overconfident, undercharismatic Coakley has botched the race since she won the primary. Every political reporter I’ve talked to has stories about how she and her campaign thought they were just going to walk into Kennedy’s office. This was Massachussetts, after all, and some of their confidence was understandable. But a certain kind of hubris wasn’t. Asked by the Boston Globe why she was running such a disengaged campaign, she joked, “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’

If Coakley loses, that will go down as one of the worst political lines in history. And if she does fall, party leaders will be blaming it only on the candidate. They’ll be wrong: DNC chair Tim Kaine as well as the DSCC should have to answer for the party’s terrible overconfidence in Massachusetts, too.

If she wins, though, Democrats can’t take for granted that their message was validated. This party is in trouble: Nobody understands its complicated health care reform plan; the economy is still pinching many people, and too many voters don’t know if Obama and the Dems are on the side of the overdogs or the underdogs. Like most Americans, and most Democrats, I have better things to do this weekend than pay attention to a race that shouldn’t be one. Let’s hope this is a wakeup call to the party that just a year ago was celebrating what seemed like a glorious realignment.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/01/16/scott_brown?source=newsletter

Copyright ©2010 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Giuliani’s Record on Security: Noun, Verb, Bernard Kerik

Mario Ruiz
VP of Media Relations at The Huffington Post
January 11, 2010

While Stephanopoulos did the necessary mea culpa in response to the explosive web reaction following his botched Giuliani interview, the larger question we should be asking is why the media continues to give the former NYC mayor a platform at all.

Giuliani’s record of poor judgment when it comes to matters of security are as well-reported as they are varied. But they’ve been all too easily forgotten by the media — or at best conveniently overlooked. For some reason, Giuliani always gets a free ride. Should the media need a refresher course on Giuliani’s supposed expertise on matters of national security, two words should suffice: Bernard Kerik.

It’s hard to think about Kerik these days as anything more than a sad sack of a man, under house arrest following a ten-day jail stint, having pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying to White House officials, charges stemming from an alleged bribery incident in the 90s.

But as pathetic and irrelevant as Kerik now seems, we’re all still paying the grave price of his incompetence. How easily the media forget that Kerik was once Interim Minister of Interior in Iraq, and was the nominee to succeed Tom Ridge as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security — a position and a nomination Kerik owed to his former boss, Rudy Giuliani.

In Iraq, Kerik was charged with creating a new Iraqi police force in our effort to bring stability to that country. It’s worth repeating: Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s former chauffeur and bodyguard, was tasked with one of the most important jobs in the world at the time. As it turned out, Kerik’s lack of substance and character contributed to our failure to stabilize Iraq at a pivotal time. And Giuliani, as Kerik’s sponsor-in-chief, is to blame.

As The Nation’s Ari Berman succinctly outlined in 2004, Kerik’s Iraq legacy left the Iraqi police force in shambles. Among other failures, Kerik spent over a billion dollars training troops even though Europe offered to do it for free, and failed to do background checks before hiring policemen.

He left under mysterious circumstances after only three and a half months on the job, but not after leaving his own indelible if brief chapter in Bush’s saga of inept post-war reconstruction. (In a 2008 interview, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, called Kerik’s efforts in Iraq a “waste of time and effort.”)

While it’s stupefying to think that Kerik was ever granted such a position, it’s downright mindboggling to think that he might have been head of homeland security following his stint in Iraq. While Kerik, in true form, withdrew his nomination for (surprise) suspicious reasons, what’s clear is that Giuliani worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make Kerik the nominee. (Bush administration officials would later claim Giuliani personally lobbied in favor of Kerik.)

In a Time profile on Giuliani, Michael Duffy explains that Kerik’s highly improbable rise was due to Giuliani’s fondness for tribal loyalties and ritual rather than substance and qualification.

Says Duffy of Kerik’s first big promotion, “Giuliani gave Kerik the news: He would announce the next day that he was appointing Kerik deputy corrections commissioner. The promotion would make Kerik the No. 2 man at the agency overseeing the city’s prisons and lockups. Kerik balked, worried about his qualifications, but Giuliani insisted. ‘Just do this,’ the mayor said. ‘Do what I’m telling you.’ Relenting, Kerik agreed, but as he tells the story in his autobiography, what happened next was a little creepy. ‘In this dark sitting room, one by one, the mayor’s closest staff members came forward and kissed me. I know the mayor is as big a fan of The Godfather as I am and I wonder if he noticed how much becoming part of his team resembled becoming part of a Mafia family. I was being made.’”

One would think Kerik’s better angels would have guided him once he hit the national stage, and once stakes were so high. But for Kerik, there was no turning the page; he’s someone for whom incompetence and shadiness run deep. (He’s so corrupt, TPM had some fun crowdsourcing to capture the full history of his sleaze.)

We know Kerik’s record is one of failure, but he no longer matters. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Giuliani, who, like it or not, continues to be heard, a favorite of the Sunday talk show crowd, despite his record.

Giuliani’s 9/11 gaffe on GMA caused fits, and rightfully so. But the media shouldn’t have been surprised. His record on security is full of lies and spin. Next time, the media needs to save itself the embarrassment and just say no to more of Giuliani.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mario-ruiz/giulianis-record-on-secur_b_418188.html

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

How Could Giuliani Forget 9/11?

Dan Collins
New York Editor-At-Large of The Huffington Post
January 8, 2010

I went through the Christmas holidays believing I might never blog about Rudy Giuliani again.

He’d dropped out of every conceivable 2010 political contest, unless he’s harboring a secret yearning to be state comptroller. He declared his attentions were focused on his business, and overseeing security for the Olympics in Brazil.

He hadn’t moved out of town, but I was still willing to live and let live.

Sure, there was his penchant for showing up on TV talk shows to say something obvious and Republican, but who cared?

Then on Friday Rudy popped up on ABC, being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos. His mission was to portray Barack Obama as soft on terror, ho hum.

But in the process, Giuliani forgot 9/11!

“What he [Obama] should be doing is following the right things that Bush did — one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama,” he said.

What about the World Trade Center????

Rudy Giuliani has spent the last eight years defining himself as the mayor who was on the ground when terror struck. How many times has he announced that Obama or some other Democrat of the day had forgotten the lessons of Sept. 11?

And now he’s on national television announcing that there were no domestic attacks under George W. Bush.

Giuliani is a man who always likes to see himself as fighting against the forces of total evil. Over the last few years, he’s put the Democrats in that category. Apparently his lust for battle is so great that it’s wiped out his entire memory bank.

This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. The cosmic error was his whole point. Giuliani has now not only written himself out as a candidate, he’s officially disqualified to be a talking head.

And, by the way, Richard Reid the shoe bomber launched his failed terror attack on Bush’s watch too. This would be a mere quibble, except that Bush tried Reid in a civilian court, and Giuliani has been loudly complaining about President Obama’s decision to do the same with accused underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-collins/how-could-giuliani-forget_b_416654.html

Copyright © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.