As I frequently allude to, we live in amazingly self-absorbed times. How self-absorbed? Well, sometime today this humble blog will reach it’s 500,000th site-view… no… where was I… Oh yes… Today, while we should celebrate the simultaneous bicentennials (today, people!) of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both pictured above, this event is pretty much by and large ignored. To be fair to our current President, he’s been in office 23 days now; this sort of thing would have been the responsibility of his predecessor. Well, we can certainly see why the Bush Administration wouldn’t have spent any...

Well, for the good news… the President seems to be confidently taking his model of organizing from outside Washington to take on politics inside the Beltway, both in his earlier town hall meeting in Elkhart, IN, and later at his prime time press conference; Al Giordano covers the field, in order to advance the economic stimulus package. During that press conference, besides reinviting Helen Thomas into the fold of Presidential questioners, the President called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. Stein asked the President “the question”: whether he would investigate, and if appropriate, prosecute, his predecessor’s administration for war...

And so it seems, Nobel Laureate and Grey Lady columnist Paul Krugman isn’t happy with how the stimulus bill has gone down. He believes that President Obama’s post-partisan claptrap (which has resulted in flipping exactly zero Republican House members and a princely three Republican Senators) to openly support the stimulus plan has been counterproductive, and results in a weaker bill that foolishly benefits the affluent and fails to benefit those who most need the additional government support… all while falling well short of “the stimulus” actually needed. To which I say, Professor Krugman has the viewpoint exactly backwards in order...

It was a matter of time, I suppose, before we were going to learn that baseball’s Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez tested positive for steroids. The highest paid player in the game, A-Rod has usually represented “addition by subtraction” for whatever team he left, and instant also-ran status to whatever team he joined, despite being, statistically, one of the greatest players in the history of the game. While it would have been no dishonor to have won no World Series rings with the perennial also-ran Seattle Mariners or the perennial not-very-good-at-all Texas Rangers, for a not insubstantial period of time, A-Rod has...

The Grey Lady reports that the Senate Democrats (yes those Senate Democrats) may have realized that, in fact, they don’t need 60 votes to pass anything, given that Joe Biden is the Vice-President and Minnesota still hasn’t seated a Senator, 50 votes will be just fine… and so, it seems, they are prepared to go forth and pass the President’s economic stimulus package, the Republicans and their quite-literally-enemies-of-the-people obstructionism be damned. And, Al Giordano, the man with his ear to the pulse of organizing (as led by our community organizer President), lays out how the President is, of course, organizing...

With a huge majority in both houses, notwithstanding the near “filibuster proof” majority… it appears that the “economic recovery” or “stimulus” package of $900,000,000,000 (yes, that’s $900 billion) in additional deficit spending lacks the votes to pass in the Senate, at least in its current form. It would appear that the problem, as we always knew it would, comes from wavering Democrats who aren’t backing the President, as its not a filibuster threat that’s the rub here, but good old “blue dog” Democrats. Thing is, the “stimulus” is in fact, a big-time progressive initiative finally providing adequate funding to education...

Jeh Johnson is the new General Counsel of the United States Department of Defense. Today, Candace published an open letter to Mr. Johnson in the Huffington Post. With apologies for harkening back to a metaphor used by the Bush Administration, Candace lays out a roadmap for one of Mr. Johnson’s signal tasks as DOD GC: closing Guantanamo. Candace’s letter, in its entirety:

The LA Times reports that the Obama Administration has decided to retain “extraordinary rendition” amidst the CIA’s officially sanctioned bag of dirty tricks; the practice is simply a euphemism for “kidnapping”. As the piece notes, some human rights groups are less concerned with this “policy option” in the hands of an Obama Administration more committed to the rule of law than its predecessor, but certainly, the program has been problematic, and led to horrific treatment by those kidnapped and handed to the custody of foreign dungeon keepers. (For more background on the subject, I refer you to my interviews with...

February is just loaded with great stuff… from the day we celebrate the births of our 1st and 16th Presidents, to Groundhog Day, to Blogroll Amnesty Day (February 3rd), the only holiday in blogtopia for blogtopia (yiksctt, skippy, etc.). We in blog-world, even those of us who have been “blogging” since one week after 11 Sept. 2001 before the term “blog” or “web log” was even in wide parlance, all too often fall into the solipsism of thinking that what we do is terribly much more than a self-indulgent hobby. This is such an occasion. Prior to the first “blogroll...

That stands for “what would Steve Gilliard do?” Our old friend, the late Steve Gilliard was a one of a kind; mild-mannered and soft-spoken in person, while his on-line version told truth to power, kept it real, and took no prisoners. Julia provided this moving tribute to Steve on the occasion of the election of our first Black President, something that, to put it bluntly, Steve just deserved to live long enough to see, but sadly, didn’t get to. The occasion of the selection of Michael Steele as the new Chairman of the Republican National Committee makes me get all...