IMPALIN’ — Stop Sarah Palin for President in 2012

MARQUETTE, Mich. — A Michigan woman with two wombs has given birth to twin daughters _ one from each uterus. The Mining Journal and WLUC-TV report that Sarah Reinfelder’s two healthy babies were delivered seven weeks premature Thursday by cesarean section at Marquette General Hospital in the Upper Peninsula. The 21-year-old Sault Ste. Marie woman has a condition known as uterus didelphys, and doctors say such twin births are rare. The uteri are different sizes, with the larger twin born from the larger uterus. Dr. Connie Hedmark and Dr. Breanna Pond first delivered Kaylin Joy, then Valerie Marie, the larger twin by one pound. Kaylin Joy weighed 3 pounds, 15 ounces. Neonatologist Julie Frei says she expects that the twins, who don’t have fully developed lung function, likely will be hospitalized for three or four weeks.

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Sarah Reinfelder, Woman With Two Wombs, Has Twin Daughters

So Bobby Jindal is locked in a close race with Sarah Palin for…most outstanding Republican liar. The latest chapter in his factually-challenged story about Sheriff Harry Lee: last year he told the story to a group of Iowa Republicans, giving himself an even bigger role in the yarn. Even though his chief of staff has admitted that Jindal did not meet with Sheriff Lee until after the height of Hurricane Katrina, on Tuesday, he made it seem like he was a key part of rescue effort. And last November, he actually made it seem like he was on the ground, right there at the boat launch. Here’s a video recap of Jindal’s lying ways:

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Sinking fast

In the first strong indication of where conservative hearts lie for the 2012 presidential race, Mitt Romney won the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll on Saturday, earning the backing of 20 percent of the crowd. It was his former Massachusetts Governor’s third straight win and followed a well-received speech to the CPAC crowd just one day earlier. The results of the CPAC Straw Poll provide a small, albeit interesting window into the affections and leanings of the conservative movement. Following Romney, the next largest vote recipients included, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal with 14 percent of the vote, Rep. Ron Paul with 13 percent and Gov. Sarah Palin with 13 percent. For the Alaska Governor, the belle of the conservative movement in the ‘08 election, the results aren’t the best of news. Her non-appearance at CPAC, however, may have contributed to the tied-for-fourth-place finish. Moderate Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, earned one percent of the vote and was ridiculed by moderator Tony Fabrizio for being Barack Obama’s favorite Republican. With roughly two years to go until formal campaigning begins on the Republican side of the aisle, the results of the CPAC poll are more a temperature of the conservative movement at this point in time than an indication of who will end up the presidential nominee. Nevertheless, Republicans don’t take these polls lightly. The results can provide a boost for a potential candidate or hurt the morale of another. Though the affect is never as strong as it seems. In 2007, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney etched out a win over former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani by a margin of 21 percent to 17 percent. Sen. John McCain, who wound up winning the nomination, came in fifth with 12 percent of the vote. In 2008, Romney won again, narrowly beating John McCain, 35 percent to 34 percent, even though Romney had officially dropped out of the race a few days before the poll was released. More than 1,700 people cast ballots in the 2009 CPAC poll, 57 percent of who were between the ages 18 and 25. Of the respondents, 95 percent said they disapproved of the job that President Obama was doing, only four percent approved. Meanwhile, 70 percent approved of the job Republicans in Congress were doing, 29 percent said they disapproved. Here are the official results: Mitt Romney - 20 percent Bobby Jindal - 14 percent Ron Paul -13 percent Sarah Palin - 13 percent Newt Gingrich -10 percent Mike Huckabee - 7 percent Mark Sanford - 4 percent Rudy Guiliani - 3 percent Tim Pawlenty - 2 percent Charlie Crist - 1 percent Undecided - 9 percent

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Romney Wins CPAC Poll, Palin Finishes Fourth

We come to the end of another Black History Month. Eric Holder, the Nation’s first black Attorney General, spent February demonstrating he owned the stones to call out Americans for being “in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes having the tough discussion on race and ethnicity. That’s when he wasn’t putting the finishing touches on the bust-up of a major Narco ring. Michael Steele, the nation’s first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, spent February explaining how he wants the RNC’s new PR campaign to be “off the hook,” featuring “urban-surburban hip-hop settings.” That’s when he wasn’t giving a shout-out of ” slum love ” to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal who is of Near Eastern ethnicity. Slum love, get it? ‘Cause, like, Slumdog Millionaire was, like, big. Can you imagine Holder publicly wishing President Obama some ghetto affection? So much for the GOP’s new face. Despite a few critical posts — call them my tough love shout-outs — I actually wish Michael Steele much success in reinventing the Republicans. There’s nothing wrong with a smart, ideas-oriented adversarial Party. A new version of Eisenhower’s Dynamic Conservatism, as opposed to the same version of “let’s try tax cuts.” Though I personally appreciate them. Steele, however, is not helping advance the cause, or sell the party beyond the base with his tone-deafness. Nor is he being helped by the “new” GOP. I’m sure Bobby Jindal is thankful 2012 is three years away, and I’m sure Sarah Palin is thankful for Bobby Jindal. For all the ills of liberal paternalism, conservatives are learning you can’t do diversity overnight. What’s clear now is that after Tuesday night’s “I’m exotic like Obama, too” flame out by Jindal, Steele is going to have to work double time in finding a new messenger. First, perhaps, he needs to figure out what the message is and how to deliver it. For more perspective visit That Minority Thing.com

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John Ridley: How Eric Holder and Michael Steele Spent Their February

It’s been fascinating watching the once imperious Republican machine staggering around the very institutions in which they only so recently swaggered. The all-encompassing cluelessness that Repubs have lately shown is far more stunning than even the years of Democratic ball-lessness during the bleak Bush years. That was just maddening. This is ball-less, brainless, senseless, gormless—and downright enjoyable. Yeah, enjoyable. Good to have them stripped of their arrogant, impervious facades and exposed to the world as the things we always knew writhed beneath. The lizard-lidded Boehner, the reedy and ineffectual Jindal, the fribble Palin, the sputtering Limbaugh, the swollen Hannity, the whole dead-end pseudo-Conservative horde stripped of their tools for wreaking havoc, all on full display, yakking, spitting. HIstory is full of cruel characters whose twisted paths converge with other similarly embittered wanderers. Under the right conditions, usually an atmosphere of deep-seated fear and unrelenting frustration, their anger intertwines, forming a dense and impenetrable briar. And even the cold ideology cradled within its stinging, protective nettles somehow becomes alluring for the purity of its design, its simplistic ability to coldly classify right and wrong, patriot and traitor. Unchecked, it grows and seethes and finally reaches the point when, propelled by its own weight, it rolls and tramples all who try to oppose its momentum. This is what happened after the well meant but ultimate failure of the Carter presidency and the meticulously sown seeds of the Reagan Revolution. At least to me, it is. History serves as more than a litany of human exploits; it is a mirror reflecting the very nature of humanity and as such is implacable and pitiless and defies our ability to assign a satisfying meaning to it all in spite of our attempts to do so. And yet, when the callous causes and the cruel characters eventually lose their momentum, the nettles untwist and expose the ideology within for all its pathetic wickedness, which is where we now find ourselves. This is a moment to observe the bestial side of American politics, of the American psyche and of what they can both become if circumstances allow. It is on daily display, with the inane utterances of the flailing right-wing punditry and feeble attempts at opposition of the demoralized Republican minority. It has been denuded, it seems, for our edification. But if history is any indication—and it is—we’d better get smart while we have the chance.

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Steven Weber: What Lies Beneath

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman addressed the Republican National Convention. Like Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s rebuttal to President Barack Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s moves at this past weekend’s California Republican Party convention point up the crisis afflicting the Republican Party. Jindal, in a not quite deer-in-the-headlights debut on the national stage, stuck to the age-old conservative Republican script. Government is the problem, and there’s nothing that can’t be solved with a tax cut. And getting government out of the way. Including, oddly, dealing with hurricanes and volcanoes. While Rush LImbaugh — an early touter of Sarah Palin — defended the substance of Jindal’s message, saying that performance is over-rated, it was all just preaching to the right-wing choir. Which brings us to Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, touted as a fresh moderate Republican voice on the scene, and her performance in the roll-out of her likely candidacy for governor of California. Her speech and press conference at the California Republican convention, and statements before and after that, left one veteran Republican expert saying “she’s joined the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican Party.” Meg Whitman and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor criticize President Barack Obama’s program. She is certainly hugging the hard right rail on the race track. Like another super-rich Republican candidate and one-time moderate who may actually be the Republican frontrunner, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who made his fortune by coming up with the device that enables the tracking of cell phones. Whitman appeared with her mentor, former conservative Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and Reagan era education secretary Bill Bennett, at her convention address. For her press conference, she was flanked by Romney and conservative San Diego Congressman Darrell Issa, the controversial car alarm magnate who funded the recall of Governor Gray Davis in 2003. Whitman ripped into the state budget deal finally arrived at by Governor Arnold Schwarzeneggger, Democratic legislative leaders, and just enough Republican legislators to surmount California’s very unusual requirement of a two-thirds vote for passage. Why? Because it includes temporary tax hikes, along with big program cuts and borrowing against future state lottery earnings. Rather airily, she declared to the Republican activists that, as a longtime CEO, she could have balanced the budget without any taxes. How? By implementing the recommendations of something called the California Performance Review, something Schwarzenegger initiated in 2004. In Whitman’s account, the state’s budget deficit, which was $42 billion deficit over 18 months, could all be made up by new efficiencies contained in the performance review report. But it was shelved by Schwarzenegger, in her telling, under pressure from Democratic special interests. The performance review was an interesting project, flawed in some ways — its officials met extensively with corporate executives and lobbyists but not with environmental, labor, or consumer advocates — yet useful in others. But not even its advocates would claim that it would make up that sort of budget gap. Asked about the state budget deal later at a press conference, Whitman had a different answer. She said that she would have gone after the state workforce across the board, first by doubling the number of furlough days that Schwarzenegger ordered — which would amount to a 20% pay cut for all state employees — and then by eliminating 10% of the state workforce. The reporter who asked that question of Whitman is a fellow named Dan Walters, a veteran conservative columnist first with the defunct right-wing Sacramento Union and now with the Sacramento Bee. An inveterate critic of Democrats such as Jerry Brown and Willie Brown, in the ’90s, he touted the idea that Republican Governor Pete Wilson marked the advent of a strong Republican era in the state. It didn’t. Despite his politics, Walters is a realist, and he pointed out to Whitman that those sorts of workforce cuts wouldn’t begin to make up the budget gap, asking her again if she knew that most of the state’s spending is actually locked down for education and other services that the state workforce does not provide. Instead of answering Walters’ follow-up, she abruptly called on someone else. Which prompted him to say, in a loud voice as she left the room at the end of her press conference: “Ready for eBay, not ready for prime time.” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s rebuttal to Obama bombed, even on Fox News. Whitman clearly has no interest in crossing the far right ideologues who presently run the state’s beleaguered Republican Party, which saw Barack Obama sweep to victory over John McCain in California by a whopping 61% to 37%. Their last gasp priority as a party, as laid out in the banquet address by the California far right’s longtime ideological vicar, Congressman Tom McClintock, is opposition to taxes and insistence on a much smaller government. For the state that is the biggest and one of the fastest-growing in the country. That’s why Whitman has been saying for the past few days that she opposes an initiative on the state’s May 19th special election ballot to create a state budget spending cap. That is a long-sought goal for many conservatives and moderates in the state. But Whitman is against it. Why? Because its passage would extend the state’s temporary tax hikes for a couple of years. (It’s part of a complex calculation to block the state’s public employee unions from killing the spending cap, as that would create an immediate revenue crisis and calls for more cuts.) That’s something Schwarzenegger and others came up with to get the deal through. Again, the no tax hike mantra trumps all else. When asked, Whitman said she supports the open primary proposal passed by the Legislature as part of the budget deal. That would be in keeping with her touted moderate views. But actually, she does not support an open primary. When asked at her press conference, she explained that supports an open primary which is not an open primary; namely, the current system which allows independents to choose to vote in a partisan primary. An open primary, as a knowledgeable politician would know, has all the candidates run together in the primary, with the top two candidates, no matter their party registration, facing off in the general election. As is the case in non-partisan elections for city and county office in California. Since it turns out that Whitman hasn’t voted very often — because, she says, of her busy job as CEO of eBay — this may explain her lack of familiarity with how these elections work. So how then is Whitman a moderate? Well, she is pro-choice on abortion. But she came out against California’s Proposition 8, the November initiative which knocked out the states new right to gay and lesbian marriage. She says she’s against gay marriage because of her religious views. Which do not extend so far as to cause her to oppose abortion. Yet she supports the right of gay and lesbian couples to adopt a child. Whitman says she is strong on the environment, and has a green-colored backdrop on her campaign web site. But she is against California’s landmark climate change program, backed by Schwarzenegger. Why? Well, she says that it would hurt business, in particular, the cement business. In her telling, a cement business located on the border between California and Nevada would never expand again in California. It would expand in Nevada. But she repeatedly mispronounces the name of Nevada, something which infuriates people in Nevada, as people who spend time there know, and as George Stephanopoulos instantaneously learned when he moderated the first Democratic presidential forum in 2007. As part of her seeking the favor of the right-wing activist base, Whitman apologized for re-registering Republican in 2007. Prior to that, she was a registered independent, decline-to-start in the technical California parlance. She changed her registration to independent when she joined eBay, she says, because she didn’t want to offend the diverse eBay community with her Republicanism. Which changes her legend completely. While there are those who say she wasn’t a Republican before, the fact is that she was very close to Mitt Romney when she worked for Bain & Company, the management consulting and equity investment firm. That’s why Whitman, who was also a supporter of the very conservative former Virginia Senator George Allen, joined Romney’s conservative presidential campaign early on as a national finance co-chair. That’s why Romney came to California for her when she asked him to to tout her candidacy at the state Republican convention dominated by right-wing activists who mostly supported him in the California presidential primary he lost last year to John McCain. McCain was happy to take her on as a national co-chair of his presidential campaign after he clinched the nomination. And she was happy to run a town hall meeting for McCain of Silicon Valley types last spring, at which she laid out a classically conservative view on the economy, complete with a call for corporate tax cuts. It will be interesting to see how her candidacy fares. Whitman says she will spend as much as $150 million on her campaign, presumably mostly from her own accounts, though she has lined up a team of big-name Republican fundraisers. She is a billionaire, after all. Or at least she was before the financial crisis. That would hardly guarantee a win for someone of her views and background in California. Former Governor Pete Wilson has signed on as her campaign chairman. And she has some veterans of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial campaign. But the top strategists from both of Schwarzenegger’s landslide election wins — two separate groups, actually — as governor are not supporting Whitman. In fact, two of the top strategists who helped revive Schwarzenegger after his failed “Year of Reform” in 2005, when he was widely seen as having veered to the right, McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt (who ran Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign) and Adam Mendelsohn (who was Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial communications director), ended their consulting relationship with Whitman last year. Super-rich candidates, while impressing the press, have generally not done well in California, especially when they start out running for the top spots. I’ll write again about why that is. Suffice to say that Whitman, pushing policies that resonate on the far right of American politics even as some doubt her sincerity, has her work cut out for her in winning the governorship of blue state California. You can check things out during the day on my site, New West Notes … www.newwestnotes.com

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William Bradley: Whitman’s Sampler: The Ex-eBay CEO’s Moves Mirror the Republican Crisis

I’m a fierce Obama supporter but the President and his 80%+ approval rating doesn’t seem to need my help. Those Republicans bring out my inner co-dependent, though. Such a self destructive mess. And Bobby Jindal….oh, Bobby. You poor thing. If you had not have fallen, I would not have found you. Come let me spoon you and stroke your hair. I will fix you. See, to a co-dependent a Cute First Meeting story goes like this; “Well, I was walking past the rehab clinic and she was hunched over the curb and her sweat pants had a large stain the shape of Michigan on them from where she had urinated all over herself but the light caught the spittle hanging from the foamy side of her mouth JUST right and BAM! I just KNEW she had potential and that if I could buy her back from her pimp and get the two of them divorced then by golly….we’d be happy together forever!” Bobby, sweet Bobby. You have that same potential… You had a Cute First Meeting with America, didn’t you? From the moment you skulked out from the shadows and opened your pretty little mouth, you had us all under your magic spell. You know, magic like trains that float on air and mountains that shoot fire. Millions of us spent the next day saying your catch phrase, our voices filled with wonder… Repiblicans Can Fuck Up ANNNYTHING! So, I’m here to help. Don’t worry - you can accept my help because I’m not from the government. No, I’m a private citizen with lots of bad advice. That means if you pin a silver badge to my nuts, spin me around three times, and then punch me in the forehead with an American flag I’m officially a GOP Consultant. Smack my ass and put me on Fox News! Bobby, you are now America’s clown. That’s just the fact. You’re lucky that Jay and Conan aren’t working this week, although Jay did show up at NBC today and I swear it was just to write jokes about you. You performed so badly that Roland Burris wants to throw a fund raiser for you. First step back to Jindal ‘12 : size yourself up honestly. Look in a mirror and admit what we all know. You’re a buffoon. An idiot. In the words of Stork from Animal House , you’re a mo-ron. Don’t fight it. Resistance is futile. Go with the flow. You’re a joke and jokes belong on TV. I know you’re afraid to appear on camera again but experts say that’s EXACTLY what you need to do. For instance, if someone is arrested for drunk driving, the worst thing they can do is give up. They need to pick themselves up, get drunk right away and get right back on the road. My first Jindal placement would be 30 Rock . Not original but give the people what they want. You’d be Kenneth’s cousin, Piyush The Page - mild mannered at first but by the second commercial break, wacky mayhem ensues as you tried to oust Jeff Zucker before you’re stopped by a well timed sexual assault from Tracy Morgan. I can help you get on 30 Rock , too! You may not know this, but Emmy award winning actor Alec Baldwin also writes for the Huffington Post and that means that I see him every day down in the HuffPost Lunchroom. I’m not allowed to sit at his table, of course. Unwritten rules and all that. I’m usually sitting at the corner table with Bob Cesca, Cliff Schecter and Chez Pazienza. But I could try to slip Mr. Baldwin a note and put in a word for you. I let him cut in line once on Fajita Day and I’m pretty sure he remembers me because he said I could call him “Mr. Baldwin” and borrowed a pear from me. If 30 Rock won’t have you and SNL turns you down and Doctor Phil won’t kick Octomom out of his Loser Mansion or whatever he calls it, that’s fine. We go straight to YouTube. The possibilities on YouTube are unlimited. We could have you do a bunch of different crazy dances. We could put you in a tight fitting t-shirt have you do a response to a speech by Obama Girl. Hell, Bobby - we could do our OWN 30 Rock parody with Sarah Palin as Tina Fey and Michael Steele as Tracy Morgan and Mr. Baldwin as whatever he wants to be. That would be a twist - politicians parodying the parodiers! And the public would love you, man. You’d be a regular guy, willing to laugh at himself. You’d be the kind of dude that people could picture themselves hanging with; throwing back a cold one or putting a padlock on a loose woman’s uterus or performing an exorcism on a pesky neighbor. Can’t you hear it now? “That Bobby Jindal, man, he’s all effing right. I thought he was a total dinkydoo when I first seen him on the TV but now I subscribe to his YouTubes and he Twitters me jokes when a scientist says some gooblygook and damn, I dunno…he’s all effing right!” Don’t stop believin’! Because the pendulum swings, Bobby. Times change. In a few years, people will be sick of competence, coherence and the ability to talk good. And you’ll be right there waiting, my sweet spicy succulent little Bobby Jindal, you.

Excerpt from:
Lee Stranahan: Come Back To The Scene Of The Crime, Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal

I’m a fierce Obama supporter but the President and his 80%+ approval rating doesn’t seem to need my help. Those Republicans bring out my inner co-dependent, though. Such a self destructive mess. And Bobby Jindal….oh, Bobby. You poor thing. If you had not have fallen, I would not have found you. Come let me spoon you and stroke your hair. I will fix you. See, to a co-dependent a Cute First Meeting story goes like this; “Well, I was walking past the rehab clinic and she was hunched over the curb and her sweat pants had a large stain the shape of Michigan on them from where she had urinated all over herself but the light caught the spittle hanging from the foamy side of her mouth JUST right and BAM! I just KNEW she had potential and that if I could buy her back from her pimp and get the two of them divorced then by golly….we’d be happy together forever!” Bobby, sweet Bobby. You have that same potential… You had a Cute First Meeting with America, didn’t you? From the moment you skulked out from the shadows and opened your pretty little mouth, you had us all under your magic spell. You know, magic like trains that float on air and mountains that shoot fire. Millions of us spent the next day saying your catch phrase, our voices filled with wonder… Repiblicans Can Fuck Up ANNNYTHING! So, I’m here to help. Don’t worry - you can accept my help because I’m not from the government. No, I’m a private citizen with lots of bad advice. That means if you pin a silver badge to my nuts, spin me around three times, and then punch me in the forehead with an American flag I’m officially a GOP Consultant. Smack my ass and put me on Fox News! Bobby, you are now America’s clown. That’s just the fact. You’re lucky that Jay and Conan aren’t working this week, although Jay did show up at NBC today and I swear it was just to write jokes about you. You performed so badly that Roland Burris wants to throw a fund raiser for you. First step back to Jindal ‘12 : size yourself up honestly. Look in a mirror and admit what we all know. You’re a buffoon. An idiot. In the words of Stork from Animal House , you’re a mo-ron. Don’t fight it. Resistance is futile. Go with the flow. You’re a joke and jokes belong on TV. I know you’re afraid to appear on camera again but experts say that’s EXACTLY what you need to do. For instance, if someone is arrested for drunk driving, the worst thing they can do is give up. They need to pick themselves up, get drunk right away and get right back on the road. My first Jindal placement would be 30 Rock . Not original but give the people what they want. You’d be Kenneth’s cousin, Piyush The Page - mild mannered at first but by the second commercial break, wacky mayhem ensues as you tried to oust Jeff Zucker before you’re stopped by a well timed sexual assault from Tracy Morgan. I can help you get on 30 Rock , too! You may not know this, but Emmy award winning actor Alec Baldwin also writes for the Huffington Post and that means that I see him every day down in the HuffPost Lunchroom. I’m not allowed to sit at his table, of course. Unwritten rules and all that. I’m usually sitting at the corner table with Bob Cesca, Cliff Schecter and Chez Pazienza. But I could try to slip Mr. Baldwin a note and put in a word for you. I let him cut in line once on Fajita Day and I’m pretty sure he remembers me because he said I could call him “Mr. Baldwin” and borrowed a pear from me. If 30 Rock won’t have you and SNL turns you down and Doctor Phil won’t kick Octomom out of his Loser Mansion or whatever he calls it, that’s fine. We go straight to YouTube. The possibilities on YouTube are unlimited. We could have you do a bunch of different crazy dances. We could put you in a tight fitting t-shirt have you do a response to a speech by Obama Girl. Hell, Bobby - we could do our OWN 30 Rock parody with Sarah Palin as Tina Fey and Michael Steele as Tracy Morgan and Mr. Baldwin as whatever he wants to be. That would be a twist - politicians parodying the parodiers! And the public would love you, man. You’d be a regular guy, willing to laugh at himself. You’d be the kind of dude that people could picture themselves hanging with; throwing back a cold one or putting a padlock on a loose woman’s uterus or performing an exorcism on a pesky neighbor. Can’t you hear it now? “That Bobby Jindal, man, he’s all effing right. I thought he was a total dinkydoo when I first seen him on the TV but now I subscribe to his YouTubes and he Twitters me jokes when a scientist says some gooblygook and damn, I dunno…he’s all effing right!” Don’t stop believin’! Because the pendulum swings, Bobby. Times change. In a few years, people will be sick of competence, coherence and the ability to talk good. And you’ll be right there waiting, my sweet spicy succulent little Bobby Jindal, you.

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Lee Stranahan: Come Back To The Scene Of The Crime, Bobby Jindal, Bobby Jindal

When Republicans suffered a disastrous beating in November’s election, it would have been fair to assume that things could not get worse for them: the-most-liberal-Senator was to be President, Nancy-Pelosi-from-San-Francisco was going to lead a massive Democratic majority in the House, and assorted socialists were going to run things. That was bad, yes, but this week, just like the stock market (funny how that goes), Republicans hit yet a new low. In recent days, Republican leaders were called cheesy , off-putting , disastrous , untrustworthy , and inconsequential , not by Democrats, but by their party’s own members, from high-profile commentators to Governors. The highlight of the GOP week was, of course, Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to Barack Obama’s Congressional address. The best that can be said for Jindal’s performance is that it channeled Kenneth The Page from 30 Rock, presumably not the objective, even for someone who willingly changed his name to “Bobby.” But the past seven days have offered so many moments of breathtaking inanity by the GOP that our head spins at trying to organize them cohesively. With the country on the verge of being swallowed up in its entirety by the spiraling economy, Republicans obsessed over Obama’s citizenship, gay people, pregnant women with HIV, helicopters, primary challenges to their own Senators from porn stars and Christian fundamentalists, registration forms, hopeless recounts, and assorted variations on the 1981 theme of Government Is The Problem. In Alabama, Senator Richard Shelby took it upon himself to try to fan the fires set by Republican psychopaths, including Clarence Thomas : Obama is not really American because, Shelby said , he had “not seen any birth certificate.” It is quite understandable that Shelby would want to detract our attention from the fact that he chaired the Senate Committee on Banking (!), Housing (!!) and Urban Affairs from 2003 to 2007, but in the end it only serves to increase the focus on the tragic consequences of his ineptitude. On the subject, John McCain this week became preoccupied with the order for a new presidential helicopter fleet, ordered by George W. Bush and, no surprise, dreadfully mismanaged . And, since McCain still can’t chew gum and walk, this is now his sole obsession, a “good idea” that would “cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money,” making it sound as if building Marine One was somehow akin to, say, the New Deal. Or perhaps akin to testing pregnant women for HIV or extending health care benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian government workers, both of which were decried this week by Republicans in the Colorado Senate because: a) pregnant women with HIV (or is just pregnant women?) are promiscuous and their unborn children should not be protected “from the negative consequences of their actions;” b) homosexuality is murder. Other Republican nut jobs, convinced that the party lost power because it was too rational, moderate and accommodating, are circling like vultures. In Louisiana, Senator David Vitter, himself a right-wing madman, realized this week that he will likely face a dual primary challenge: by porn star Stormy Daniels (it is still unclear whether she -and we assume it is a she– was involved in Vitter’s pay for sex diaper play , but let’s not rule it out); and by Family Research Council Tony Perkins , who is as sexually obsessed as Vitter, and is probably even more insane. Another barmy Republican, Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, whom his Republican colleagues are desperate to get rid of (yes, he is that cuckoo), has threatened to sue his own National Republican Senatorial Committee if they do not support his reelection in 2010. This week, he also said of the head of the Committee: “I don’t believe anything John Cornyn says.” The ostensible new leader of the Republican National Committee, Michael “Hip Hop” Steele, also thinks that the party has veered way too far left, this week leaving open the possibility that the three moderate GOP Senators who voted for the Obama stimulus package could face retribution . “Oh, yes, I’m always open to everything, baby, absolutely,” he told an interviewer when asked whether he may withdraw funds from those Commie Republicans (”Baby?” It was on Fox News, but still). Is it any wonder that moderates everywhere are mulling party changes? Mortified by his Republican colleagues, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week made sure we realized that he had recently considered leaving the party, although why he did not is unclear. At the same time, New York City Republicans (sounds weird, no?) also took steps to remain out of power forever by refusing to support Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s bid for a third term, unless he becomes a card-carrying Republican. Again . Other GOP members don’t bother leaving the Party, they just assault it from the inside. Some do it subtly, such as once-lifelong bachelor Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who said this week that there is “a national leader, his name is President Obama,” clearly meaning there are no Republican leaders. Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah also gave us a sense of how low his GOP has sunk, saying of the party’s Congressional leaders: “I don’t listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential — completely.” This is not from a strange leftover Vermont Republican, it is from the Governor of the most consistently Republican state in the country. In New Hampshire, former Senator Bob Smith, an early victim of the state’s leftward tilt, is also intent on destroying any comeback for his Republican party in the state. This week, he appeared to threaten to move back from Florida to New Hampshire (one more sign of his madness if any was needed) to challenge his Republican nemesis , former Sen. John Sununu, himself humiliated just this November in his reelection effort (all very complicated for a small party in a small state.) Not even their favorite cheerleader/pundit Stuart Rothenberg’s irrational prediction that “2009 and 2010 could be the beginning of a rebound for the party in the Northeast” (ha!) is likely to save Republicans from their cannibalistic instinct. That said, Republicans are not only molesting one another. Yes, they are powerless against Obama or Pelosi, but they have shifted their time and money to a Democratic threat even bigger, or at least one they think they have a shot at: Al Franken, who won his challenge to Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman by a slim margin. Coleman, who has already taken a new job but actually seems to want to remain a Republican, this week called for a do-over, and Republicans everywhere are throwing money at his challenge to the November election. From an electoral perspective, it is not entirely clear why, however. Republicans are busy trying to kick out the three Northeastern GOP moderate Judases from the Senate (and surely they know they don’t have a shot at replacing them with anything but a Democrat, whatever Rothenberg may hope for), but they are fighting tooth and nail to keep the Minnesota moderate? The truth is, of course, that the GOP’s Minnesota focus has to do with the fact that Franken is the author of “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” and that Limbaugh, besides being a big fat drug-addled idiot, is also the actual leader of the Republican Party in 2009. Presumably this would explain why Republicans, to their dying breath, are fighting the slanderous Franken. In return, they can expect various favors to be bestowed by the head big fat idiot, and even be saved from political death. “I love Bobby Jindal he’s brilliant,” Limbaugh said this week, in what is sure to be the Republicans’ determining verdict on Jindal’s very Bobby-ish performance. With the sweet smell of defeat lingering in Republican Washington, three of the party’s biggest losers are back. Tom DeLay, run out of the capital because even by its standards he was woefully corrupt, called Obama’s Congressional address “the most irresponsible, hypocritical speech I have ever witnessed.” This from the man who blamed the Columbine shootings on “school systems [teaching] our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud.” Speaking of irresponsible, hypocritical, primordial and muddy, Newt Gingrich is also back and you will be stunned to hear that he is “disappointed” with Obama’s performance so far. Mitt “Who Let The Dogs Out” Romney, who drained $100 million on a creepy presidential campaign, this week decided to come to the financial rescue of embattled Republicans who are “standing up for fiscal responsibility and saying no to spending abuse” (ie, the stimulus package). Yes, that’s right, the man who spent $400,000 per delegate in the Republican primary is proudly lecturing others about fiscal responsibility. Any moment now, we expect Rudy Giuliani, who outdid Romney by spending $59 million for just one delegate, to share some of his own financial wisdom, probably spicing it up with his usual light-handed touch of 9/11 doomsday. In just seven days, Republicans have offered up more amusement and fodder for an election campaign than even the most hopeful among us could have expected. What is especially thrilling is that it comes at little expense: Obama is competently in charge, as are, by and large, Democrats elsewhere, and change is happening at a mind-blowing pace. In the long run, yes, there should be concern that having buffoons in opposition is not healthy, but for now let’s enjoy the moment. Of course, you ask, what about Sarah Palin, one of the likely buffoons-in-chief in 2012? Well, her very serious documentarian took charge of her faltering public relations this week. He went on national television to tell us emphatically that she is NOT a “moron.”

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Paul Jenkins: Worst Week Ever: Republicans Unhinged

NEW YORK — Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland,” an acclaimed post-Sept. 11 novel bypassed for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle prize, has finally received a literary honor: the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The choice was announced Thursday by Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, directors of the Washington-based PEN/Faulkner Foundation. O’Neill, whose book is narrated by a man who lived in downtown Manhattan at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks, will receive $15,000. The finalists _ Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s “Ms. Hempel Chronicles,” Susan Choi’s “A Person of Interest,” Richard Price’s “Lush Life” and Ron Rash’s “Serena” _ each get $5,000. Previous winners include Philip Roth, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow.

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Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland Wins PEN/Faulkner Prize

I know that there are many Republicans out there, who think that Sarah Palin is a complete “whack job” (to quote a source in the McCain campaign). I know this because I just had dinner with one of them the other night. My impression was that she voted for Obama, almost out of desperation, because she wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing Sarah Palin was a heartbeat away from the presidency. I’m sure many of those people watched Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to Obama’s speech tonight hoping that there was, indeed, and up and coming young Republican that wasn’t….well….embarrassing. His underwhelming performance was more than a little bit “me me me” and quite devoid on actual policy. It was a pretty obvious opening act to his 2012 campaign. And, he didn’t mention veterans. And he mocked volcano preparedness (was that just to tick off the land of Palin?) And he tried to use Hurricaine Katrina as a Republican talking point, and that story may in fact be a lie. And he didn’t really exude sincerity either. OK, let’s face it. That speech was pretty damn bad. But these people are desperate for SOMEone. And he’s still a relief from the whiny, hand-wringing, gun totin’, winkin’, cookie bakin’, spotlight hoggin’ Wasilla gal with the crazy witch hunting pastor. You remember that guy, right? Pastor Muthee from Africa (which is a continent by the way, not a country) who came to fame and fortune by driving a witch, menacingly named “Mama Jane” from a village, after killing the demon in the form of a python she kept as a pet. The one who flew multiple times to Wasilla and prayed the witches away from Sarah Palin, while she stood at the altar with arms extended and palms toward heaven. Then he asked Wasillans to pray that God would take over the banks and the schools and the businesses and the minds of the little children, and of course, the government. Still don’t remember him? Here’s a reminder. 2:57 - First mention of Sarah 5:00 - We need God to ‘take over the education system.’ 5:27 - We need God to ‘take over the media’ and Hollywood itself. 6:08 - We need the government run by born-again Christians. 6:58 - Praying for Sarah to become governor (Doesn’t this impact their tax-exempt status? Anyone?) 7:12 - Sarah herself enters and is “prayed upon”. 8:38 - Another witchcraft reference. Doesn’t it seem even weirder now than it did back in October? So, yeah. Those Republicans I mention, are looking long and hard at Jindal. After last night’s performance, they may not be dancing in the streets, but at least he’s not the star of that video clip above. Not so fast, my disenchanted conservative friends. This came to my attention, and made me start to wonder what exactly is IN that red Kool-Aid? This has just got to make you wonder. Let’s wind the Bobby Jindal time machine back to 1994, when he wrote an article entitled…are you ready? Are you sitting down? “Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare.” No, this was not some term paper for a creative writing class, or an abstract for Comparative World Religions or Cultural Anthropology. This was an actual true-to-life story; a personal narrative, if you will. Yup. Bobby Jindal - Demon Beater. Spiritual Warrior. Exorcist Extraordinaire. Who knew? Did he put this on his resume under “Skills and Talents”? The original article will cost you money to see at The New Oxford Review . But for those of you not wanting to part with your hard earned $1.50, here are some of the highlights. Some background first. Jindal’s best friend Susan has not been doing well. She’s been diagnosed with skin cancer, and her behavior has become strange and erratic. She is surrounded by “sulphurous smells,” and has come to a prayer meeting for help. Jindal writes: The students, led by Susan’s sister and Louise, a member of a charismatic church, engaged in loud and desperate prayers while holding Susan with one hand. Kneeling on the ground, my friends were chanting, “Satan, I command you to leave this woman.” Others exhorted all “demons to leave in the name of Christ.” It is no exaggeration to note the tears and sweat among those assembled. Susan lashed out at the assembled students with verbal assaults. Whenever I concentrated long enough to begin prayer, I felt some type of physical force distracting me. It was as if something was pushing down on my chest, making it very hard for me to breathe. . . Though I could find no cause for my chest pains, I was very scared of what was happening to me and Susan. I began to think that the demon would only attack me if I tried to pray or fight back; thus, I resigned myself to leaving it alone in an attempt to find peace for myself. It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force. But the momentum had shifted and we now sensed that victory was at hand.While Alice and Louise held Susan, her sister continued holding the Bible to her face. Almost taunting the evil spirit that had almost beaten us minutes before, the students dared Susan to read biblical passages. She choked on certain passages and could not finish the sentence “Jesus is Lord.” Over and over, she repeated “Jesus is L..L..LL,” often ending in profanities. In between her futile attempts, Susan pleaded with us to continue trying and often smiled between the grimaces that accompanied her readings of Scripture. Just as suddenly as she went into the trance, Susan suddenly reappeared and claimed “Jesus is Lord.” With an almost comical smile, Susan then looked up as if awakening from a deep sleep and asked, “Has something happened?” She did not remember any of the past few hours and was startled to find her friends breaking out in cheers and laughter, overwhelmed by sudden joy and relief. I leave you with this thought to ponder. Why are these two the new great hopes of the Republican Party; the shining stars; the young energetic faces of the GOP’s future? If this is the case, the best movie analogy may not be “The Exorcist”. It just might be “Night of the Living Dead.” Dems, just sit tight and don’t be corrupt. The world is yours.

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AKMuckraker: Witches and Demons and Republicans….Oh My!

Remember when it was an unfair personal attack to even ask what Bristol Palin’s pregnancy said about her mother’s abstinence-only stance? Yeah, that was a while ago. Now that Bristol has said abstinence is ” not realistic at all ,” she’s not getting privacy or support from her mother’s erstwhile allies. The National Abstinence Education Association has this to say about her views: During Sarah Palin’s recent vice- presidential bid, her unmarried teen daughter Bristol’s pregnancy became a hot campaign topic. As a follow-up report on this compelling human interest story, Fox News Commentator Greta van Susteren, asked Bristol Palin about abstinence. Bristol shared her view that “abstinence is…not realistic at all”. It is suspect that media, seemingly devoted to science based research, is quick to claim Bristol Palin’s experience as proof positive that abstinence education for all teens should end. RH Reality Check responds: The main point: I have not heard anyone, anywhere, suggest that “abstinence education for all teens should end.”  Rather, many have said before me,  and I have argued here ( indeed just this week ) that federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage education should end. --snip– Because most young people have sex for the first time at about age 17, but do not marry until their middle or late 20s , young adults are likely to be sexually active before marrying for nearly a decade.  This means they need protection from unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.  Some may never marry; some are not legally able. Some may choose to be abstinent until marriage.  That is their right and their prerogative.  Others will choose to engage in sexual activity.   Should we just throw them all under the bus? Or do we equip them early on with good negotiating skills, medically accurate information, and access to birth control (including condoms) that can prevent either one or both of unintended pregnancy and infection. Unfortunately we know the abstinence-only crowd’s answer to that rhetorical question. Kind of like we know the answer an “ex-gay ministry” would give to the question of whether gay people deserve to be able to love who they choose happily and with dignity and respect.

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Abstinence Education Group Slams Bristol Palin

“Oh God,” muttered Chris Matthews, before Gov. Jindal had begun. If you’re going to enter like a wanna be president the least you can do is have a clue what has come before you show up. Michael Gerson should be hiding after tonight: Some have compared Jindal to Obama, but the new president has always been more attracted to platitudes than to policy. Rush Limbaugh has anointed Jindal “the next Ronald Reagan.” Happy Mardi Gras is how Gov. Jindal started. It got worse from there. Fox’s Charles Krauthammer stated it simply: “Jindal didn’t have a chance.” Following President Obama’s incredible oratory, personal touches and serious content, Jindal’s high school bio driven blather, complete with Katrina gaffe that included mentioning the sheriff that stood on the bridge with dogs and guns to keep people from crossing, you had to wonder if Republicans had ever heard the man speak before. Maybe they simply picked him because Michael Steele is the only other guy of color they’ve got and he was busy. David Brooks drives in the final nail: LEHRER: Now that, of course, was Gov. Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, making the Republican response. David, how well do you think he did? BROOKS: Uh, not so well. You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician, and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale “government is the problem,” “we can’t trust the federal government” - it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we’re just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say “government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,” it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is. There’s an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he’s making that case. I think it’s insane, and I just think it’s a disaster for the party. I just think it’s unfortunate right now. Republicans might have to rethink this Jindal thing. Calling Sarah Palin? Yep, all Palin has to do is stay out of sight and study. They’ll end up begging her to come back, with Rush & Sean Hannity leading the cheers. She can’t answer the simplest questions but at least she can deliver a speech.

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Taylor Marsh: Calling Sarah Palin

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s task tonight, to rebut President Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress, was a thankless one. But it still constituted an opportunity for the Louisiana Republican to show that he could handle the national spotlight, present himself as a fresh face of the Republican Party, and stand up to the current president oratorically. On each of these three hurdles, he came up short. Both Democrats and Republicans alike panned Jindal’s rebuttal in terms that were decidedly harsh: “amateurish,” “laughable” and, most commonly, “a missed opportunity.” “After watching Jindal,” one Democratic strategist emailed, “I’d pay a lot of money to be back watching a Palin speech.” “Awkward with capital A,” emailed another. The punditry was equally brutal. Part of the problem was the crux of Jindal’s address, which consisted almost entirely of red meat for conservatives. The Governor offered criticism for anything other than tax cuts and ridiculed government spending for items that are either widely supported — “$8 billion for high-speed rail” — or seemingly essential — “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring’” (isn’t Louisiana Exhibit A in the need for natural disaster warning?). “You know, I think Bobby Jindal is a very promising politician,” said New York Times columnist David Brooks, appearing on PBS, “and I oppose the stimulus because I thought it was poorly drafted. But to come up at this moment in history with a stale “government is the problem,” “we can’t trust the federal government” — it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea … that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this … it’s just a form of nihilism. It’s just not where the country is, it’s not where the future of the country is. There’s an intra-Republican debate.” And yet, much of the critique of Jindal’s address focused on his hokey, folksy, seemingly-forced tone and vernacular. The Governor, who has never held court on the national stage before — remember, his speech at the Republican convention was called off after Hurricane Gustav made landfall — showed a bit of wetness behind the ears. And the commentators let him have it, even on Fox News . BRIT HUME: “The speech read a lot better than it sounded. This was not Bobby Jindal’s greatest oratorical moment.” NINA EASTON: “The delivery was not exactly terrific.” CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “Jindal didn’t have a chance. He follows Obama, who in making speeches, is in a league of his own. He’s in a Reagan-esque league. … [Jindal] tried the best he could.” JUAN WILLIAMS: “It came off as amateurish, and even the tempo in which he spoke was sing-songy. He was telling stories that seemed very simplistic and almost childish. All said, the speech was received with disappointment by conservatives who have looked to the Governor as the Republican Party’s next star. Jindal’s background and resume — he was raised by Indian-immigrant parents and has an undisputed intellect — seem, at least superficially, like key pillars upon which to forge a new kind of GOP candidacy. But other politicians have been panned for their State of the Union rebuttals in the past and managed to achieve national success, including Gov. Tim Kaine, who now heads the DNC, and Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who appears poised to be nominated Secretary of Health and Human Services.

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Bobby Jindal Response Panned By Pundits, Republicans And Democrats Alike

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today settled a state ethics complaint filed against her in Alaska last October by agreeing to pay back the state approximately $6,800 for nine trips claimed for her children to various functions paid for by Alaska’s tax payers. The ethics complaint was originally filed during last year’s presidential election by retired electrical lineman Frank Gwartney, from Anchorage, who called the travel expenses claimed by Palin “such a blatant misuse of state money.” A second-generation Alaskan native whose parents arrived on the Kenai Peninsula in the 1930s, Gwartney said he filed the complaint simply because he was “sick and tired of corruption in Alaska’s government.” He also charged the governor with altering travel records to indicate that her family members were on “official business” while traveling with her. The response from the McCain-Palin campaign at the time was to attack Gwartney: This is a purely political stunt less than six days from the election that not only violates the law that requires Personnel Board complaints to be confidential, but raises serious questions about the motives of Mr. Gwartney, a stated Obama supporter. Governor Palin has always acted with the highest standards of ethics. Apparently not. Today’s “settlement agreement,” as the document is titled, involves no admission of wrongdoing, blaming the expenditures on “little statutory or regulatory guidance.” Palin contended that her administration viewed the travel expenses as “official First Family business” and that Palin only takes her children on the taxpayers’ nickel “to events they’re invited to.” Nonetheless, according to the Anchorage Daily News , lawyer Tim Petumenos, who was hired by the state Personnel Board to investigate the complaint (and who earlier exonerated Palin in the Troopergate affair), found that for nine trips claimed by Palin for her children, “the personal benefit outweighed the public benefit.” According to Petumenos it didn’t matter if they had been “invited” or not. The ethics settlement comes in the immediate aftermath of Palin turning in her state-purchased Chevy Surburban and announcing that she had to pay taxes on reimbursements she received for living in her Wasilla home. Only yesterday, Palin’s chief political flak Bill McAllister held a news conference in which he declared: The news media have been focused on the $8,500 the governor has collected in per diem annually while working in Anchorage, almost 50 miles from her home in Wasilla. But aside from the fact that the governor is legally entitled to these payments, the media have missed the larger point that the governor actually has saved the state money by not living year-round in the official residence in Juneau. Say what? Didn’t Palin run against her predecessors as a reformer? And now she’s comparing her record to theirs? In fact, Palin spent more annually in 2007 on “conference fees” and “meals and incidentals” than either of her two predecessors in any given fiscal year. What Palin, McAllister and those entrenched around her apparently don’t get is that the Governor touts herself as a “reformer” and “fiscal conservative,” while she herself has tapped the public trough frequently for her family’s private benefit . Their hypocrisy apparently knows no bounds. “Governor Palin ran on an ethics platform,” said Gwartney, “but she’s no different than the rest of them. Apparently, she thinks she was elected Queen.”

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Geoffrey Dunn: Palin Nailed in Another Ethics Scandal

Welcome back to Wife Watch!, the only blog post that ranks the most powerful wives on this week’s Big Love. This week’s contest, however, will be a little bit different, since the latest episode, “Come, Ye Saints,” is never about power. Instead, playwright Melanie Marnich , writing her first segment for the series, undoes some of the biggest secrets in the Henrickson family. And when they’re out in the open, secrets just aren’t powerful anymore. When secrets are out in the open, everyone is vulnerable, so everyone is on an equal playing field. Everyone realizes they need each other to survive Or at least, that’s what this family realizes. After the great leveling, the Henricksons come together as powerfully as they ever have. The final credits even roll in silence because there’s no more story to tell, at least not this week. In “Come, Ye Saints,” the end result isn’t a move up the ranks, but a universal explosion of forgiveness, so this week’s First Wife isn’t the most crafty or persuasive. She’s the one who contributes most to the revelations and the recovery. (Before I go on, can I just reiterate that Big Love is the best drama on television right now?) For the most part, Barb is getting hit with bombs. She discovers Nicky’s birth control, then instantly decides that it belongs to Sarah. Convinced her daughter is sexually active, she loses her mind, and her fit makes secretly-pregnant Sarah race out of the hotel, weeping about the fact that she’s a disappointment (even more than her mother realizes.) Oh, right…the hotel. This episode takes us away from Utah while the Henricksons go on a cross-country pilgrimage to visit major Mormon landmarks. That means no one can escape anyone else and no one can get distracted by Juniper Creek. (This answers a question I had earlier this season about what would happen if the show ever left Utah. Apparently, lots and lots of truth-telling.) And so, Barb starts expressing herself. After the Sarah smackdown, she hurls a zinger at Bill after she learns he’s on Viagra (Right! From the first season!) Eyes blaring, she reminds him that he never needed pills when it was just the two of them. Granted, Barb is open about her mixed feelings back home, but now that they’re on the road, her family can’t avoid her uncomfortable truths. She doesn’t have much to reveal herself, but the sheer force of her personality pushes other people into action, even if it’s because they’re annoyed with her. Margene, meanwhile, is taking big steps. After she and Ben accidentally see each other naked, and Ben finally admits he has sexual feeling for her, Margene firmly (but kindly) rejects his puppy love. It’s fantastic to see her embrace her maternal position in the family. She also mothers Teeny, who discovers Ben’s love note to Margene. By refusing to shame Ben or lie to Teeny about what’s happening, Margene invites loads of forgiveness. Plus, she’s incredibly understanding of Bill, who has his most touching arc in ages. Faced with the realization that his family may be broken—-an idea that strikes when he glimpses them through a camera lens, frowning for a family portrait—he has a crisis of faith. His roles as father, husband, and good man all seem threatened, and in an especially elegant scene, he Bill carries the time capsule his family was supposed to bury at the end of their journey. It’s tucked under his arm as he wanders down a road, feet blistered, trying to catch up to a family that accidentally drove off without him. He’s utterly alone, left with nothing but a ludicrous phallus, which mocks the masculine ideals he’s trying to uphold. It’s the most vulnerable Bill has been in the entire series, and his vulnerability is partially caused by Margene. (She tells Barb and Nicky about his Viagra, after all.) But then she also forgives him for being human by trying to get him aroused for his night with Nicky. It’s an explosive image, watching a half-naked Margene kiss Bill while Nicky looks on, but it doesn’t play like cruelty. It plays like a wife trying to help the rest of her family. Granted, Margene’s good intentions are misguided, but what can you do? Emotionally, she’s getting it right. In this episode, however, Nicky is the biggest force. For one thing, she still has the tiny secret that her boss is flirting with her, though that seems small compared to what else is going on. Second, she’s behind two big revelations. She not only admits she’s been taking birth control for four years (!), but she also convinces Sarah to tell the rest of the family about her baby. But here’s thing: In both cases, Nicky reveals the big, raw heart beneath her sour expression. Regarding her birth control, she admits that she doesn’t want to have children with a man who needs Viagra to want her, and she correctly points out that Bill takes secret pills just like she does. It’s hard not to sympathize. But Nicky’s no narcissist. She’s discovers Sarah sobbing in the bathroom, learns she’s just had a miscarriage, and instantly starts helping. When Nicky says she’s in Sarah’s corner, you know she means it, because Nicky doesn’t mess around with family devotion. And so it’s Nicky who pushes the season’s deepest secret into the light. And that’s the revelation that leads to the biggest moment of forgiveness. On the side of the road, the family sees Sarah breaking down, and they don’t push her away. They pull her close. And for a moment, the pull each other close, too. For more, please join me at The Critical Condition .

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Mark Blankenship: Big Love Wife Watch! : Round Six (Spoilers)

Original caption: Kim Jong-il Giving Field Guidance at a Chewing Gum Factory in North Korea. YESTERDAY’S FAVORITES FRIDAY’S WINNER: “And Ladies, you hold it just like I’m holding this microphone…” By ameliawizard.

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Caption This Photo, Vote For Yesterday’s Best, See Friday’s Winner

Oscar is American, but the red carpet is French - with some Italian blood. When it came to choosing gowns for the Academy Awards this year, Kate, Penelope, Sarah, and Angelina went for Old World Couture. Of the 27 most photographed female stars at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood last night, only seven were dressed by U.S. designers. The French and Italian gowns, most notably the 60 -year-old cream silk Balmain worn by supporting actress winner Penelope Cruz, were gorgeous. But they were more of the same of what we’ve been seeing at the Academy Awards for years - beaded and structured extravaganzas that evoke European High Style. They looked as demodé as Hugh Jackman’s song and dance number with Beyoncé - too big and too produced. The television audience for The Academy Awards has been declining steadily in recent years, especially among younger viewers, and the ceremony’s organizers are desperate to make it more exciting and youthful. Since many people watch the show mainly to see the stars’ clothes, one solution would be to get the actresses out of their Diors and Valentinos, their Versaces and Armanis and into some fresh, sassy, U.S. frocks. That might be too much to ask of the celebs, a group not known for pushing fashion to extremes. They’re expected to make their grand entrances looking grand, and most of them have tended to play it safe, relying on stylists who steer them to famous European designers. The results are cookie-cutter confections - either pale, frothy, wedding type dresses like Sarah Jessica Parker’s Dior, or severe black columns like Angelina Jolie’s Elie Saab. Three of the most stunning dresses last night, and three that did nothing to disappoint in the glamour department, were by American designers. At the top of the list was the pale lavender silk dress by Kate and Laura Mulleavy, of the California based Rodarte, worn by Natalie Portman. Tina Fey was gorgeous in a shimmery champagne colored dress by Zac Posen that looked like liquid silk. And Amy Adams’s crimson gown with black spider web-piping by Caroline Herrera stood out so boldly it dulled all the red dresses around it. In America today, as is often the case in periods of turmoil, there’s a yearning to return women to traditional ideas of femininity. Perhaps that’s why actresses are so drawn to the opulent luxuriousness of European couture. But Americans can do opulence, too, and it would be nice to see more dresses on the red carpet by U.S. designers. In this economy, they need all the help they can get. Michelle Obama, for one, is making headlines for a personal style that reflects a passion for American fashion. Her taste for classic feminine clothes by Jason Wu, Thakoon, Maria Pinto, and Isabel Toldeo, plants her firmly in the tradition of such legendary style icons as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But unlike that other Mrs. O., Mrs. Obama is not a clothes horse besotted with French luxury. In fact, she’s not a clothes horse at all. She loves clothes, but they are not central to her life in the way they were for Jackie or, say, Marie Antoinette. Even before her husband became a candidate for president, Michelle supported American designers, and now that she’s First Lady, she’s continuing that support. Jackie, on the other hand, began patronizing American designers only after Women’s Wear Daily reported her extravagant Paris shopping sprees during the 1960 election. The public remembers her best in the pink Chanel suit she was wearing when her husband was shot and the magnificent gowns by Givenchy and Valentino that she favored after leaving the White House. I’ve never seen Michelle Obama in Chanel or Valentino. Jennifer Aniston, are you listening?

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Gioia Diliberto: Is the Red Carpet French?

Southern Republican Governors Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Rick Perry of Texas, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina are making noises about “refusing” federal dollars from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. They are posturing in a way reminiscent of an earlier generation of Southern governors who stood for “states’ rights,” which was a euphemism for Jim Crow racial segregation. Given that these GOP governors preside over the nation’s “black belt,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina accurately called their obstructionist stance “a slap in the face of African Americans.” Haley Barbour, before winning the governorship of Mississippi was a high-powered Washington lobbyist and a former chair of the Republican National Committee. When he’s not attending barbeques hosted by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (C of CC) he’s figuring out new ways to tax poor people while denying them government aid. Mississippi has the most regressive tax structure in the country and is ranked 50th among the states for per capita spending on social programs. Bobby Jindal is the Indian-American rising star of the Republican Party. To prove himself to the country club set he adheres to the harshest of anti-poor ideologies. Jindal is also a right-wing Christian fundamentalist who calls for teaching “intelligent design” in public schools. His talk radio conservatism is tinged with the fanaticism of someone who comes from a “subaltern” group. Jindal’s immigrant background leads him to compare his own experience to that of African Americans and conclude that the black community must be inherently dysfunctional. Jindal must distance himself from the first African-American president or he’ll jeopardize his lilywhite political base and dash his presidential ambitions, and what better way to do so than to posture against federal aid? And don’t forget Texas Governor Rick Perry. A mad executioner like his predecessor, Perry is closing in on his 200th execution since taking office (George W. Bush only managed 152, but both governors hold national records). Perry also vetoed a measure that would prohibit executing mentally retarded people. “At a time when the country — including Texas — is opening its eyes to the problems that plague capital punishment,” Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA said, “Governor Perry has chosen to remain blind to its flaws, further tarnishing Texas’ human rights reputation.” The vast majority of inmates Perry (as well as Bush) put to death were blacks and Hispanics. And then there’s Mark Sanford who rose out of Strom Thurmond’s Republican Party in South Carolina with an abysmal record on all issues affecting the lives of African Americans. His policies always somehow benefit the well-healed white folks in his state while leaving behind everybody else. Governor Sanford proudly flies the Confederate flag over the South Carolina state house, a fitting tribute to the rise of the Neo-Confederacy. On that score, Sanford must be the new Jefferson Davis. These Neo-Confederate governors are following in the tradition of President Andrew Johnson of the Reconstruction era. Johnson vetoed over twenty pieces of legislation that would have created a set of federal institutions in the former Confederacy to help guide the transition from slavery to freedom of four million former slaves. Today, the Neo-Confederacy obstructs the federal government’s attempt to alleviate some of the suffering of the descendants of those slaves even while the nation endures its worst economic disaster in 70 years. These Southern governors are even refusing federal help to continue unemployment benefits for tens of thousands of people who have recently lost their jobs. Now that’s pretty harsh! But there’s hope. The Department of Justice has the tools to bring Southern obstructionist governors in line as it did in the 1960s. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” and there are plenty of federal statutes on the books protecting the rights of poor people and minorities that Attorney General Eric Holder could enforce far more vigorously than his Republican predecessors. The process of Southernizing the Republican Party has reached a more advanced stage after the election of the first African American President. What began in 1968 with Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” continued to mature through the Reagan years and the Newt Gingrich “revolution” until, in the 2000s, George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, and Bill Frist brought it to apotheosis. The Southern wing and its Sunbelt allies gave the Rockefeller Republicans the heave-ho leaving only a distilled rump party filled with ideologues, zealots, and “Ditto-Heads”; note the inordinate hostility aimed at Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter for voting for the stimulus bill. Vacuums in political leadership never last long. And some of the most backward elements in our political discourse are poised to take control of one of our nation’s major parties. “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” Barry Goldwater famously said. But it might be bad politics. In 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated the Republicans had 36 Senators and 117 House seats; four years later, when FDR began his second term, the Republicans had 16 Senators and 88 House seats. Of course, the madness is not limited to the South. The state of California is reeling after six years of a Republican governor and an obstructionist Republican minority in the legislature. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power through a circus-like, GOP-financed “recall” election, where Gary Coleman and a porn star also ran, for the sole purpose of stroking his overblown ego. Schwarzenegger’s abysmal record coupled with the crippling Republican “supermajority” needed to pass budgets means the Golden State ain’t so golden anymore. When “the Terminator” came to power the state’s budget deficit was about one-fourth the size it is now and he failed to get any federal help from his “good friend” George W. Bush. He spent most of his political capital trying to privatize the public employee pension system and break the teachers’ and nurses’ unions. He spent a lot of time in 2008 out on the stump campaigning for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Most recently he couldn’t even get members of his own party to vote for the desperately needed budget. The devastated U.S. economy is tearing families apart and the cutbacks at the state level are coming at exactly the wrong time. The California Republican Party is every bit as backward and reactionary as its Southern counterparts. California Republicans are up in arms because a handful of GOP legislators voted to keep the state from going belly up. They were apparently willing to let the state hemorrhage $400 million halting construction projects rather than show “bipartisanship.” Like their brethren in the Neo-Confederacy, California’s Sunbelt Republicans would rather see the state drop off into the Pacific Ocean than take the step of raising taxes on their wealthy friends or give a helping hand to those who are suffering in these terrible economic times.

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Joseph A. Palermo: Neo-Confederacy Erupts with Governors’ Rejection of Stimulus Money

The GOP announced today that the party as a whole would be heading off the political cliff later this year. Republicans are hatching a political comeback by dusting off a strategic playbook written nearly two decades ago. Its themes: Unite against Democrats’ economic policy, block and counter health care reform and tar them with spending scandals. Those represent the political trifecta that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich bet on in 1994 to produce a historic Republican takeover of Congress. Keeping in tune with polls that show that only ultraconservative Republicans like them , GOP and conservative leaders have decided to shrink the GOP until it’s small enough to drown in the bathtub. Democrats were somewhat skeptical, noting that independents were supportive of Democrats and not Republicans on the major issues: Health care is a personal issue for many voters. Reforming the current system ranks as the public’s third top priority, according to a January Kaiser Family Foundation poll. And many of those advocates aren’t traditional Democratic constituents. “We are in a different game, and they are playing by the old rules,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic political strategist and former Clinton adviser. Republican leaders like Eric Cantor and John Boehner are debating whether to add anti-flouridation to the GOP agenda, in case their message isn’t clear. But whatever the final strategy, if it worked in the 60’s or the 80’s or the 90’s, it’s on the table for discussion. “We’re thinking of calling for universal exorcism and bloodletting as national policy,” said an anonymous source close to Governor Sarah Palin, as the Republican Governors figure out how to refuse stimulus money for their states. “We’ll start with apostates Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist and see how it goes.” The plan won’t be formally ratified until all the carrier pigeons return with the ballots.

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Operation Unified Lemming

What’s with the wedding cakes? Clearly Michelle Obama’s inaugural night confection by Jason Wu set Hollywood stars into envious copycat mode. White, frothy, tiered and layered full-length poofs have been the biggest trend and misstep of the night. That is except for Brad and Angelina snubbing both Tim Gunn and Ryan Seacrest in the Oscars pre-show coverage. Now they’re known as Snobalinga! HERE CAME THE BRIDES Here’s my list of biggest bridal girls: Miley Cyrus : Prom Queen bride in a multi-layered petaled gown by Zuhair Murad edged in sequins. Penelope Cruz : Best supporting actress and vintage Balmain bride. Sarah Jessica “Cinderella” Parker : Sarah’s Dior crinoline couture would have been Carrie’s dream dress. WINNERS IN WHITE White: the biggest color of the night but these stars sidestepped marital moments and looked amazing! Anne Hathaway : stunning in a sparkly paillette column by Armani Prive. Evan Rachel Wood : classy in Elie Saab. Taraji Henson : not only does her body conscious sheath with trailing train make her look inches taller, it’s completely soft, pretty and flattering. Thank you Roberto Cavalli. Marisa Tomei : Ok, apparently she’s actually in pearl grey but it looks white to me and it’s fantastic! Slim through the body, then a pure Hollywood flared train by Versace Atelier. Tina Fey : Liz Lemon hides the fact that Tina’s figure rocks and she finally lets us see that in her crystal-beaded full-length formfitter by I -don’t- have-a-clue right now. Jen Aniston : did someone leak to her that Angelina would wear black? Best thing about her head-to-toe in general: she looked 15 years younger than 40! Best golden hair highlights of the night! SIMPLY STELLAR They came and conquered!! Freida Pinto : what a first time appearance. Absolutely stunning in blue lacy curvacious John Galliano. Kept her makeup natural-looking. Hair dressed up but not too tight. Kate Winslet : the silver and black lace YSL Atelier gown was an elegant original though Kate it would have been even more amazing if you just let your hair down. Marion Cotillard : so risky with its fitted top with a crazy full-on black ballgown that it was kind of like Robert Downey Jr.’s role in Tropic Thunder: verging on insane, but genius. Natalie Portman : an Oscar float in the best sense. So pretty in she could appear in Wikipedia under the entry, “ethereal.” BLACK BEAUTIES In no way risky or headline-making but you can’t criticize them for going purely classy: Angelina Jolie : Not her most memorable red carpet ever but Angie still looked sexy (can she help it?) and soft in Elie Saab especially with a cascade of black curls down her back. Octo-mom eat your heart out! Diane Lane : can’t beat a slim number like that that shows off your perfect form THEY PULLED OFF FEATHERS & SEQUINS Vanessa Hudgens : She’s my teen queen. Totally carried her Marchesa tight column with a Wild Westian saloon flounce and some front feathers with confidence. Fun, and the black set off her dark hair and pretty light makeup. High school girls across America will rightly continue to worship her. Leslie Mann : pure Jean Harlowesque full length fluid sequins from Pamella Roland for the funny girl and it worked. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? Beyonce : matador-in-training? Heidi Klum : why was such a nice woman in such a space age gown? Jessica Biel : you forgot to untuck your dinner napkin from your dress. For more of Bonnie’s Oscar thoughts, follow her at www.twitter.com/bonniefuller .

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Bonnie Fuller: Oscar Gowns: The Best, The Worst & The What Were They Thinking? An Insta-Review!

It seems the Academy must have stopped trying to keep winners from thanking specific people in their acceptance speeches — that always seemed like one of the ticky-tackiest initiatives in a long line of ticky-tacky initiatives designed to keep the winners from having their moment in the sun in order that there might be more time for awkward scripted intros. (And, this year, embarrassingly bad musical intros.) I know a number of people who make a point of seeing all the major nominated pictures — last night I was talking to someone who had seen two that day in order to make his goal — and I always intend to do so but can never quite bring myself to see them all. This year I’ve seen very few. How about you? Prediction: Sarah Jessica Parker and Miley Cyrus are going to be pictured next to each other in every magazine’s Oscar fashion story, thanks to their similar fairytale-princess dresses. Award for art direction: Curious Case of Benjamin Button Award for costume design: The Duchess Do you feel bad for the writers who had to come up with a different description of Benjamin Button for each of its nominations? Award for makeup: Curious Case of Benjamin Button So far, a night of surprises… Award for cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire

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2009 Academy Awards Open Thread #2

The last two days of fashion week were just as overwhelming as the first. The week closed with such incredibly relevant showings, all of which left me yearning for more when normally I just walk away feeling partially satiated. Only four shows were left for me to see which included Tommy Hilfiger , Calvin Klein , Zac Posen and Project Alabama . I arrived backstage at Tommy Hilfiger bright and early on Thursday morning as I was slated for an interview with the designer pre-show. (Note to self: next time book interview POST show because 9:30am is too early for any interview.) The place was packed with models, stylists, hair, makeup, reporters and photographers frantically running around in the final countdown. Champagne, Mimosas and little espresso cups filled with rich hot chocolate and paired with vanilla macaroons were being served by a team of beautiful Hilfiger-clad models, all provided by New York’s most celebrated (and my personal favorite) event caterer, Olivier Cheng . Tommy Hilfiger Fall Winter 2009 The collection was entitled Quintessentially Fifth Avenue and was inspired by the new 5th Avenue Hilfiger boutique opening later this year, where “sensibility meets fashion” Tommy Hilfiger told me. “This season was designed to fit with everything else in our entire world.” When I asked him how he was aligning himself and his brand with the current state of the economy, he said that it was all about the clothes themselves. “We’re putting all of our effort into improving the quality of our garments. We want them to be incredible at affordable prices.” In true Hilfiger fashion, no visible expenses were spared, and the show was just as decadent and American as seasons past. The women’s Calvin Klein show designed by Francisco Costa was next on the schedule, and I was very excited as I had never attended this show before. On Tuesday, I received a phone call from the PR department with my seating assignment. I had been placed in Section F, Row 3, Seat 3. I couldn’t believe it. I had been given third row which, if you know anything about fashion show hierarchies, was an incredible seat. The third row is only two rows away from the front row which is a coup d’etat in itself if you can get it. The night before the show, I was regaling my good friend and online fashion editor, Sarah Cristobal , with the incredible news of my swift advancement through the upper echelons of fashion’s media elite, and she regretfully said to me, “Ummm, Joey. There are ONLY three rows at the Calvin show.” Really??? Oh. Right. I knew that. Totally. I was still very excited to have been invited. Calvin Klein Fall Winter 2009 The collection was a masterpiece in fashion design sculpted in strong architectural silhouettes and built with technologically advanced fabrications featuring crackled metallic jacquards, crystal bonded wools and laser cut velvets. The music also reflected the modernity of the clothes with a soundtrack filled with acoustic pings and pongs which one guest described as “the architecture of sound”. The front row was packed with a stellar group of VIPs including actresses Eva Mendes and Kate Beckinsale , supermodel Natalia Vodianova , famed photographer Terry Richardson and social queens Jennifer Creel , Fabiola Beracasa , Allison Sarofim and Zani Gugelmann . Earlier in the week, I had heard a rumor that Zac Posen had done away with the two front rows which lie in the center of his U-shaped runway and replaced them with five grand pianos on which The 5 Browns , a family of brother and sister piano virtuosos, would perform during the show. Leave it to Zac, a man of perennial showmanship, to bring this kind of glamor to the tents. Zac Posen Fall Winter 2008 While trying to find my seat, I ran into my old friend and actress, Joy Bryant . She had been in town all week for the shows, so I asked her if she was heading back to Los Angeles for the Oscars. “No. I’m staying here a couple of extra days. I hosted a cocktail party here in the New York with Oxfam for the ladies a couple days ago, so I’m going to hang around and relax.” In true Zac Posen fashion, the front was filled with the industry’s hottest stars including Alicia Keys , Claire Danes , Sandra Bernhard , pop stars Estelle and Santogold , Rachel Bilson and Nicole Richie . The collection was a Victorian exultation of turn of the century glamor mixed with the heightened femininity of the 1940s. “I celebrate the relationship of passion to pragmatism, and the power of a woman’s self-expression,” said Posen when describing his inspiration for the collection. A broadtail lace evening coat was paired with a Venetian blue blouse and metal plisse skirt. A mink coat was featured over a caviar silk blouse and scarlet silk crepe skirt. Although over the top and a bit questionable when parlaying the collection to the functionality of the modern woman’s daily wardrobe, you definitely cannot deny Posen the title of master of his craft. With the week just hours before coming to a close, I had one final presentation to attend and that was Project Alabama by Southern Belle, Natalie Chanin , who hales from Florence, Alabama and whose garments are all hand sewn and constructed using quilting and stitching techniques from the depression-era South. The line is American couture unlike that which the industry has seen in a while. Chanin employs 40 artisans skilled in the tradition of hand stitching and uses all recyclable and sustainable materials in her garments. When I asked her how long this collection took to create, she laughed and said “I have 40 women working 8-10 hours a day over a few months to create these pieces.” With that in mind, I could only estimate it took over 33,000 man hours of painstaking attention to detail. Project Alabam by Natalie Chanin Fall Winter 2009 Photos by Nick Wolf The collection was entitled Songbirds and was inspired by female vocalists such as Emmylou Harris , Patty Griffin , Allison Moorer and Abigail Washburn . The clothes were soft and romantic as is Chanin’s trademark style. Indigo blues played against backdrops of natural cream cottons and deep burgundy trims, and countless crystal beads, applied by hand, embellished the floral appliques, as seen in the above photo. The beauty in the clothes lies in the touch, feel and the fit which in part is due to the sustainable nature of the materials used. “The process in which we make the clothes is just as important to us as the finished product,” Chanin said. “We do not live as though there is no tomorrow, but rather, we live as though we know there will be .” With that tomorrow brings another day where we realize that fashion is just clothes on our back and one’s personal style is a gift of beauty that one shares with the world. Until next season…

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Joey Jalleo: Inside Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2009: Third Row at Calvin

WASHINGTON — To take federal stimulus money for your state or not to take it. That is the big question for Democratic and Republican governors in town for the National Governor’s Association meeting this weekend. Democrats claim those Republican governors who turn down money from the federal stimulus package are “fringe” Republicans eager to score political points. The head of the Republican governors says the Democrats are out of touch. Governors at the conference played down a split in Republican ranks over the stimulus plan, which will send billions to states for education, health care and transportation. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a likely 2012 presidential contender, has said he would reject a portion of the money aimed at expanding state unemployment insurance. Gov. Haley Barbour, R-Miss., said he was considering a similar move. Taking the unemployment dollars, he said, would force his state to eventually raise taxes when the stimulus money runs out, putting in place what he called an unfair tax on employers. “There is some (money) we will not take in Mississippi. … We want more jobs. You don’t get more jobs by putting an extra tax on creating jobs,” Barbour told CNN’s “State of the Union’ on Sunday. Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm said there are other states that want and need the new money. “We’ll take it. We’ll take your money.” Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., also has criticized the plan, as has Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee who traveled to Washington last month to press for her state’s share of the money. Palin, busy with her state’s legislative session, did not attend the NGA meeting. Florida GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, also a potential 2012 contender and strong supporter of the stimulus plan, said the criticism leveled by other Republicans wasn’t rooted in politics. “I don’t know that it’s a partisan issue. It’s different people, different CEOs _ governors _ who have a different perspective on how it would impact their states,” Crist said in an interview. “I know it has a positive impact on Florida. A lot of that money has been paid to the federal treasury by my fellow Floridians and they deserve to get it back.” At issue for Jindal and Barbour is a provision in the stimulus bill that could allow people ineligible for unemployment benefits to receive them anyway. That could eventually force a tax increase on employers, both governors have said. Some Democrats took a harder line at a press conference arranged by the Democratic Governors Association to praise Obama for his leadership on the stimulus. DGA Chairman Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley dismissed GOP detractors as “fringe” Republicans eager to score political points. “All of us are committed to working with President Obama to pull our nation’s economy out of the ditch that George W. Bush ran it into,” O’Malley said. “If some of the fringe governors don’t want to do that, they need to step aside and not stand in the way of the nation’s interests.” The line drew a rebuke from Sanford, the Republican Governors Association chairman. “I think in this instance I would humbly suggest that the real fringe are those that are supporting the stimulus,” Sanford said. “It is not at all in keeping with the principles that made this country great, not at all in keeping with economic reality, not in keeping with a stable dollar, and not in keeping with the sentiments of most of this country.” ___ On the Net: National Governors Association: http://www.nga.org/

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Mark Sanford: Stimulus Supporters The "Real Fringe"

Media Matters points out that US News & World Report has, for some reason, a poll on its website asking readers who they would prefer to run a daycare center for their kids: First Lady Michelle Obama, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. For what it’s worth, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin are neck and neck.

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US News Poll: Which Female Politician Should Run A Daycare Center?

WASHINGTON — The nation’s governors Saturday welcomed money heading their way from President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, but said it was only a down payment on improving dire fiscal conditions in their states. Most also played down criticism of the plan by a handful of Republicans, who have said they may reject some of the stimulus funds. Leaders of most of the 50 states and U.S. territories were attending the three-day winter meeting of the National Governors Association in Washington. The meeting focused on the need for infrastructure improvement, which is expected to absorb much of the stimulus funding directed to states. Several of the governors were escaping drama in their own states, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who signed the state’s overdue budget last week after a bruising battle with lawmakers over how to plug the state’s mammoth $41 billion budget hole. Another was newly minted Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, the former lieutenant governor promoted after his predecessor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, was impeached and removed for trying to sell Obama’s former Senate seat for cash and favors. Friday, Quinn called on Obama’s successor, Roland Burris, to resign after Burris acknowledged he had tried to raise money for Blagojevich, who appointed Burris to the seat. Yet another, Democrat David Paterson of New York, was trying to beat back criticism for his handling of the choice of a successor for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who resigned her New York Senate seat last month to become Obama’s secretary of state. Paterson chose former Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a conservative Democrat, after appearing to snub Caroline Kennedy, another leading contender. Paterson’s popularity has dropped since the flap, prompting speculation that he could face a primary challenge when he runs for re-election in 2010. But the federal stimulus money remained the central focus for most governors. Most said it was hardly a bailout and that they were still facing painful cuts to state services. “We’re not just getting a handout here _ we’re doing the heavy lifting,” Vermont GOP Gov. Jim Douglas said. “We’re still making tough cuts in budgets, we’re making changes in some of our programs. We’re doing what we can to live within our means.” For the most part, governors here downplayed an apparent split in Republican ranks over the stimulus plan, which will send billions to states for education, health care and transportation. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a likely 2012 presidential contender, has said he would reject a portion of the money aimed at expanding state unemployment insurance. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has said he may do so as well, as has South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, has also criticized the stimulus but traveled to Washington last month to press for Alaska’s share of the money. Florida GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, a potential 2012 contender and strong supporter of the stimulus plan, said the criticism leveled by other Republicans wasn’t rooted in politics. “I don’t know that it’s a partisan issue. It’s different people, different CEOs _ governors _ who have a different perspective on how it would impact their states,” Crist said in an interview. “I know it has a positive impact on Florida. A lot of that money has been paid to the federal treasury by my fellow Floridians and they deserve to get it back.” At issue for Jindal and Barbour is a provision in the stimulus bill that could allow people ineligible for unemployment benefits to receive them anyway. That could eventually force a tax increase on employers, both governors have said. Some Democrats took a harder line at a press conference arranged by the Democratic Governors Association to praise Obama for his leadership on the stimulus. DGA Chairman Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley dismissed GOP detractors as “fringe” Republicans eager to score political points. “All of us are committed to working with President Obama to pull our nation’s ecoomy out of the ditch that George W. Bush ran it into,” O’Malley said. “If some of the fringe governors don’t want to do that, they need to step aside and not stand in the way of the nation’s interests.” The line drew a rebuke from Sanford, the Republican Governors Association chairman. “I think in this instance I would humbly suggest that the real fringe are those that are supporting the stimulus,” Sanford said. “It is not at all in keeping with the principles that made this country great, not at all in keeping with economic reality, not in keeping with a stable dollar, and not in keeping with the sentiments of most of this country.” ___ On the Net: National Governors Association: http://www.nga.org/

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Governors debate whether to accept stimulus funds

Missouri Republican Sarah Steelman is preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, on a platform of fighting white guys in suits like the current Republican frontrunner, Rep. Roy Blunt. She may be in the wrong business. She’s definitely in the wrong party: “I’m in the process of laying the groundwork that I need to get done before making an official announcement,” Steelman told POLITICO. “I’m definitely strongly leaning towards doing this.” Her expected entrance in the campaign increases the likelihood of a divisive primary, which Blunt had been trying to avoid. In the interview, Steelman took some sharp jabs at Blunt, describing the seven-term congressman Blunt as being part of the “old-boys’ network” who has spent too much time in Washington. “Roy Blunt is another white guy in a suit, and I think the public wants change,” Steelman said. “There’s a good old boys’ network out there that’s hard to penetrate… and it’s not always in the best interest of the party or for conservative principles.” As the GOP’s unofficial captain and spokesman might say, that’s Feminazi Talk! Now, this comes the same week as Michael Steele’s attempt to bring hip-hop to the party of the Southern Strategy, so maybe it really is going to be a brave new world for the Old White Elephants. Of course, there already is a place in the political arena where women and minorities are encouraged to fulfill their potential. The thing is, that place is within the Democratic Party. Sarah Steelman’s personal record of taking on white Republicans in suits, anyway, is somewhat less than stellar. She was last seen losing a 2008 gubernatorial primary to a white Republican in a suit from Washington, Kenny Hulshof. Hulshof himself proved something less than popular in the general election: Democrat Jay Nixon eviscerated him, 58% to 39%. Having lost to the guy who lost that badly can’t do much for you, politically. So how does Blunt feel about her candidacy? “Sarah can’t win the primary,” Blunt said. “If there’s a primary, I’ll win it.” What can you say? Republicans love white guys in suits. The presumptive Democratic nominee, by the way, is Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, a woman. If she receives a primary challenge, it will likely be from Rep. William Lacy Clay Jr., an African-American.

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MO-Sen: Sarah Steelman Hates White Guys In Suits

There are ironies, and then there are real ironies . In the aftermath of Bristol Palin’s candid interview with Greta Van Susteren this week about teen abstinence, one of mom Sarah Palin’s chief support groups — right-wing evangelicals who promote abstinence — tore into Bristol over her comments on Fox News that “abstinence is unrealistic.” In a statement entitled “The Cold Hard Facts Melt Myth That Abstinence Is Unrealistic,” the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA), an organization dedicated “to serve, support and represent individuals and organizations in the practice of abstinence education,” issued a rather harsh and direct response to Bristol’s claim: During Sarah Palin’s recent vice-presidential bid, her unmarried teen daughter Bristol’s pregnancy became a hot campaign topic. As a follow-up report on this compelling human interest story, Fox News Commentator Greta van Susteren, asked Bristol Palin about abstinence. Bristol shared her view that “abstinence is….not realistic at all.” It is suspect that media, seemingly devoted to science based research, is quick to claim Bristol Palin’s experience as proof positive that abstinence education for all teens should end… The NAEA statement concluded: While Bristol’s story makes for an interesting human-interest story, her comment should not be the basis to form public policy on the complex issue of teen sex especially if we look at the facts regarding the teen sexual activity. I’m not going to touch NAEA’s implied reference to Fox News with a ten-foot pole. But only weeks after Sarah Palin said “leave my kids alone,” her biggest “news” promoter, Van Susteren, sneaks into Alaska behind Palin’s back for a ratings-grabbing interview with Bristol. And then a conservative Christian group goes after her daughter. Where’s Palin’s vituperative comeback at Van Susteren or the NAEA? Her silence says truck loads. I’ve written more than two dozen pieces on Palin since she was picked to ride shotgun with John McCain, and I’ve never once mentioned Bristol and her pregnancy. But now that Bristol is 18 and coming forward with public interviews of her own about issues such as teen-pregnancy and abstinence, I felt compelled to point out the irony of this new attack on Bristol and the hypocrisy of Palin’s silence. Moreover, this is not the first time that the NAEA has used Bristol’s pregnancy to advance its own cause. Last September, Valerie Huber, the executive director of NAEA, invoked Bristol’s pregnancy in an op-ed piece for USA Today pushing the abstinence myth. The governor was silent then, too. I don’t pretend to be an expert on teen pregnancy . But for the record, I think Bristol was spot-on in her comments about abstinence. If Sarah Palin’s evangelical base really wants to confront teen pregnancy, they’d be smart to listen to Bristol Palin and others in her shoes and absorb some of their real-life wisdom.

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Geoffrey Dunn: Palin’s Evangelical Base Slaps Down Bristol

KABUL — An operation the American military at first described as a “precision strike” instead killed 13 Afghan civilians and only three militants, the U.S. said Saturday, three days after sending a general to the site to investigate. Civilian casualties have been a huge source of friction between the U.S. and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has stepped up demands that U.S. and NATO operations kill no civilians and that Afghan soldiers take part in missions to help prevent unwanted deaths. A U.S. military statement said the decision to dispatch a general to the western province of Herat to investigate shows how seriously the U.S. takes civilian casualties. The U.S. rarely releases the findings of civilian casualty investigations, and the disclosure this time could show the effect of Karzai’s criticisms. The U.S. military originally said 15 militants were killed Tuesday in a coalition operation in the Gozara district of Herat province, but Afghan officials said six women and two children were among the dead, casting doubt on the U.S. claim. Afghan officials say the group targeted in the airstrikes were living in two tents in a remote area. An ethnic group of Afghans known as Kuchis travel the countryside with livestock and live in tents. Photographs obtained by The Associated Press from the site showed the body of a dead young boy _ bloodied and dirtied. In response, Brig. Gen. Michael Ryan traveled to the site to meet with Afghan elders. Investigators found weapons and ammunition, but concluded that 13 civilians were killed along with three militants, the U.S. said. An expert on civilian casualties said she was “cautiously optimistic” the U.S. is taking a new approach in dealing with civilian casualties. Sarah Holewinski, the executive director of The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, said more high-ranking military officials are visiting gravesites and apologizing. In recent weeks, she said, Defense Secretary Robert Gates “turned the old way of doing things on its head.” “Instead of immediately denying civilian deaths, which deeply angers Afghans and with good reason, he said the U.S. will instead immediately investigate, make apologies and provide amends where appropriate,” she said. The U.S. on Saturday released photos of Ryan talking with Afghan elders and embracing a mourning man. “We expressed our deepest condolences to the survivors of the noncombatants who were killed during this operation,” Ryan said in a statement. “Our inquiry in Herat demonstrates how seriously we take our responsibility in conducting operations against militant targets and the occurrence of noncombatant casualties. “Our concern is for the security of the Afghan people. To this end, we continually evaluate the operations we conduct during the course of our mission in Afghanistan and have agreed to coordinate our efforts jointly,” Ryan said. Holewinski said an upfront apology is what “U.S. and allied troops should have been doing from the beginning.” “Avoid harm, investigate when it occurs, apologize and provide compensation or other amends,” she said. After increasingly angry demands by Karzai for more U.S.-Afghan military cooperation, the American and Afghan militaries announced plans this month to increase the number of Afghans who will take part in U.S. operations. The Afghan Defense Ministry condemned the civilian deaths in a statement Wednesday but noted it would take more time to implement the agreement. It also urged U.S. forces to “be very careful during their operations.” The investigative team’s trip to Herat came one day after the U.N. released a report saying 2,118 civilians died in the Afghan war last year, a 40 percent increase over 2007 and the most in any year since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 that ousted the Taliban’s hard-line Islamist regime. The report said U.S., NATO and Afghan forces killed 829 civilians, or 39 percent of the 2008 total. Of those, 552 deaths were blamed on airstrikes. Militants were blamed for 55 percent of the deaths, or 1,160. President Barack Obama this week announced the deployment of 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 already in the country to fight an increasingly violent Taliban insurgency. A higher number of troops in the country also means that civilian casualties could increase. In Kabul, meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Karzai for talks about the ongoing American strategic review of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, the president’s office said. Pelosi, D-Calif., arrived in Afghanistan on Friday to meet with Afghan officials and U.S. and NATO military leaders and troops, said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a U.S. military spokeswoman. Afghanistan was to send a high-level delegation headed by Foreign Minister Dadfar Rangeen Spanta to the U.S. on Sunday “to review the joint strategy and the fight against terrorism,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Saturday. Afghanistan’s interior and defense ministers, its national security director and chief of intelligence are on the delegation. Pakistan is also sending representatives. Spanta and Pakistan’s foreign minister are expected to meet together with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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US: 13 Civilians Killed In Afghanistan Strike

Montana Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer ribbed Alaska Republican Gov. Sarah Palin Friday for announcing at the last minute that she will not be attending a Sunday discussion of energy policy that the two governors were scheduled to lead at this weekend’s meeting of the National Governors Association (NGA) in Washington. “I don’t know where she’s going to be. You’ll be stuck with me,” Schweitzer told ABC News. “There will be no glamour, certainly no snappy dressing. I brought my best two pairs of jeans. There’s a little bit of a horse s**t stain by the knee. But I’ve been washing that stuff out.”

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Montana Governor Ribs Palin For Skipping Governors’ Meeting

Many of the Democratic governors assembled in Washington this weekend for the National Governors Association’s annual meeting doubt that four Republican governors will follow through on their threat to reject stimulus funding. Republican Govs. Haley Barbour (Miss.), Mark Sanford (S.C.), Bobby Jindal (La.) and Sarah Palin (Alaska) have all said they intend to turn down some of the funding. Other Republican governors have said they will generally accept all the funds allocated to their state, though some have hinted they may join the group over certain portions of the bill they oppose.

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Dem Governors Skeptical Of Stimulus Boycott

Meghan McCain wasn’t impressed with Michael Steele, or Sarah Palin, in an interview with ABC Radio’s Curtis Sliwa today.

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Meghan McCain Not Impressed With Michael Steele, Sarah Palin

Earlier this week, I offered my take on this year’s Political Oscars - mashing up the best and worst from the worlds of politics and entertainment - and asked for your suggestions. You responded with an Oscar-worthy collection of winners (and losers). Here are our favorites: Best Picture : Slumdog Millionaire Worst : Bailout Billionaire (RepugsOut08) Sound Effects: Best: Wall-E’s singing. Worst: Wall Street’s begging. (Temsi) Editing: Best: Elliot Graham, Milk Worst: George W. Bush, The Constitution (boatsrwood) Performance by an Actor Playing a White Character Pretending to Be Black: Best: Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder Worst: Michael Steele, Republican National Committee (stevemarvin) Performance as a Psycho Clown Who Wants To Watch The World Burn: Best: Heath Ledger as The Joker. Worst: Rush Limbaugh as Himself. (3rdcitizen) Makeup: Best: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , in which Brad Pitt has a backwards way of aging. Worst: The Curious Case of Ashley Todd , in which a crazed McCain fan has a backwards way of writing. (Beets) Song: Best: M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” Slumdog Millionaire Worst: G.O.P.’s “Barack the Magic Negro,” Scumdog Millionaires (kurtlockwood) Portrayal of an Interviewer: Best: Michael Sheen as David Frost, interviewing Richard Nixon ( Frost/Nixon ). Worst: Greta Van Susteran as Herself, interviewing Sarah Palin (Fox News). (MIMom) Achievement in Sound: Best: The Dark Knight Worst: Rod Blagojevich recorded trying to sell a Senate seat (kmv) Farce: Best: War, Inc. Worst: (tie) Iraq War, Afghanistan War, War on Terror, War on Drugs (OttoMann) Visual Effects: Best: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Worst: The Curious Case of Blagojevich’s Hair (Temsi) Rude Character: Best: Dane Cook, “Tank” in My Best Friend’s Girl Worst: Dick Cheney “VP” in The Torturista (ez14livin) Costume Design: Best: The Duchess Worst: Sarah Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe (kmv) Overblown Performance by a Diva with a Dubious Sense of Right and Wrong: Best: Meryl Streep in Doubt Worst: Sarah Palin in Doubt She Has Any Business on the Ticket (uofcphd) Adaptation: Best: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire Worst Adaptation: George W. Bush, U.S. Constitution (DryIce) Supporting Actor: Best: Heath Ledger Worst: Joe the Plumber (Bleubeard)

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Arianna Huffington: The Political Oscars: Your Winners (and Losers)

T. Boone Pickens efforts to convince the political leadership to invest heavily in a fundamentally flawed energy concept continue to move apace. Superficially, Pickens’ $10s (likely over $100 now) of millions expended on advertising, web sites, and otherwise provide a superficially appealing concept: Build wind turbines Use wind electricity to displace gas-fired electricity (about 22 percent of the grid’s power) Use that natural gas to replace imported oil in transportation So simplistically appealing, with a clarity of purpose put forward by this old oil man in such a compelling manner. The Pickens Plan has many problems, many flaws, but at the core the worst of all might best be referred to as the Peabody-Pickens Axis for Perpetuating Pollution. When considering the Pickens Plan, the image that might strike most is wizened T Boone Pickens speaking simply and directly as wind turbines turn in the background. This old oil man speaking the praises of renewable energy. So refreshing, so appealing. Willing to say, directly, that “this is one problem that we can’t drill our way out of.” Are we surprised that prominent Democratic Party leaders have met with and, seemingly, embraced die-hard Republican Pickens with open arms? The wind turbines might be the most striking image for most, but not me. A very simple pie chart provides, for me, the stark summary of The Pickens’ Plan and why, fundamentally, T. Boone’s concepts are so dangerous at their core. [NOTE: due to copyright concerns, image not provided her but can be found at The Pickens' Plan website.] It is a very simple pie chart entitled “US sources of electrical generation” with four wedges Coal: 50% Nuclear: 20% Other: 8% And, a wedge pulled out: Natural Gas, 22% Remember, the basic concept of the “Plan”: use wind power to displace natural gas from the electrical grid and then use that natural gas to displace imported oil. The problem That 50%. The 50 percent of electricity coming from coal-fired electricity remains untouched in Pickens’ concept. Putting aside the issues of the huge fiscal cost of putting in equipment for concentrated natural gas transportation (and it is a high figure, both for vehicles and refueling stations) and the high opportunity costs that ensue (how else could we spend the money). Put aside how natural gas is a fossil fuel, like oil, and we are simply shifting transportation from one limited in reserves and polluting fossil fuel to another limited in reserves and (albeit less) polluting fossil fuel. Putting aside all the other uses for natural gas that have higher value than moving around SUVs (heating homes, making fertilizer, industrial processes). Putting aside all so many other issues, I return to that 50 percent. Pickens says that Global Warming is secondary to him, but that adopting his plan will move the nation forward on the Global Warming agenda. That 50% puts the lie to his claims. We cannot make meaningful steps forward in mitigating climate change without radically cutting our (and convincing others to radically cut their) coal usage, mainly for electricity. What T. Boone offers is an illusion of achieving progress, while lining his pocket (and his allies’ pockets), while setting a path that would dig our hole(s) even deeper. In the end, what does that 50% suggest about The Pickens Plan: that the hidden, strongest ally might actually be the coal industry and coal industry giants like Peabody. Thus, the Peabody-Pickens Axis for Perpetuating Pollution . Brief selection of blogosphere discussions of The Pickens Plan The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: T Boone Pickens , 8/26, A Siegel Pickens’ Plan vs Pickens’ Problem , 8/21, A Siegel Picking at Pickens’ Plan , 7/8, A Siegel The Big Green Tent , 8/24, A Siegel T. Boone Pickens Loves You and Wants to Use Your Credit Card , 8/30, JohnnyRook T Boone Pickens trying to pick Californians Pockets , 9/9, JohnnyRook T. Boone Pickens Fancy Sales Pitch , 8/27, Plutonium Page Is T Boone Pickens selling you shinola, or something else? , 8/26, ApolloGonzales Sarah Palin and Boone Pickens: Birds of a Feather , 10/7, Josh Nelson Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-baked , 7/8, Joe Romm, Climate Progress (former Assistant Secretary Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, DOE) Pickens learns the hard truth: drill-only GOP hates alternative energy , 9/23, Joe Romm Why T. Boone Pickens’ ‘Clean Energy’ Plan is a Ponzi Scheme , 8/21, Scott Thill Pickens’ Natural Gas Plan Makes No Sense and will never happen , 9/26, Earl Killian Mr Pickens Half-Right Plan , 7/25, Bill Becker, Presidential Climate Action Plan Pickens continues hard sell with blogger call , 10/07, A Siegel Questions to ponder: Pelosi investing in Pickens , 11/08, A Siegel For the Pickens Plan to Work, People Have to Misunderstand It , 11 Jan 09, Josh Nelson, The Seminal T. Boone Pickens Thinks Obama is a Fool , 12 Jan 09, The Choice is Yours

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A. Siegel: Axis of Perpetuating Pollution: Peabody-Pickens

Ever wonder why the Republican Party’s foreign “policy” got so off the wall and bellicose? Want to know why we’re in two wars? Want to know why so many evangelicals hate Obama for saying he’ll negotiate with Muslims? Want to know why President Obama should not try to work with Republicans? All you need to know is that the Republican/Sara/Palin base of evangelical support is rooting for war, death and killing as a longed for — even prayed for — conclusion to human existence. No kidding! Understand what I’m going to tell you here, and you’ll understand what went so wrong with America with W. Bush and why we are the most dangerous country on earth. Shorthand: we have nukes and risk being run by kooks. And, until the election of 2008, an evangelical born-again kook was running our country. Disclosure: I’m the son of one of the evangelical’s foremost thinkers, the late Francis Schaeffer. And until I left the fold in the mid 1980s I was intimately involved with the Religious Right and have been (until quite recently) a life-long Republican. I knew Jerry Jenkins’ and Tim LaHaye personally and both are followers of my father. The wild financial success of Jerry Jenkins’ and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels is about belonging to the winning side. The books have made hundreds of millions of dollars while spawning an “End Times” industry, inclusive of Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books and video games. The evangelicals — and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed US policy through the then dominant Republican Party — are in the grip of an apocalyptic “Rapture” cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times cult is built on a literalistic interpretation of the book of Revelation. The book was the last to be included in the Cannon of the New Testament. It was only recognized gradually as conical late in the process — after the year 400 AD — of collecting the gospels and various letters included into the New Testament. The historic Church remained so suspicious of the book Revelation that to this day in the Orthodox Church it has never been included as part of the cyclical public readings of scripture. In other words the book of the Bible that the historic Church found (and finds) most problematic and dangerous is the one that American evangelicals have latched on to like flies on spilled jam. According to Jenkins and LaHaye the “chosen” (in other words born-again evangelicals) will be airlifted to safety in the “Rapture” when the “End” comes. At last evangelical Americans will know “we” were right about everything and “they” were wrong. We’ll know that because Spaceship Jesus will come back and take us away leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they failed to say the words: “I accept Jesus as my personal savior.” Evangelicals not only wish to be proved right they also want revenge on all other religions and peoples. Not unlike Islamic terrorists who behead their enemies, the evangelicals relish the prospect of God doing the messy killing for them as they watch from on high. It isn’t enough for them to cast the individual “apostate” out of their midst, or to denounce the Roman Catholics as the “whore of Babylon,” they want revenge on all people not like them. The Left Behind novels provides access to vicarious revenge . No need to wait for the End Times, you can get your violent jollies now! Jenkins and LaHaye describe various deadly scenarios proceeding and following believers being “snatched away” to safety leaving the infidels to their punishment. The authors cash in on years of evangelical paranoia and imagined victimhood. (A strange belief imbued with losers’ self pity by people who have run Congress and the White House until this election!) Jenkins and LaHaye provide an entertaining book version of a cosmic I-told-you-so from the backward earthly losers (as evangelicals perceive themselves in this the age of science and secularism) to the earthly winners (as evangelicals think of all those clever big city, over-educated progressive secular “elites”). Glory be! As God kills them, including those “secular Jews” running the New York Times who will have to admit we were right all along just before Jesus blasts them! The promotional copy for one of the books — Shadowed — promises plenty of we-told-you-so entertainment; “After God intervenes with a miracle of global proportions, the tide is turned on international atheism!” God Is Great! Kill them God! Kill those “international atheists!” They made fun of us because we refused to believe in evolution and built a creationist theme park! They laughed at us for opening our Friday night football games with prayer! They even laughed at Billy Graham, our one and only saint, when his son Franklin raised 28 million dollars to build the Graham theme park! Strike them Lord! Jenkins and LaHaye are End Times revenge pornographers. Reading about violence against unbelievers is the evangelical Viagra. Take this passage from Glorious Appearing in which Jesus slaughters unbelievers; The riders not thrown leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted, and their tongues disintegrated… the soldiers stood briefly as skeletons in now-baggy uniforms, then dropped in heaps of bones as the blinded horses continued to fume and rant and rave. Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they too rattled to the pavement. Evangelicals can’t get enough of this trash. The video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces was developed by a publicly traded company, Left Behind Games. The player controls a “Tribulation Forces” team and allows the player to “use the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.” The game blesses and encourages religious violence. Guided by a literal reading of the prophetic sections of the Bible the expanding Left Behind entertainment empire also feeds the delusions of Christian Zionists who are convinced that the world is heading to a final Battle of Armageddon. Christian Zionists led by the likes of John McCain’s Jabba the Hutt lookalike and big fan — the Reverend John Hagee — believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will. Hagee predicts in his book, Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World , that Russia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist — the head of the European Union — to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West. Armageddon will ensue and the Second Coming of Christ. This would all be a joke except for the fact that sixty million Americans identify themselves as evangelicals. That’s a lot of crazy voters — as McCain proved he recognized when he nominated the religious Right’s pet evangelical goof Sara Palin to be his running mate to re-energize the army of goofs who gave us the 8 years of W that brought us to war and economic ruin. Note to Jews: the evangelicals say they are the State of Israel’s friend, love Jews etc., etc. Wake up! In the evangelical “game” Jews are just apocalyptic Jesus fodder! With friends like these you don’t need enemies. Friends of Israel — and I am one — don’t see Israel as nothing more than a pawn in the End Times. Dig under the surface and you’ll find Hagee, Jenkins, LaHaye are profoundly and fatally anti-Semitic. Follow their uncompromising “Rapture logic” and Israel will be destroyed. These people will always push the US government to take the hardest line against the Arabs. That is no long term favor to Israel. Eternal war is no answer. Check out the area’s demographics. Make peace while there is time! Christian Zionists support all violent actions by Israel for any reason because in the fevered evangelical mind the nation of Israel is presently standing in for Jesus-the-avenger-on-evildoers everywhere, i.e. Arabs, all of whom (according to the born-again porn peddlers) are soon destined to burn anyway! So, who cares if 10 Israeli deaths from Hamas’ rockets fired into southern Israel are avenged by the killing of 1,300 men women and children in Gaza?USA! USA! Go Jesus! Time for another godly session on my Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game! Hurry Jesus come back and kill em’ all. And that is the Republican’s base. Good luck to President Obama trying to find bipartisan solutions to our world wide problems with these folks. Frank Schaeffer is author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back Now in paperback.

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Frank Schaeffer: Why Obama Must Not Work With Republicans

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com President Obama will almost certainly touch down in Baghdad and Kabul in Air Force One sometime in the coming year to meet his counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he will just as certainly pay a visit to a U.S. military base or two. Should he stay for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midnight chow with the troops, he will no less certainly choose from a menu prepared by migrant Asian workers under contract to Houston-based KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton. If Barack Obama takes the Rhino Runner armor-plated bus from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone, or travels by Catfish Air’s Blackhawk helicopters (the way mere mortals like diplomats and journalists do), instead of by presidential chopper, he will be assigned a seat by U.S. civilian workers easily identified by the red KBR lanyards they wear around their necks. Even if Obama gets the ultra-red carpet treatment, he will still tread on walkways and enter buildings that have been constructed over the last six years by an army of some 50,000 workers in the employ of KBR. And should Obama chose to order the troops in Iraq home tomorrow, he will effectively sign a blank check for billions of dollars in withdrawal logistics contracts that will largely be carried out by a company once overseen by Dick Cheney. Questions for the Pentagon If Obama wants to find out why KBR civilian workers can be found in every nook and cranny of U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, he might be better off visiting the Rock Island Arsenal in western Illinois. It’s located on the biggest island in the Mississippi River, the place where Chief Black Hawk of the Sauk nation was once born. The arsenal’s modern stone buildings house the offices of the U.S. Army Materiel Command from which KBR’s multibillion dollar Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program contract (LOGCAP) have been managed for the last seven years. This is the mega-contract that has, since September 11, 2001, generated more than $25 billion for KBR to set up and manage military bases overseas (and resulted, of course, in thousands of pages of controversial news stories about the company’s war profiteering). Even more conveniently, Obama could pop over to KBR’s Crystal City government operations headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, just a mile south of the Pentagon and five miles from the White House. On Crystal City Drive just before Ronald Reagan National airport, it’s hard to miss the KBR corporate logo, those gigantic red letters on the 11-story building at the far corner of Crystal Park. Many people who know something about KBR’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan might want Obama to question the military commanders at Rock Island and the corporate executives in Arlington about the shoddy electrical work, unchlorinated shower water, overcharges for trucks sitting idle in the desert, deaths of KBR employees and affiliated soldiers in Iraq, million-dollar alleged bribes accepted by KBR managers, and billions of dollars in missing receipts, among a slew of other complaints that have received wide publicity over the last five years. But those would be the wrong questions. Obama needs to ask his Pentagon commanders this: Can the U.S. military he has now inherited do anything without KBR? And the answer will certainly be a resounding no. Keeping a Volunteer Army Happy Tim Horton is the head of public relations for Logistical Supply Area Anaconda in Balad, Iraq, the biggest U.S. base in that country. He was a transportation officer for 20 years and has a simple explanation for why the army relies so heavily on contractors to operate facilities today. “What we have today is an all-volunteer army, unlike in a conscription army when they had to be here. In the old army, the standard of living was low, the pay scale was dismal; it wasn’t fun; it wasn’t intended to be fun. But today we have to appeal, we have to recruit, just like any corporation, we have to recruit off the street. And after we get them to come in, it behooves us to give them a reason to stay in.” Even in 2003, the U.S. military was incredibly overstretched. For the Bush administration to go to war then, it needed an army of cheap labor to feed and clean up after the combat troops it sent into battle. Those troops, of course, were young U.S. citizens raised in a world of creature comforts. Unlike American soldiers from their parents’ or grandparents’ generations who were drafted into the military in the Korean or Vietnam eras and ordered to peel potatoes or clean latrines, the modern teenager can choose not to sign up at all. As Horton points out, the average soldier gets an average of $100,000 worth of military training in four years; if he or she then doesn’t reenlist, the military has to spend another $100,000 to train a replacement. “What if we spend an extra $6,000 to get them to stay and save the loss of talent and experience?” Horton asks. “What does it take to keep the people? There are some creature comforts in this Wal-Mart and McDonald’s society that we live in that soldiers have come to expect. They expect to play an Xbox, to keep in touch by e-mail. They expect to eat a variety of foods.” A quarter-century ago, when Horton joined the Army, all they got was a fourteen-day rotational menu. “We had chili-mac every two weeks, for crying out loud. What is that? Unstrained, low-grade hamburger mixed with macaroni. Lot of calories, lots of fat, lots of starch, that’s what a soldier needs to do his job. When you were done, you had a heart attack.” Today, says Horton, expectations are different. “Our soldiers need to feel and believe that we care about them, or they will leave. The Army cannot afford to allow the soldier to be disenfranchised.” When I visited with him in April 2008, Horton took me to meet Michael St. John of the Pennsylvania National Guard, the chief warrant officer at one of Anaconda’s dining facilities. St. John led me on a tour of the facility, pointing out little details of which he was justly proud — like the fresh romaine lettuce brought up from Kuwait by Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC) truck drivers who make the dangerous 12-hour journey across the desert, so that KBR cooks have fresh and familiar food for the troops. Stopping at the dessert bar St. John explained, “We added blenders to make milkshakes, microwaves to heat up apple pie, and waffle bars with ice cream.” The “healthy bar” was the next stop. “Here,” he pointed out, “we offer baked fish or chicken breast, crab legs, or lobster claws or tails.” “Contractors here do all the work,” St. John added. He explained that he had about 25 soldiers and six to eight KBR supervisors to oversee 175 workers from a Saudi company named Tamimi, feeding 10,000 people a day and providing take-away food for another thousand. “They do everything from unloading the food deliveries to taking out the trash. We are hands off. Our responsibility is military oversight: overseeing the headcount, ensuring that the contractors are providing nutritional meals and making sure there are no food-borne illnesses. It’s the only sustainable way to get things done, given the number of soldiers we have to feed.” Horton chimes in: “I treat myself to an ice-cream cone once a week. You know what that is? It’s a touch of home, a touch of sanity, a touch of civilization. The soldiers here do not have bars; all that is gone. You’ve taken the candy away from the baby. What do you have to give him? What’s wrong with giving him a little bit of pizza or ice cream?” Between a chili-mac military and a pizza-and-ice-cream military, the difference shows — around the waistline. Sarah Stillman, a freelance journalist with the website TruthDig, tells a story she heard about a PowerPoint slide that’s becoming popular in Army briefings: “Back in 2003, the average soldier lost fifteen pounds during his tour of Iraq. Now, he gains ten.” Stillman says that the first warning many U.S. troops receive here in Baghdad isn’t about IEDs (improvised explosive devices), RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), or even EFPs (explosively formed projectiles). It’s about PCPs: “pervasive combat paunches.” Privatizing the U.S. Army KBR has grossed more than $25 billion since it won a 10-year contract in late 2001 to supply U.S. troops in combat situations around the world. As of April 2008, the company estimated that it had served more than 720 million meals, driven more than 400 million miles on various convoy missions, treated 12 billion gallons of potable water, and produced more than 267 million tons of ice for those troops. These staggering figures are testimony to the role KBR has played in supporting the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries targeted in President Bush’s Global War on Terror. And in the first days of the new Obama administration, the company continues to win contracts. On January 28, 2009, KBR announced that it had been awarded a $35.4 million contract by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for the design and construction of a convoy support center at Camp Adder in Iraq. The center will include a power plant, an electrical distribution center, a water purification and distribution system, a waste-water collection system, and associated information systems, along with paved roads, all to be built by KBR. How did the U.S. military become this dependent on one giant company? Well, this change has been a long time coming. During the Vietnam War in the 1960s, a consortium of four companies led by the Texas construction company Brown & Root (the B and R in KBR) built almost every military base in South Vietnam. That, of course, was when Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan with close ties to the Brown brothers, was president. In 1982, two years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Brown & Root struck gold again. It won lucrative contracts to build a giant U.S. base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, a former British colony. In 1985, General John A. Wickham drew up plans to streamline logistics work on military bases under what he dubbed the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), but his ideas would remain in a back drawer for several years. In the meantime, Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense in the administration of the elder George Bush, loosed the American military on Iraq in the First Gulf War in 1991, and hired hundreds of separate contractors to provide logistics support. The uneven results of this early privatizing effort left military planners frustrated. By the time Cheney left office, he had asked Brown & Root to dust off the Wickham LOGCAP plan and figure out how to consolidate and expand the contracting system. President Bill Clinton’s commanders took a harder look at the new plan that Brown & Root had drawn up and liked what they saw. In 1994, that company was hired to build bases in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, as well as to take over the day-to-day running of those bases in the middle of a war zone. By the time Donald Rumsfeld took over as Secretary of Defense under the younger George Bush, he had embraced the revolution that Wickham had begun, and Clinton and Cheney had implemented. At a Pentagon event on the morning of September 10, 2001, one day before three aircraft struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld identified the crucial enemy force his assembled senior staff would take on in the coming years: “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy. “We must ask tough questions. Why is DOD [Department of Defense] one of the last organizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our own? At bases around the world, why do we pick up our own garbage and mop our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?” He outlined a series of steps to slash headquarter staffs by 15% in the two years to come and promised even more dramatic changes to follow. While the invasion of Afghanistan the following month was conducted by military personnel, Rumsfeld’s ideas started to be implemented in the spring of 2002. Indeed, the building of bases in Kuwait in the fall of 2002 for the coming invasion of Iraq was handled almost entirely by KBR. Today, there is one KBR worker for every three U.S. soldiers in Iraq — and the main function of these workers, under LOGCAP, is to build base infrastructure and maintain them by doing all those duties that once were considered part of military life — making sure that soldiers are fed, their clothes washed, and their showers and toilets kept clean. While many stories have been written about the $80,000 annual salaries earned by KBR truck drivers, most of the company’s workers make far less, mainly because they are hired from countries like India and the Philippines where starting salaries of $300 a month are considered a fortune. Outsourcing the Kitchen Patrol The majority of KBR’s labor force, some 40,000 workers (the equivalent of about 80 military battalions), are “third country nationals” drawn largely from the poorer parts of Asia. In April 2008, I flew to Kuwait city where I spent time with a group of Fijian truck drivers who worked for a local company, PWC, doing subcontracting work for KBR. My host was Titoko Savuwati from Totoya Lau, one of the Moala Islands in Fiji. He picked me up one evening in a small white Toyota Corolla rental car. The cranked-up sound system was playing American country favorites and oldies. Six feet tall with broad, rangy shoulders, short-cropped hair, and a goatee, Savuwati had been a police officer in Fiji. He was 50 years old and had left at home six children he hadn’t seen in four years. When he got out of his car, I noticed that he had a pronounced limp and dragged one foot ever so slightly behind him. We joined his friends at his apartment for a simple Anglican prayer service. Deep baritone voices filled the tiny living room with Fijian hymns before they sat down to a meal of cassava and curried chicken parts and began to tell me their stories. Each had made at least 100 dangerous trips, driving large 18-wheeler refrigeration trucks that carry all manner of goodies destined for U.S. soldiers from Kuwaiti ports to bases like LSA Anaconda. They sleep in their trucks, not being allowed to sleep in military tents or trailers along the way. Savuwati had arrived in Kuwait on January 14, 2005, as one of 400 drivers, hoping to earn $3,000 a month. Instead, his real pay, he discovered, was 175 Kuwaiti dinar (KWD) a month (US$640), out of which he had to pay for all his food and sundries, even on the road, as well as rent. Drivers were given an extra 50 dinar ($183) allowance on each trip to Iraq. “I came to Iraq because of the large amount of money they promised me,” he said, sighing. “But they give us very little money. We’ve been crying for more money for many months. Do you think my family can survive on fifty KWD?” He sends at least 100 dinars ($365) home a month and has no savings that would pay for a ticket home at a round-trip price of roughly $2,500. I did a quick calculation. For every trip, if they worked the 12-hour shifts expected of them, the Fijians earned about $30 a day, or $2.50 an hour. I asked Savuwati about his limp. On a trip to Nasariyah in 2005, he told me, his truck flipped over, injuring his leg. Did he get paid sick leave? Savuwati looked incredulous. “The company didn’t give me any money. When we are injured, the company gives us nothing.” But, he assured me, he had been lucky — a number of fellow drivers had been killed on the job. The next day, I stopped by to see the Fijians again, and Savuwati gave me a ride home. I offered to pay for gasoline and, after first waving me away, he quickly acquiesced. As he dropped me off, he looked at me sheepishly and said, “I’ve run out of money. Do you think you could give me one KWD [$3.65] for lunch?” I dug into my pocket and handed the money over. As I walked away, I thought about how ironic it was that the men who drove across a battle zone, dodging stones, bullets, and IEDs to bring ice cream, steak, lobster tails, and ammunition to U.S. soldiers, had to beg for food themselves. This, of course, is the real face of the American military today, though it’s never seen by Americans. Obama’s Army Pentagon commanders often speak of a “revolution in military affairs” when summing up the technological advances that allow them to stalk enemies by satellite, fire missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles, and protect U.S. soldiers with night-vision goggles, but they rarely explain the social and logistical changes that have accompanied this revolution. Today, U.S. soldiers are drawn from a video-game culture that embraces computers on the battlefield, even as the U.S. Army bears ever less relation to the draft armies that did the island-hopping in the Pacific in World War II or fought jungle battles in Vietnam. Indeed, the personnel that Obama will soon visit in Iraq and Afghanistan is generally supplied with hot food and showers around the clock in combat zones in the same way they might be on a Stateside base — by workers like Savuwati. Undoubtedly, an Obama administration could begin to cut some of the notorious fat out of the contracts that make that possible, including multi-million dollar overcharges. Obama’s potential budget trimmers could, for example, take whistleblowers inside KBR and the Pentagon seriously when they report malfeasance and waste. But could Obama dismiss KBR’s army, even if he wanted to? Will Obama really be willing to ask American volunteer soldiers to give up the bacon, romaine lettuce, and roast turkey that they have come to expect in a war zone? And even if he could do so, those are only the luxuries. Keep in mind that, on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, every single item, from beans to bullets, is shipped using contractors like PWC of Kuwait and Maersk of Denmark. In the last two decades, the U.S. military has even divested itself of the hardware and people that would allow it to move tanks around the world, relying instead on contractors to do such work. The White House website states that “Obama and Biden support plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps by 27,000 Marines. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families.” As part of the same policy statement, the site claims the new administration will reform contracting by creating “transparency for military contractors,” as well as restoring “honesty, openness, and commonsense to contracting and procurement” by “rebuilding our contract officer corps.” Nowhere, however, does that website suggest that the new administration will work toward ending, or even radically cutting back, the use of contractors on the battlefield, or that those 92,000 new soldiers and Marines are going to fill logistics battalions that have been decimated in the last two decades. What we already know of the military policies of the new administration suggests instead that President Obama wants to expand U.S. military might. So don’t be surprised if the new LOGCAP contract, a $150 billion 10-year program that began on September 20, 2008, remains in place, with some minor tinkering around the edges to provide value for taxpayer money. KBR’s army, it seems, will remain on the march.

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Pratap Chatterjee: The Military’s Expanding Waistline

So in this brave new Democratic world, what’s the next good career move for a former Tom DeLay lieutenant? Once you’re knocked off your perch as House Majority leader, and then beaten back by the voting populace into a Lilliputian minority, where do you go from there? What do you do if you’re a House lifer who suddenly finds he has zero future in the House, even within his newly insignificant opposition party? Well, if you’re Roy Blunt, the answer is “try for the Senate!” Two Washington pensions are better than one, after all. Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) will announce his candidacy for Senate on Thursday, sources close to Blunt have confirmed. Blunt has been expected to enter the 2010 race for weeks. His candidacy sets up a potential clash of the families in Missouri, as Secretary of State Robin Carnahan has entered the race on the Democratic side. If it’s a battle of potent family names, then Carnahan should take Blunt to the cleaners. One popular Governor, one U.S. Senator, two noted Congressmen, and Carnahan’s own accomplishments ought to balance out a failed GOP House leader (Roy Blunt) and a Governor (Matt Blunt) who was so unpopular he declined to run for reelection after his first term. Blunt appears to be the GOP favorite, but could still receive a primary challenge, perhaps a very strong one, from former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman. Carnahan has proven her electoral viability statewide, and her own famous name brings general favorability. Blunt, meanwhile, is associated not only with failed Republican leadership in Washington, but his son Matt Blunt is associated with failed leadership in Jefferson City. Blunt will raise vast sums of money, he will have his national party infrastructure behind him, and he’ll be a strong candidate in the race. Fortunately for Democrats, Robin Carnahan will have all those things as well, and she already starts with an edge . Statewide races are virtually always close in Missouri (at the presidential level as well), and this one should be a classic Show-Me slugfest. But there’s nothing not to like about Carnahan’s chances.

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MO-Sen: Rep. Roy Blunt (R) To Run For Senate

The future of the GOP, in all her glory : A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year’s session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence. Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session? Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. “I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot,” she said finally, as the room became silent. Damn Republicans in Alaska, with their “gotcha” questions… Update : What she could’ve answered, from the comments: all of ‘em… all the legislation.  Any of it that’s been put in front of me over the years, also the legislation about job growth you know and the maverick.

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Poor Sarah faces more "gotcha" questions

BATON ROUGE, La. — A handful of Republican governors are considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package, a move opponents say puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment. Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy. “My concern is there’s going to be commitments attached to it that are a mile long,” said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who considered rejecting some of the money but decided Wednesday to accept it. “We need the freedom to pick and choose. And we need the freedom to say ‘No thanks.’” U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the No. 3 House Democrat, said the governors _ some of whom are said to be eyeing White House bids in 2012 _ are putting their own interests first. “No community or constituent should be denied recovery assistance due to their governor’s political ideology or political aspirations,” Clyburn said Wednesday. In fact, governors who reject some of the stimulus aid may find themselves overridden by their own legislatures because of language Clyburn included in the bill that allows lawmakers to accept the federal money even if their governors object. He inserted the provision based on the early and vocal opposition to the stimulus plan by South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford. But it also means governors like Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal _ a GOP up-and-comer often mentioned as a potential 2012 presidential candidate _ can burnish their conservative credentials, knowing all the while that their legislatures can accept the money anyway. Jindal said he, like Perry and Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, is concerned about strings attached to the money even though his state faces a $1.7 billion budget shortfall next year. Barbour spokesman Dan Turner, for example, cited concerns that accepting unemployment money from the stimulus package would force states to pay benefits to people who wouldn’t meet state requirements to receive them. In Idaho, Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter said he wasn’t interested in stimulus money that would expand programs and boost the state’s costs in future years when the federal dollars disappear _ a worry also cited by Jindal and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. A spokesman said Sanford, the new head of the Republican Governors Association, is looking at the stimulus bill to figure out how much of it he can control. “We’re going through a 1,200-page bill to determine what our options are,” Spokesman Joel Sawyer said. “From there, we’ll make decisions.” But state Democratic Party chairwoman Carol Fowler says Sanford’s hesitation is driven by his political ambition rather than the best interests of a state that had the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate in December. “He’s so ideological,” Fowler said. “He would rather South Carolina do without jobs than take that money, and I think he’s looking for a way not to take it.” Not all Republican governors are reticent about using the federal cash. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist lobbied for the stimulus plan and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has embraced it as he looks to close a $2.6 billion deficit in the state’s budget this year. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley has already figured the money into his state’s budget. Pearson Cross, a political scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said fiscally conservative governors may be able to give themselves political cover by turning down small portions of the stimulus money, like health care dollars requiring a state match, that they might not fully use anyway. But in the end, he said, they will likely take most of the available money because their states need it so badly. “Ideology usually takes second place for governors,” he said. “And that’s going to mean that most governors are going to go ahead and take the money even though they have misgivings about it.” ___ Associated Press writers Seanna Adcox, Mary Clare Jalonick, Shannon McCaffrey, John Miller, Emily Wagster Pettus, Phillip Rawls, Anne Sutton and Jim Vertuno contributed to this report.

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GOP Governors Consider Turning Down Stimulus Money

Remember when we all found out what a chiseling freeloader Sarah Palin really was? How she was charging her state’s taxpayers money for meals and lodging while staying in her own home? Word comes today from Alaska that yes, paying yourself to stay home and eat “your own” mooseburgers is, at the very least, taxable income. It’s also dirty pool, but that’s another story. Also. Anchorage Daily News: Gov. Sarah Palin must pay income taxes on thousands of dollars in expense money she received while living at her Wasilla home, under a new determination by state officials. The governor’s office wouldn’t say this week how much she owes in back taxes for meal money, or whether she intends to continue to receive the per diem allowance. As of December, she was still charging the state for meals and incidentals. “The amount of taxes owed is a private matter,” Sharon Leighow, Palin’s spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “If the governor collects future per diem, those documents would be a matter of public record.” Ain’t she somethin’? Still doing it as of December, no less. “Sounds like Socialism to me!” Wink!

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Palin also finally taxed also on her per diem chiseling also

JUNEAU, Alaska — A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year’s session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence. Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session?

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Sarah Palin’s Bumpy Homecoming: Intense Scrutiny, Looking "Ill At Ease"

In a stroke of media mastery, Bristol Palin harnessed the Palin family-doting Fox News last night to announce a powerful (and decidedly non-Fox News) message for policy makers: abstinence only is “not realistic.” The new teen mom also told Great Van Susteren that she would “love to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy.” Making this announcement on one of the most watched, and most conservative, news stations in the nation is already a pretty good display of her ability to reach a large swath of Americans (particularly the most difficult to reach on this issue.) As we all remember, Bristol and her unplanned pregnancy dominated the national news for a month during the Presidential campaign. Yet this is really the first time we’ve heard from Bristol herself. It appears she is striking out on her own. In fact, she told her mother about the interview, and her plans to discuss teen pregnancy prevention during it, just the day before. Some have spun this story as Bristol attacking her mother’s abstinence-only policies. She clearly is not, but she is finding her own voice. (Anyway, it appears Governor Palin is reconsidering her position. She makes an appearance during the interview and admits that the abstinence-only approach is, as she puts it, “naive” which, in itself, is big news the main stream media has yet to pick up on.) What the interview reveals is that Bristol is lovely, humble, honest, no doubt still a teenager and refreshingly free of any political agenda–except to use her experience to steer teens away from the same fate. In startling candidness, Bristol expresses the conflicting emotions that come packaged with teen parenthood; her love for her child and of motherhood and her belief that waiting ten years before becoming a parent would have been a better path. She explained, “I like being a mom, I love it. Just seeing him smile and stuff, it’s awesome…It is very challenging but it’s so rewarding…Of course, I wish it would happen in ten years so I could have a job and an education and be, like, prepared and have my own house and stuff… I just hope that people learn from my story and, I don’t know, prevent teen pregnancy I guess… It’s not just the baby part of it that’s hard, it’s that I’m not living for myself anymore I’m living for another human being…I’d like to be an advocate to prevent teen pregnancy because its not a situation you strive for I guess…Kids should just wait–it’s not glamorous at all.” In many ways, Bristol appears on the national stage just in the nick of time. Teen birth rates are suddenly spiking nationally after fifteen years of steady decline and Congress is about to consider re-funding the failed abstinence-only policies that likely led to this trend. An organization like The National Campaign for the Prevention of Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy could use a spokesperson like Palin right about now. Together, armed with real data, they can educate teens about the real life consequences of sex and lobby for the policies that help delay teen sexual activity and prevent unintended pregnancy. Palin has already won fans in the organization. One is Bill Albert, Chief Program Officer. He described Palin as ‘brave.’ “There has to be some real passion, great inner fortitude to come forward to talk about these issues,” Albert explained, “she said something very powerful–’I wish I had waited, I wish this beautiful event could have happened in ten years.’ She said it in her own words and it was not an anti-child message, not an anti-family message–it was about timing and what order you want to take life’s most important events. If she could turn back the big hands on the clock of time she would have waited. That is a message on target with all the teen parents we talk to. Teen mothers and fathers are the most powerful messengers of all. She already is an advocate.” This post originally appeared on RH Reality Check –Information, commentary and community for Reproductive Health and Justice.

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Cristina Page: Bristol Palin: Media Maven with a Message

Perhaps the best innovation in the 2008 presidential campaign was the advent of the post-debate snap poll. For years, we had heard the usual lineup of right-wingers on cable news tell us how bold and impressive their candidate had been in the debate, and somehow, these jokers were allowed to determine the winners and losers of the debates. In 2008, those snap polls made fools of the talking heads until the last debate, when they finally shut their traps and let the snap polls determine the winners. Because according to them in the previous three debates, McCain, Palin and McCain had won. The people, on the other hand, had drastically different thoughts on the matter. The gap between the chattering class and the populace couldn’t have been starker. But the lesson hasn’t been learned, and we’re once again seeing this huge divide between the out-of-touch DC chattering class and, well, everyone else. Jane has a remarkable roundup : MSNBC’s First Read lists among its winners “the Republican Party (which demonstrated unity after its big losses in November), and No.2 House Republican Eric Cantor (who raised his profile during the debate).” Reid gets a win, Pelosi gets a loss. Chris Cillizza also declares Eric Cantor a victor for maintaining party discipline (although he tags him a loser too for the AFSME ad).  Reid gets a “win” her too, and House Democrats are deemed losers, because “it appeared as though this was a Senate-run production.” Fox News unsurprisingly says “Republican lawmakers may turn out to be winners. Most of them voted against the package, and in their largely       unified opposition, they found an issue to galvanize the party after two consecutive dispiriting electoral defeats.”  Reid and Pelosi don’t exist. Liz Sidoti also says the Republicans win:  ”Adrift after back-to-back electoral losses, they found their voice against a Democratic speaker and an expanded majority. They held to the GOP ’s cornerstone of fiscal conservatism as they led the effort to define the package as too costly and too quick.”  Likewise, Jon Boehner: “He strengthened his hold on his job, keeping his rank-and-file united against the House version.” Again, Reid gets a win.  She gives Pelosi and Mitch McConnell losses. So according to the DC punditry, last week was a big WIN for the GOP! Huzzah! Except that as Jane points out, the reality is much more different, as our weekly polling starkly shows: Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 2/9-12. All adults. MoE 2% (1/5-8 results) FAVORABLE UNFAVORABLE NET CHANGE PELOSI: 42 (39) 39 (37) +5 REID: 32 (33) 42 (41) -2 McCONNELL: 22 (29) 50 (46) -11 BOEHNER: 18 (21) 55 (47) -11 CONGRESSIONAL DEMS: 39 (36) 53 (53) +3 CONGRESSIONAL GOPS: 19 (24) 69 (64) -10 DEMOCRATIC PARTY: 56 (53) 37 (39) +5 REPUBLICAN PARTY: 31 (32) 61 (60) -2 : The people who live in DC, who pretend to speak for the rest of the country, have no direct experience with what is happening there — and their attempts to handicap DC politics have more to do with the inside baseball games that seek to protect their own interests above all else. The fact that three and a half million Americans will have jobs as a result of the passage of this bill, or that people who are unemployed or living on food stamps will continue to be able to eat, doesn’t seem to graze their analyses. It seems like the American public looked at DC, they saw the Democrats trying to do something, and they liked what they saw.  People who are deeply worried about staying employed and taking care of their families do not seem to have the universal high regard for House Republicans who stood together to oppose helping them out that the DC establishment do. It’s as if the DC chattering class is going out of its way to prove that it has completely lost touch with the country it’s supposedly trying to inform. It’s as if they want everyone to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that their bubble is impenetrable to things such as “reality” and “facts” and “truth”. It truly is bizarre. But it’s also dangerous, which is why I invested in these weekly polls. During the primaries, I had no idea how the American people would react to the debates, so I was happy to wait for the poll results to come back. It was clear that Americans knew better what they themselves thought than arrogant cable news blowhards. I loved the concept, so I wanted to apply it more broadly to the coming policy debates in 2009 and 2010. Instead of depending on clueless, out-of-touch blowhards in DC to declare winners and losers, why not ask the American people themselves? And I’m glad we are, because the gap is real and seemingly getting bigger by the week.

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DC: Where the losers are winners

Alaska’s Iron Dog snowmobile race ended Saturday night. Todd Palin finished sixth. Came out of the wild woods to be greeted at the Fairbanks finish by Greta Van Susteren, which is the whole reason men have always come home from the sea. Oh, and his wife was there too. And Piper of course. You can see the pictures on Greta’s blog. http://gretawire.foxnews.com/. Sarah and Piper are wearing totally cool green and black Team Arctic branded snow outfits. I feel dirty even thinking this, but those parkas sell for a couple of hundred dollars a piece on the Team Arctic website… I wonder what the Palins paid for them.

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Chris Kelly: Iron Dog Update

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s favorite consignment shop has been forced to change its name after she brought the trendy, upscale Anchorage boutique unintended legal problems during last year’s presidential campaign. Out of the Closet owner Ellen Arvold said she was served a cease-and-desist letter by a Los Angeles-based chain of thrift stores with the same name _ same trademarked name, it turned out _ after Palin mentioned her store in an interview. Rather than fight, Arvold agreed to change the name to Second Run. The change is effective Saturday, the store’s fifth anniversary. “We don’t have the resources to fight,” Arvold said. “We just decided to change the name. We really had no choice legally.” Palin came under heat as John McCain’s running mate when it was disclosed the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 to outfit the Alaska governor and her family during the presidential campaign. Palin told reporters at the time the clothes were neither her idea, nor her property. In an interview with Fox News in October, she said she was a frugal shopper and her favorite shop was “a consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska, called Out of the Closet.” Ged Kenslea, spokesman for AIDS Healthcare Foundation, the owner and operator of the Out of the Closet thrift store chain, said if it weren’t for Palin, the duplicative name “wouldn’t have landed on the radar.” “We’ve invested a lot of time, energy and money or resources branding Out of the Closet, tied specifically to our HIV/AIDS mission to provide care and advocacy regardless of a patient’s ability to pay,” Kenslea said. “She was very gracious and agreed to change the name of her store.” Arvold said Palin was last in the store a few days before McCain made her his surprise pick for vice president in late August, and sent a note Arvold a photograph from the campaign trail, showing her wearing a pink Dolce & Gabbana jacket she bought at the store. Included was a note that “thanked us for the clothes, and apologized for all the flak we took, so that was really thoughtful of her,” Arvold said. As for Palin’s high priced wardrobe, the Republican National Committee has said it would be donated to charity. Neither Palin nor RNC officials immediately responded to interview requests on Friday. If the campaign duds haven’t been distributed yet, Kenslea said the charity would be happy to take them. ___ On the Net: http://www.outoftheclosetalaska.com/ http://www.outofthecloset.org/

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Palin’s Favorite Store Forced To Change Its Name From Out Of The Closet To Second Run

WASHINGTON — White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is retaining his $1.76 million political war chest, I’ve been told, with Emanuel keeping his options open for a return to an elected position. “The account will obviously remain dormant during the time that former Congressman Emanuel is serving as President Obama’s chief of staff,” Emanuel spokesman Sarah Feinberg told me. “No decisions have been made about what will be done with the account or the funds in the account in the future.”

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Rahm Emanuel Keeping His $1.76M Political War Chest

Introductory Note: with the Chinese New Year just past, and the Tibetan New Year just days away (this week is considered Don Season, an inauspicious time to do anything new, risky or adventurous, including travel), I thought a post honoring the already-or-just-about-here Year of the Ox would be appropriate. Generally, the year is (hopefully appropriate to our new Administration) thought to be one of modesty, nose-down hard work, prosperity, tolerance, fortitude and sustained effort with the long-term in mind. Traditionally, with the coming of the New Year, communities gather to share their aspirations. So, my virtual friends, if you have an aspiration for the coming 12 months, please offer it below. Mine? To be of benefit to all sentient beings, generally. Specifically, to follow the path–whether running for Boulder City Council or seeing our green / spiritual talk show make it to a mainstream platform, or both–that is of the most benefit, quickest. To have, say, one meaningful relationship over the next year (not counting my mutt, Redford). To pay my mortgage. To have fun, and be genuine, at the same time. Alright, your turn: comment below if so inspired. ~ In 1985, or something, my parents’ Buddhist teacher, Chogyam Trungpa , decided to move the HQ or ‘capitol’ of his American Buddhist community to Canada. Halifax , to be exact. Within a few years, my mom had joined the burgeoning community up there–a community that was, with its many businesses, a first organic grocery store , fine/fun restaurants and cafes , found itself welcomed with open arms by the economically-depressed, sick-of-their-own-food Haligonians. And so I wound up spending some time, now and again, up in Halifax–and through Buddhist slash Canadian comedic star Cathy Jones (who I’d done a Dathun with, at Karme Choling in Vermont, way back in…1992?), I got to take a girlfriend (or some friends, I don’t remember, this is wayyy back in my youth) to Canada’s SNL, called ” This Hour has 22 Minutes .” Cathy was one of the stars of the show, along with a young man by the name of Rick Mercer . Years later, Rick shoved off on his own, and has since become Canada’s Jon Stewart –smart, funny, vicious with a smile, a man more powerful in politics than just about any representative. Here he visits Toronto’s Chinatown for a little cultural intrigue, and requisite trouble-making. Video:

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Waylon Lewis: Canadian funnyman Rick Mercer learns about the Chinese New Year. Happy (almost) Year of the Ox (video)

This time, ”Mission Accomplished” really means it. Back during the presidential campaign — remember that? — I busted the place that Sarah Palin said was her favorite shop. It wasn’t Neiman-Marcus or Bloomie’s, she said. It was an Anchorage resale shop called ”Out of the Closet.” ”Out of the Closet” happens to be one of my favorite shops, too — but not the Alaska one. ”’OOTC” is a chain of nonprofit thrift stores here, run for nearly 20 years by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which owns the name. Elizabeth Taylor and Carol Burnett have donated stuff to the stores. I am proud to say that in my blog here and at the Los Angeles Times, I busted the Alaska shop’s chops, right after Palin said it was her favorite boutique. The next day, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, citing Palin’s remarks and my post, announced that it was looking into trademark infringement by the Anchorage store. And now that shop is changing its name. ”We really had no choice legally,” the owner said today. The shop’s new name is ”Second Run.” With a name like that, it can still be Sarah Palin’s favorite store. She can buy her 2012 campaign wardrobe there. With her own money. ,

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Patt Morrison: Sarah Palin Finally Gets Change — Just Not What She Campaigned On

In an interview with The New York Times appearing this Sunday in its Magazine , former Weatherman and top 2008 campaign demon, Bill Ayers, reveals that he sent Sarah Palin a note after the November election. You will recall — how could you not? — that she had claimed on numerous occasions that Barack Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists,” notably, Bill Ayers. Asked about these attacks, Ayers replies, referring to Palin, “I did send her a note after the election. I suggested that we have a talk show togehter called Pallin’ Around With Sarah and Bill .” Alas: “I haven’t heard back.” He also claims that he was never contacted by Obama or his team during the campaign and asked to stay quiet. And he did not resent when Obama said he had committed “despicable” acts, saying this is not the “minority” view and “even people on the left” feel that way. Ayers, in the talking to Deborah Solomon, refuses to call Obama a liberal, instead describing him as “a moderate Democrat. If you look at his records, it’s the record of a moderate, who indeed does know how to make compromises.” He says he did not attend the Inauguration but like everyone else will claim he was there 20 years from now — if the Obama “magic holds, and the magic will only hold if we don’t burn it up in war.” As for himself: “I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.” He says he wakes up happy eveyone morning, perhaps because he has a “genetic flaw” — his mother was a “hopeless Pollyanna.” He and his wife Bernardine Cohrn have a new book coming out, Race Course.

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Greg Mitchell: Coming on Sunday from ‘NYT’: Bill Ayers on His Talk Show With Sarah Palin

Speaking at a forum on presidential transitions, Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe said that the Texas primary constituted “the biggest mistake” he made during the campaign, said if John Edwards had finished third in Iowa, Obama would have won New Hampshire, and scoffed at cable news for its knee-jerk coverage of anything “snarky.” These reflections on campaign ‘08 were not deeply controversial. But Plouffe’s appearance was, because it was insisted that the session be off-record for members of the press. When word came down about these ground rules, protest and histrionics erupted in the halls of the National Press Club, where the event was held. The Club wrote a letter registering strong opposition to Plouffe’s decision. And the Washington Post ’s Dana Milbank donned a sandwich board sign mocking Plouffe, before writing a scathing column about the incident on Friday. On Thursday, the event’s sponsor, Georgetown University, said the decision to restrict reporting was Plouffe’s alone. But, even it that’s true, there was certainly time for advance warning. The contract Plouffe signed assuring the event would be closed-press was dated December 19. That nuggets of information would make become public anyway seemed inevitable. Milbank handed out pens and pads to non-media attendees, urging them to take notes and report back to him. What he got was mostly political milquetoast but, for those who lived through the past two years, worth a read. Here is Plouffe on Gov. Sarah Palin: “Vice presidential picks rarely but sometimes make an electoral difference. Our view was it probably wasn’t going to matter that much. It’s the most over-covered story in politics. This was the one exception to that. It did have an effect.” “She was our best fundraiser and organizer in the fall.” Here is Plouffe on the media: “What we were focused on… was really not what was coming out of the coverage every day, and our candidate was very good about it. … The McCain campaign was much more focused on putting ads out to dominate cable chatter for a few hours. … That was never what we thought was important.” “You put out a snarky TV ad or something controversial, that’s all NBC, CNN and Fox are talking about, but that’s not how you win elections. I think that discipline paid off.” And here is Plouffe on the general election turning point: “Probably the most important 72 hours of the campaign … were McCain’s suspension of his campaign right up through the presidential debate. One was steady, one was not. … From that point on, people saw McCain as more unsteady and erratic. He was never really able to dig out of that.” All of which is somewhat interesting stuff. But there was one anecdote that Milbank missed that seemed like truly new terrain. (Full disclosure: I was in the room but — observing the ground-rules — not taking notes. This comes via a friend who was also in attendance). Plouffe said that, “If Edwards had come in third in Iowa it would have helped us in New Hampshire. Almost all of his vote in New Hampshire would have gone to us… I remember getting on a plane and someone said, ‘Oh, Hillary Clinton came in third in Iowa.’ And I said, ‘That’s not going to help us at all.’” Following Plouffe’s logic, Edwards’ voters were more likely to go to Obama once they realized that their candidate was out of the running. Of course, Hillary Clinton’s chief spokesman, Howard Wolfson, has basically insisted the exact opposite . He suggested that had Edwards’ dropped out of the primary because of his affair, his boss would have won the Iowa Caucus and, likely, the nomination.

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Plouffe: Palin "Was Our Best Fundraiser And Organizer In The Fall"

On the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, we should celebrate his ideas, even though some have been proved wrong. For example, Darwin mistakenly believed in survival of the fittest, while we have corrected that to survival of the richest. Darwin has his naysayers. As evidence that man does not evolve, Darwin’s critics point to the Bible or Joaquin Phoenix. Sarah Palin says people shared the earth with dinosaurs, which means she could see herself co-existing with a velociraptor but not Katie Couric. The Creationists have not only made America number one in pseudoscience, but they have challenged widely held beliefs about the separation of church and red state. Most, however, agree that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. How else to explain the progression from heavy metal to hair metal to speed metal to death metal? Or all those CSI’s? Or the transformation of one Jay Leno show into an even earlier Jay Leno show? Darwin’s theories are sound, but he is full of contradictions. He believed in natural selection, yet when it came time to choose a wife, he picked his cousin, which not only is unnatural, it barely counts as a selection. Bible thumpers claim Darwin had nothing in common with the Bible, yet his daily ailments, such as severe stomach pains, vomiting, headaches and large boils qualify him as the Job of 19th century naturalists. Was Darwin perfect? No. He wasn’t right about everything. Some species just don’t evolve, like sea turtles, spiny mollusks and Republicans. The great man’s work is still mysterious. We know that monkeys evolved into humans. But we still don’t know why monkeys dressed as humans are hilarious. How exactly did wolverines evolve into investment bankers? And Darwin simply cannot help us understand the curious case of Benjamin Button. However, few people believe in either evolution or Creationism. Instead, most subscribe to a new theory called Unintelligent Design. This holds that the world was created during the eight years of the Bush administration. So, Charles Darwin, for your birthday I salute you with our latest evolutionary belief: Only the strong survive. Unless they get a bailout.

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John Marshall: You’re a Good Man, Charlie Darwin

All the way downtown on the subway and over to Hell’s Kitchen where towering new apartment construction abuts the Lincoln Tunnel, I am thinking — with not a little trepidation: I’m going to meet Mikhail Baryshnikov , or Misha as he’s known to almost everybody. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, courtesy Mikhail Baryshnikov Exclamation point! For an ex-dancer, even one whose career was long-ago nipped in the bud by a mother who didn’t believe ballet was a path likely to produce a house in the suburbs and 2.2 babies, I find myself walking a little taller, the slight turnout that sometimes imports vestigially when I even think about a ronde de jambe as I cross the scaffolding on the overpass. But my pilgrimage is not about my dancing, or even, really, his. I am coming instead to talk to a master of self re-invention, to find out how you can shape shift repeatedly and still come up smiling. They say everyone has four or five careers now, but not everyone has the potential to fail with the eyes of the world upon them. Baryshnikov, Russian superstar dancer-actor-impresario-photographer-father, pays this no heed. Most of his decisions about career shifts “came from the heart”, anyway, he insists, and were not premeditated. (Check out the vast YouTube library , which documents his career.) Misha greets me in a small conference room atop his now three-year-old Baryshnikov Arts Center , a home for itinerant dancers and performers of all stripes, his elegant, wiry frame still fit and ready for action. In between raising money for his new theater (home to the Wooster Group), acting as a facilitator (he hates the word “mentor”) for other dance companies, being a benevolent landlord, honing his photography, being a “better” father to his four children and grandchildren, Misha is planning a round-the-world tour of a new series of dances with Ana Laguna in late spring, choreographed by Russian sensation Alexei Ratmansky, who will become artistic director of American Ballet Theater next year, Mats Ek and Benjamin Millepied. Yet he opens with, “I don’t know what or who I am,” later reiterating, “I really don’t know half the time what I am doing.” He is overly modest, claiming he, “never had any reputation,” ceding pride of place to “friends” like George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins, who guided him while they were still alive. Though he admits to some “mistakes,” left vague, his eagerness and enthusiasm, even overlaid with a bit of weariness, shows through. When I ask him if he reads the Huffington Post , he says with a twinkle, “like Governor Palin, I read what’s put in front of me.” At first a “Hillary” supporter, he lined up for Obama when he became the candidate and they share a number of the qualities of compelling leaders. Like Obama, he relies on a “collective” decision-making apparatus, one in which everyone’s opinion around the table is taken into consideration, preferring a “chamber” way of working: small, intimate, and where presumably he can still have some measure of control. And like Obama, he is an agent for change. But there is something a little bit different about dancers than, say, the Cabinet. “We’re a little bit like a bordello,” he confesses wryly. “We wait for the kindness of strangers.” And he singles out Obama’s “wife and children” as his most impressive accomplishment, that the way they comport themselves “says a great deal about who he is as a parent and human being.” In fact, his tone changes to regret only once during our chat, when he confesses to being a “quite-absent father,” presumably one of the “mistakes” with which he is “trying to catch up.” His own children are 14, 16, 19 and 27, the eldest the child he had with Jessica Lange. He is the first to admit: “some young people have old souls.” Yet even showing me around the studios later, or chatting with Hugh Jackman, who has come to present himself between rehearsals for the Oscar number he’s working on, one sees the deference, the homage that’s paid. Misha’s goal of putting creative people together with the express intention of having them rub up against each other has worked at BAC and plans for its expansion continue deservedly unabated even in the current economic climate. On Friday night, Philippe Petit of Man on Wire will be there to present his film, first in an initiative with the Cinematheque de la Danse . I can only imagine, two men in the same building who dance on air! Misha doesn’t teach except for the rare master class — he’s more comfortable giving advice only when asked. He is self-deprecating to a fault: one wants a little bit of the Russian impresario to emerge, just because, well, he is larger than life and we have so few heroes left anymore. 2008 Mikhail Baryshnikov He had fun with Sex and the City and his other movie work, but does not seek it out. Things and people seem to come to him; he has the easy charm of someone who doesn’t have to fight for attention. Yet there is a gravitas that alternates with the charm, one he says all artists have as they experience the “exaltation versus the depression, the shifts of mood… Nobody loves being unhappy,” or being a “brooding soul” (even if that’s what we expect from Russian literature), yet it comes with the territory of “chasing something that is not quite manageable.” Baryshnikov could have long ago put his masterful feet up and sat back and rested on his considerable laurels. But he still seems curious about so many challenges and is one of those people who begins each morning by “thinking about moving forward.” “What is this day,” he asks himself as he gets out of bed , “going to propel you to do?” The tour dates are April 29 - July 5, 2009, beginning in Latvia and then on to Sweden, Italy, Poland, Holland, and Serbia — other destinations to be announced.

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Patricia Zohn: Culture Zohn Off the C(H)uff: Misha (That’s Baryshnikov) Mixes It Up

Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday called an e-mail pitch in her name for Planned Parenthood that ran wild on the Internet during the presidential campaign “great theater.” But she said it wouldn’t change her view that “every life is precious.” Planned Parenthood wasn’t behind the effort, but the e-mails asking for donations spread rapidly in September and October and ended up generating more than $1 million for the organization nationwide, said Clover Simon, Alaska vice president of Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest.

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Palin Pans Fake Planned Parenthood Email Using Her Name

Le pauvre, Talent! That’s Jimmy Talent, of the Missouri Talents, former Congressman and Senator, unceremoniously ejected from Washington upon losing his 2006 bid for reelection to Senator Claire McCaskill. Talent has been positively itching to return to the limelight, so the decision not to seek an open U.S. Senate seat must be awfully hard for the poor guy to swallow. Despite evidently wanting back into the political game, Talent fell on his sword for the party, so as to avoid another nasty internecine primary such as the one the GOP enjoyed in the 2008 gubernatorial race: “First,” Talent said, “there are other qualified Republicans who are seriously investigating the race, and it is vital to prevent the kind of dissension that hurt my party’s ticket so greatly in 2008. “In addition, I have family and public obligations which this unexpected race would disrupt. Chief among the latter is my work as vice chairman of the Commission on WMD Proliferation and Terrorism, which is working to prevent a nuclear or biological attack on the United States.” … “I am still very interested in serving the people of Missouri in elective office, but the considerations I have recited in this statement are more important than my personal goals. Awwww, the poor guy. Talent’s exit leaves Roy Blunt, Congressman from MO-07, as the biggest name in the pool, but Blunt may not have a clear shot to the nomination even without Talent. Former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman is apparently considering a run, and she could quite easily leverage the “Washington” tag against Blunt in a primary. Being associated with DC, and DC Republicans in particular, is about as corrosive a tag as one can bear in the current political climate. And Blunt is not simply a generic Washington Republican, but the former Majority Leader, the very face of the Bush Era’s worst excesses. Meanwhile, Democrat Robin Carnahan remains alone on the blue side, and is the favorite to capture the seat.

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MO-Sen: Jim Talent Is Out

Dear President Obama: I know that from time to time you read Huffington Post because you’ve written for it. As a Huffington Post reader you’ll know that no one on this web site has more faithfully supported your candidacy and now your presidency than me. As a former lifelong Republican, son of a co-founder of the Religious Right; my late evangelical leader father, Francis Schaeffer, I’m in a unique position to tell you a few things about the Republicans from inside perspective. (As you know I left that movement in the mid 1980s.) The lack of cooperation you’re getting from the Republican Party will continue. You were right to indulge in a little bit of tokenism when you had to Pastor Rick Warren pray and your inauguration. But if you think that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are going to do more than their utmost to obstruct everything you are and what you stand for you’re dreaming. As someone who appeared numerous times on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry Falwell used to send his private jet to bring me to speak at his college, as an author who had James Dobson giveaway 150,000 copies of my one of my fundamentalist books allow me to explain something: the Republican Party is controlled by two ideological groups. First, is the Religious Right. Second, are the neoconservatives. Both groups share one thing in common: they are driven by fear and paranoia. Between them there is no Republican “center” for you to appeal to, just two versions of hate-filled extremes. The Religious Right supply the kind of people who at McCain and Palin rallies were yelling things such as “kill him” about you. That’s the constituency to which your hand is extended when looking for compromise on your financial bailout bill. There’s only one thing that makes sense for you now. Mr. President, you need to forget a bipartisan approach and get on with the business of governing by winning each battle. You will never be able to work with the Republicans because they hate you. Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the norm not the exception. James Dobson and the rest are praying for you to fail. The neoconservatives are gnashing their teeth and waiting for you to “sell out Israel” or “show weakness” in Afghanistan, whatever, so they can declare you a traitor. The problem is that when you deal with the Republican Party you’re talking to the polished characters in Washington. I wish you could see the hate e-mail’s that I have received over the last two years because I supported you, letters calling for God to kill me, telling me that I hate God because I supported you and that I am “an abortionist” and worse a “fag lover” because I’ve written that I believe that you will be a great president. What those senators and congressmen are telling you is not what their rabid core constituents are telling them. Like Rush Limbaugh they want you to fail. Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology on the one hand and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the “other” on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends. The good news is that most Americans support you. And if you will just get in the face of the Republican Party and call their bluff you’ll be surprised how many individual ordinary American Republicans will support you, not to mention the rest of us. America is sick of the Republicans. The Democratic Party won for a reason: the Republicans failed and have taken us all down with them! You’re doing your presidency and America no favor by extending an open hand to the perpetually knotted fist of what has become the embittered lunatic fringe of our country. They would rather go down in flames than “compromise” their ideology. As you showed us again at your press conference of Feb 9, you are a brilliant, articulate and decent man. Your Republican opponents are not decent people but ideologues bent on destroying you. To quote the biblical adage sir, don’t cast your pearls before swine. Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back. Now in paperback.

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Frank Schaeffer: An Open Letter to President Obama About the Republicans (From a Former Republican)

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the tired state of the Republican Party and how it desperately needs to blow past the disastrous Bush years and rediscover its core values. But months after being overwhelmingly rejected by the American people, the Republican Party remains unable to recapture its substance. Instead, we have only seen more pandering to the fanatics and dim bulbs, more of the same putrid ideas and more power-plays that evoke politics before country — while the economy crashes and burns . Weeks after the election, a Gallup Poll recorded that 67% of Republicans wanted Sarah Palin to be the party nominee in 2012. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 55% of GOP voters want their party to look more like Palin. (The fact that 43% of Republicans decry their party for becoming “too moderate” under Bush is utterly terrifying.) Yes, Sarah Palin — the hockey mom who makes George W. Bush and Dan Quayle look like professors — is the front-runner to lead this party. We’re talking about the governor who couldn’t identify the Bush Doctrine or recall a Supreme Court case besides Roe v Wade. The journalism major who couldn’t name a newspaper she reads. The Vice Presidential candidate who repeatedly informed us that she does not know what a Vice President does! But the constituency’s fondness for the intellectually feeble doesn’t end there. GOP officials are now seeking economic counsel from Joe the Plumber, the daft Ohioan McCain exalted as “an American hero” and “my role model” during his campaign. Yes, Joe the Plumber — the alleged plumber without a plumbing license, who was recently in trouble for not paying his taxes and who has no discernible background or expertise in any field. The dreamer who was upset that Obama was going to disrupt his fantasy by increasing taxes on a business he wasn’t even close to owning, even though Obama’s tax plan would have left him better off in reality. The commentator who obtusely claimed that Obama’s “ideology is completely different than what democracy stands for” and blathered on FOX News that a vote for Obama would bring the “death of Israel.” Even so, none of this is as disturbing as Rush Limbaugh’s rapid ascent to ” new leader ” and ” new face ” of the Republican Party, as numerous journalists suggest. Just hours after Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) took an honorable stance and reprimanded Limbaugh for “throwing bricks,” he was reduced to his knees in an embarrassing apology to mighty Rush. John McCain, who once upon a time criticized the fringe elements of his party, defended the talk radio host against those who dare to be critical of a conservative voice with a “wide viewing audience.” Other prominent GOP officials have joined the rush to Limbaugh’s defense, while he humiliates them further by bragging that Obama is “more frightened” of him than of the most powerful Republicans in Congress. Incredible. It’s no wonder Republicans refuse to play ball on President Obama’s crucial stimulus package — they’re beholden to madcap who has broadcast his desire to see his president fail; they’re searching for guidance in a thick-headed clown who continues to view Obama as a gay-marrying Muslim socialist from someplace foreign, and they’re keen on ushering in as their new leader a former beauty queen who reminds us of Miss Teen South Carolina . Despite Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship and repeated overtures to the GOP, we’ve watched them sit on the bleachers and sulk while their country sinks deeper into hot water . Obama has reminded the GOP that the reason they were crushed in November was that their ideas, which they still cling to, “have been tested, and they have failed.” Maybe it’s time to loosen the fist, take a hint and grow up. So there’s your Republican Party in a nutshell: controlled by Rush Limbaugh, seeking wisdom from Joe the Plumber and eager to extol Sarah Palin as their next commanding officer. How is this not sending chills of horror down more spines? And to my conservative friends: this isn’t about our philosophical differences — we all want two respectable parties so they can keep each other in check. This is about holding both to certain minimal standards, which one of them clearly isn’t fulfilling.

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Sahil Kapur: A Trifecta of Inadequacy

V. Day is coming soon and I’m not referring to the WWII holiday or Eve Ensler’s spin on February 14th. It causes plenty of angst amongst couples about how they should profess their undying love for each other on this special Christian-rooted Hallmark-marketing holiday. Is it with a bouquet of flowers? An over-priced dinner (re-labeled holiday special by restaurants)? Chocolates? For those of us who are single, we might have the following instincts for dealing with February 14th: hide and pretend the day doesn’t exist (I sometimes use the Jewish card to explain to people that I don’t celebrate a holiday honoring St. Valentine), embrace it as International Quirky Alone Day or comb through all of your Facebook friends to find a group of like-minded single people to spend time downing lots of alcohol and chocolate while also paying for an over-priced meal. Whatever your take is on February 14th, it’s an opportunity to actually not spend much money (and who has any left to spend in this economy?) and make it a sustainable day. Here are a few suggestions: 1. Buy organic flowers . Did you ever think about all of the pesticides that are applied to conventional flowers and the effects of these on workers and the environment? The thought of it could make a gladiola wilt. 2. Give Theo’s fair-trade organic chocolate . If the recipient has a special place for Jane Goodall or wildlife, then you might want to consider their special line which honors the conservationist and donates to her organization. I had the pleasure of visiting the factory with my sister and while they nearly threw me out for eating all of their samples, I can attest to the delicious-ness of all of their products. 3. Prepare a homemade dinner with local produce . It’s a lot cheaper than eating out, will probably taste better and is a great way for you to show your love for a local farmer. 4. Skip flowers and plant a tree . It lasts longer, helps the planet and will be a living testament to your love for another person. 5. Practice safe sex and protect the environment. Yes, birth control will help keep our population growth down, but more importantly, you can use vegan condoms and organic lubricant . And, if anyone reading this happens to live in Brazil, you can help to protect the Amazon by purchasing new government-issued condoms made from an Amazonian tree. 6. Make your own cards. Yes, let’s get out the crayola crayons, scissors, glitter and glue to make a homemade gift for someone special in your life. I guarantee you that even if you’re not the most artistically-inclined person, your homemade card will probably be a lot more meaningful than a store-bought one. 7. Write your own poem. You don’t need to be Shakespeare to express your love and you can also be a green hero by using recycled paper. 8. If you decide to purchase a gift, consider supporting a local business which is probably struggling during these tough economic times. You can help your local economy and buy a lovely V. Day gift. 9. Choose organic lingerie . So, this isn’t as racy as Victoria Secret stuff, but it’s eco-friendly for you and the planet. And, who isn’t attracted to a green girl? 10. Enjoy organic champagne . Yes, I keep seeing those ads about the name champagne being illegally used by American winemakers who are ignoring their French counterparts pleas for accurate labeling (real champagne is only grown in Champagne, France). Whatever you want to call it, I’m suggesting you enjoy an organic beverage of choice. The original post of Sarah’s Social Action Snapshot appeared on Takepart.com

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Sarah Newman: Sustainable Valentine’s Day

Michelle Obama’s stylistic choices face as much scrutiny today as Sarah Jessica Parker’s did in the actress’s “Sex and the City” heyday. Many bloggers panned her red and black Narcisco Rodriquez election night shift as a “dress misstep,” and her Inaugural gown, a one-shoulder white chiffon dress designed by 26-year-old Jason Wu , was criticized by many as seeming too “wedding gown-ish.” Yet if the criticism phases the First Lady, it doesn’t show. Whether parading to the White House in an Isabel Toledo wool guipure ensemble or perched on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” couch in a yellow J. Crew cardigan and bold print blouse , she continues to make colorful, fashion-forward choices and she wears them with confidence. The confidence to work whatever outfit she wears from whatever price point is a hat tip to the style culture in her hometown, Chicago. Women around the country can take a page from Chicago’s–and Michelle Obama’s–book on fashion. “Michelle represents the sensibility of Chicago women,” says Julie Watson, owner of Chicago-based wardrobe consulting company juliewatsonstyle . Watson sees a misperception in the world of fashion that Chicago women may not know a lot about fashion. “In fact,” she says, “I have industry friends who visit Chicago for the first time, and are shocked at how chic the women are. It always makes me laugh–why should it be a shock? It’s a silly misconception that because Chicago is a Midwestern city, that women lack style.” It takes self-esteem to find a way to look fashionably put together while waiting for the bus in six inches of snow or standing on a train platform in -10 degree weather. While fashionistas in cities like New York and Paris wouldn’t be caught dead in a winter hate, many Chicago women throw on brightly colored ear muffs with their pea coat and not think twice about it. “In -20 degree weather, sensible women would rather wear an ugly hat than freeze,” points out Watson, who spent several years as senior director of merchandising for Banana Republic, where she was in charge of decision-making for a $500 million division of the company’s women’s apparel business. Wander around the Loop on a particularly cold day, however, and you will see a number of Chicago women in finding a way to make fashion work. Having lived in San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia prior to Chicago, Watson understands the necessity of a functional winter wardrobe. “There is always a stylish way to do a warm hat,” she explains. Sacrificing warmth in favor of fashion often makes one look more like a fashion victim than an icon, and Watson has witnessed more than her fair share of women waiting in line outside clubs in the winter dressed in short skirts, strappy heels, and impractical jackets. “It’s heart-breaking,” she says. “It makes you look like you lack intellect. Don’t do it. There’s always a chic way to dress for weather.” Mrs. Obama is effortlessly chic when it comes to seasonable wear, and she has Watson’s favorite winter trend down pat: the statement coat. At their father’s inauguration, Obama daughters Sasha and Malia donned gorgeous, J. Crew coats and scarves in cheerful, bright colors on a chilly D.C. day. Michelle herself wore an intricate coat that matched her Isabel Toledo shift, and complimented the yellow-gold hues with an unexpected punch of lime green in her J. Crew leather gloves and green Jimmy Choo pumps. “Statement coats are fashionable and practical,” Watson says, whose own wardrobe is full of bold, printed, and patterned coats. Her own favorite winter coat, made by Elijah and featuring fitted sleeves along the forearm to keep out the chill, was purchased at hot Chicago boutique p.45 in Bucktown, and her answer to the ugly hat is a cozy Eugenia Kim with ear flaps, which she has dubbed “warm winter dorky chic.” Pulling off a winter look isn’t about money; it’s about confidence. Like Mrs. Obama, who alternates between paying retail for J. Crew pieces that anyone can buy and designer frocks from Thakoon, Watson can be found scouting key pieces in Target as often as she visits Chanel. “How much you spend on your wardrobe should be relative to your lifestyle: consider dollar per wear,” she advises. For instance, if you can afford a $1,000 bag, but aren’t sure it’s a wise investment, consider how often you would carry the bag. If it’s your new everyday bag, carrying it 365 days a year amounts to $2.74 per day. Is it worth it to you? Then splurge. If not? Skip it. Kat Rauber, owner of the Kansas City, Missouri, tall women’s boutique KAT Clothing , knows a thing or two about fashion in the Midwest, and thinks Michelle Obama’s comfort with her height (she’s almost 5′11″) has a lot to do with her style. “Perfect posture and proper tailoring are easy ways to convey style and confidence without saying a word,” she says. Proper posture can not only make your outfit look better; it can make you look better. “When you stand up straight, you project an air of confidence and you’re instantly slimmer,” says Rauber. “I meet a lot of tall women who slouch and my advice is always the same: You can’t change your height so embrace it. Head up, shoulders back.” If, on a favorite item of clothing, a sleeve is too long or a pant leg too short, don’t just leave it in your closet to collect dust. “Especially on tall women, people notice if something doesn’t fit,” Rauber points out. “Tailored garments appear pulled together and stylish, reinforcing that air of confidence. Find a great tailor - they’re like a secret weapon who can take your outfit from good to great.” Quick Tips to Year-Round Style - Confidence, not cost, determines how well you wear an outfit. Whether you found your standout piece at TJ Maxx or Nordstrom, it stands the same chance of being hit or miss if you don’t wear it with confidence. - Find ways to make winter work for you: Julie Watson advises statement coats and sensible, warm hats. - The right fit makes all the difference. Kat Rauber recommends standing up straight and getting items tailored to fit to look your best.

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Brett Ashley McKenzie: Chicago Style: Looking Good Year-Round Takes Confidence, Not Cash

The great mystery is still why President Barack Obama would whiplash obstructionist GOP congresspersons with Rush Limbaugh. A guy who a big majority of Americans don’t like and who rates lower than any other political figure. That was the finding of the Greenberg-Quinlan-Rosner poll taken back in late October. The poll released by a Democratic leaning polling firm may well be politically partisan and tainted, and Limbaugh and company loudly screamed that it was. But he is America’s long time great polarizing talk show gabber, and it’s a role he relishes. Yet Obama still made him his straw man to demand that the GOP reps and senators get on board his legislative train to pass the economic stimulus package and any other legislation he and the Democratic controlled Congress want passed. Using Limbaugh as a foil was a big mistake. This writer warned that Limbaugh would use Obama’s taunt to further sell-inflate his importance as a public opinion and political kingmaker. Unfortunately, Obama’s perverse hype of Limbaugh didn’t end there. GOP senators and congresspersons dutifully kissed the talk bloviator’s ring and swore not to say or do anything to frontally offend him. Former Republican National Committee chair Rich Bond was one of the few party men to dare warn against the GOP’s grovel to Limbaugh. Bond bluntly asked whether there would be an all-white man litmus test for the GOP. Bond’s bulls eye challenge to the GOP to stop paying homage to Limbaugh or risk an even bigger free fall will likely fall on deaf ears. The ascension of Michael Steele as the RNC’s first African-American chief won’t do much to change that for now either. The brutal reality is that a narrow majority of GOP voters believe the party should think like Sarah Palin and be even more noisy and brutish in hectoring the GOP conciliators. Obama and the media’s puff of Limbaugh, his rabid sprawling on-air following, and his ruthless and relentless self-promotion machine virtually insure that Bond’s worst fear of a white man’s litmus test for the party will hold. Take Limbaugh’s listening audience. It’s overwhelmingly white, male and hard core conservative. That was and still is the GOP’s bread and butter constituency. They vote, are outspoken on issues, bully and badger party moderates and dissenters, and when fully aroused can inflame millions of voters around the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on these voters for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance. The strategy was simple; say and do as little as possible about civil rights, talk God, country and patriotism, use racially tinged code words and furiously court white males. The strategy worked like a political charm for four decades. Limbaugh knows that and is never shy about saber rattling the GOP and at times he can still pack a mean political wallop against GOP apostates. When Georgia rep Phil Gentry had the temerity to accuse Limbaugh of taking holier than thou cheap shots at GOP congresspersons, Limbaugh quickly whipped up the talk show pack against him. Gentry got the message to button it up, and he did. Limbaugh is not presumptuous enough to take full credit for pumping steel in the back of GOP congresspersons to oppose much of the Obama economic stimulus bill, branding it another “pet liberal project.” But he’s come close. Limbaugh’s finger in the dike last stand and hike in radio popularity ratings can’t change one fact. The GOP is an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue collar whites. That’s not a demographic to be totally sneered at, because the numbers are still huge. But the number of voters who don’t fit that demographic are even bigger and are fast changing. In the past decade the number of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters has leaped to nearly one quarter of the nation’s electorate. At the same time, blue collar white voters shrunk from more than half of the nation’s voters to less than forty percent. Obama handily won the Hispanic and Asian vote and crushed Republican rival John McCain with the black vote. In the next four years, the number of non-white and youth voters will continue to climb and the white electorate overall will drop even more. No matter, Limbaugh has milked the Obama bash for all it’s worth and at least for the moment has managed to cower a big chunk of the GOP into keeping the party the kind of party he likes. And he’ll keep using a white man’s litmus test to do it. Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).

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Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Limbaugh’s White Man Litmus Test for the GOP

If this episode of Big Love is a little disappointing, it’s partly because last week’s installment was so gobsmackingly good. Anything short of the Six Feet Under finale (or that Lafayette scene in True Blood ) would’ve been a comedown. But still, while it has some excellent moments, this episode, “On Trial,” lacks the show’s usual cohesion. Whereas last week’s multiple plot strands were elegantly twisted around a single theme ,most of the stories in this segment are sloppy. I mean, I understand the shock value of learning that Lois lives in her car, but the feet-only shot of her urinating outside is needlessly provocative. What does that teach us about her situation that we don’t learn from seeing her dirt-smudged face as she wakes up in her backseat, on the run from the vengeful husband she tried to kill? There’s no reason to oversell the fact that she’s living like an animal. Similarly, why is the montage of Margene dancing herself into a frenzy so long ? After several scenes of her attempts to imitate her dead mother—including flirting Don Embry, of all people—it’s clear that she’s having grief issues. Do the endless smash cuts of her sweaty hip-shaking really add to the revelation? (Oh, and on that note… I joked about it in yesterday’s Wife Watch! , but it’s cheap to have Margene mimic her mother by sexy-dancing to the song “Take Your Mama.” I guess they couldn’t get the rights to “(I Just) Died In Your Arms.” Curse you, Cutting Crew!) Anyway, the excess information is highlighted by David Knoller’s clunkily-paced direction. To be fair, my research tells me this is his first time directing a full-length episode, but still… scenes like the moment where Barb and Bill’s mothers chastise their children for proposing to Ana never hit their stride. In that scene, Bill walks to each of his wives to declare his love for them, meaning Bill Paxton has to maneuver an obstacle course of set pieces and fellow actors. His physical roadblocks are so dominant they pull focus from the storytelling. Yet the episode does have resonant moments. Nicky’s shady motivations grow more fascinating every week, and I appreciate that we still don’t know exactly what she wants. Because the show trusts us to accept the slow development of her feelings, we can be surprised when she, oh, pushes her elderly father down a flight of stairs. It’s clear from Chloe Sevigny’s acting that Nicky assaults him for a reason, but it’s possible even she’s not sure what that reason is. Likewise. Sarah’s thousand reactions to her pregnancy are refreshingly dense: Her research on giving the baby to a religious family is a reminder that her “teen rebellion” is complicated by her upbringing, but her irritation with Mormon parenting and her unspoken-yet-obvious consideration of abortion make her ultimate choice impossible to predict. Unlike, say, the no-brainer obviousness of Rhonda’s storyline. Of course she takes Adaleen’s bribe money, and of course she hitchhikes to L.A. to push her demo tape. And because this is TV, of course the trucker who gives her a ride is a dirty, dirty child molester. Sigh. Normally, the show is above that kind of cliche. Episode Grade: C

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Mark Blankenship: The Big Review: Big Love Season 3, Ep. 4 (spoilers)

Fresh from a weekend trip to Camp David with her family, First Lady Michelle Obama addressed the Interior Department on Monday afternoon. As she spoke, a mysterious black and white object sat on her lapel. At first it looked like one of her signature brooches, but, then, upon closer inspection, it revealed itself to be a corsage. As in the kind of floral accessory that Sarah Palin is so fond of wearing . Behold: Obama’s corsage was of the plastic variety, but, in our opinion, it was closer to a corsage than a brooch. If there’s a symbolism to this piece of jewelry that we’re overlooking, please tell us below in comments. But the event was not without its fashion do s. For example, the First Lady was presented with a beautiful handmade shawl from Director of Public Affairs for the Bureau of Indian Affairs Nedra Darling. Check it out:

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Michelle Obama Succumbs To Corsage Trend, Dons Pretty Purple Shawl (SLIDESHOW)

New state gift disclosures show it cost Liberty Legal Institute and the two law firms working with it $185,000 to represent six Alaska legislators in an unsuccessful lawsuit to halt their colleagues’ “troopergate” investigation into whether Gov. Sarah Palin acted improperly in firing the state’s public safety director. The legislators listed a $25,000 gift of services from the Texas-based Liberty Legal Institute. Liberty is the legal arm of the Free Market Foundation, which is associated with evangelical leader James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and lists its guiding principles as limited government and promotion of Judeo-Christian values.

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Texas Evangelicals Funded Attempt To Stop Palin Troopergate Probe

Let’s be honest: the real winner at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards was rapper M.I.A.’s pregnant belly, draped in show-stopping sheer ensemble during her jaw-dropping performance with T.I., Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, and Kanye West. And we mention that Sunday was her due date? M.I.A. served up the best pregnant performance we’ve seen since a nine-month pregnant Amy Poehler brought the house down with her Sarah Palin rap on SNL in October (and gave birth one week later) . The rapper born Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, who spent her life between London and Sri Lanka, has had an epic year: She’s expecting her first child baby with fiance Benjamin Brewer, the son of Warner Music Group Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., her single “Paper Planes” was a hit and nominated for “Record of the Year” at the Grammys, and she worked on the soundtrack for “Slumdog Millionaire,” for which she received an Oscar nomination. Here’s a look at the Grammys’ “Best Dressed Belly” and all the maternity wear that came before it.

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M.I.A.’s Maternity Wear: A Retrospective (SLIDESHOW)

This morning I woke up and turned on CNN for a minute and it was Howie Kurtz interviewing Katie Couric. I was still in a daze– having stayed up all night reading Mike Lux’s book, The Progressive Revolution , but I could swear he asked her if she thought her new hairdo was helping her ratings. She told him to go ask Brian Williams if he thought his darker tan was good for his ratings. I didn’t have my eyes open and maybe they were bantering or… maybe not. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the lot of women in our political system. When I look at the ten most progressive members of Congress, six of them– Donna Edwards (D-MD), Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Linda Sánchez (D-CA) and Hilda Solis (D-CA)– are women. On the other hand, when you look at the worst reactionaries in Congress you wind up with Mary Fallin (R-OK) sitting in the top spot but followed closely by Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). There are 78 congresswomen, including 11 freshmen ranging from superb progressives like Marcia Fudge (D-OH) and Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) to an anti-choice conservative Democrat, Kathy Dahlkemper (PA) and raging reactionary Republicans Lynn Jenkins (KS) and Cynthia Lummis (WY). But to many people what stands out here is that there are 435 members of Congress and that 78 means that slightly over half the population holds around 18% of the seats– and that’s 1% more than the percentage of women in the Senate. What brought it up for me was an argument I had with some friends about identity politics. Emily’s List, for example, supports women over men — even as was the case last year in Memphis, when a super-progressive champion of women’s rights and working families, Rep. Steve Cohen, was challenged by a bigoted corporate shill, Nikki Tinker. There needs to be more women in Congress, but not terrible ones in the place of excellent male incumbents with proven track records. Emily’s List should help recruit good challengers not support embarrassing ones. (In fact, they were so embarrassed that they tacitly pulled out of the race on election day when their candidate launched an orgy of anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic ads.) Last year one women who Emily’s List did support– although not financially– was Sam Bennett, a progressive stalwart who took on fake moderate Charlie Dent in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (PA-15). Blue America raised $10,562 for Sam from 331 donors and also sent her a $2,000 check from the Blue America PAC. During the campaign, I couldn’t help but notice a shocking amount of sexist invective aimed at her. Last week, after a catching-up blog session , we were talking about it on the phone and she offered to send me a short post she wrote about her thoughts on the subject. LILLY’S LEGACY by Sam Bennett I was once a single mother. My mother too. Nationally women earn only 77 cents to every dollar a man earns– a problem for America’s children. Recent passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act seeks “to provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex.” I’m deeply grateful this bill was passed and deeply disappointed that my Congressman, Charlie Dent, voted against it. As a recent candidate for U.S. Congress who happened to be a woman, the issue of gender proved to be profound in my race. I was driving west on Route PA-78 passing McCain Palin signs mounted like shrines on barns with thirty foot American flags waving beside. Driving to Catherine “CBK” Baker Knoll’s viewing, recently deceased first female Treasurer and Lt. Governor of my state. My state with one of the lowest rates of women in elected office in the whole US of A. In Pennsylvania we have nineteen Congressional seats and until the past election only one woman represented us. We now have two: Kathy Dahlkemper won out Erie way where churches grow small crosses across lawns with signs explaining “each cross represents one/one hundred/one thousand babies that have been aborted each day/week/year.” Somehow the U.S. manages to have the lowest rate of women in elected office among all industrialized democracies. I was the only other woman who ran for U.S. Congress in PA this year. I lost but garnered more votes than any congressional Democratic candidate in my district prior. CBK special guested a fundraiser for me, arriving with disposable camera and hostess gift. One week later I received a handwritten note with strict instructions to immediately deliver the accompanying photos of her with every guest. Clearly her political success based on decades of exceptionally well organized personal touch. Hillary under the frescoed dome of our capitol rotunda honored CBK. She who made “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling won Pennsylvania. We delivered again for Obama despite being home to the one of the highest concentrations of white supremacy groups in the country. Is the national glass ceiling of gender thicker, more resistant than the one of race? Deborah Tannen stressed that in countries from Pakistan to the United Kingdom, even if you are a woman, the fact that you’ve ascended the political ladder automatically provides the inherent deference accorded to those of higher social standing– structures just not in place in our Horatio Alger society. A donor sent a Bill Moyer interview to me on the disturbing media “avalanche of misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton” and warned that I should prepare for the upcoming assault in my run for Congress. I was somewhat ready. Running for mayor of Allentown, the third largest city in Pennsylvania, I lost by 46 votes against a 20 year political incumbent. At our first political debate the audience of only white-men-older-than-my-father riced me with “so are you a stewardess sweetie?” as I walked up the aisle. After my opponent had his ten unimpeded minutes I started my remarks, and midway was interrupted by the Democratic Club president. “Sam, I have a question for you… I was laying in bed last night thinking about you and all of us here are wondering… just what are your measurements?” I should have said I’d be happy to give him mine if he would first supply his. As it was, I smiled, ignored his question, clearly intended to intimidate. But the real shocker: the newspaper reporter who covered the event failing to make any mention of the comment. In thirty years as a businesswoman I’ve been invited to participate in wet T-shirt contests, been fondled under conference tables and thought politics and its press would be better behaved. I was wrong. Post announcing my bid for U.S. Congress this same newspaper day after day ran with this verbatim quote from a local blog on its front page: “Sammy Bennett is a phony political w**** who gives good h*** and makes cheap, blatant political opportunists look like Mother Fucking Teresa. Even her c*** is made of plastic.” Though over the next year the paper never cited the differences between my opponent and I on issues, they ensured the launch of my bid for U.S. Congress linked me to “c***,” “w****” and “h***.” Next this paper promptly dove into a multiple week query about my salary as the newly minted statewide director of a non-profit. Professional women still look me in the eye “Sam, if you were a man, no one would have said a word about your salary.” Women candidates for U.S. Congress: Vic Wuslin of OH; Betsy Markey of CO; Judy Baker of MO; Suzanne Kosmas of FL; and I stood on stage at the Yale Club in Manhattan, Gloria Steinem presiding. The event organized by the legendary Sarah Kovner and Ann Hess of NYC. Passionate, stern, demanding, without these women and many like them, my race would have been still born. The legions of women who fiercely support other women essential to any progress made. Women must run. And we do not fail when we lose. The fact that we ran is a win. Mina, CBK’s daughter, confides “Sam, you know what my mother would have said… you need to run again.” And to Lilly, who fought her part of the war for all of us, we say thank you. Bottom line, we need more women running or we’ll never have more women elected. And our nation will be the poorer for it.

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Howie Klein: A Woman’s Place Is In The House

First they came for me, because I had made fun of Sarah Palin. And they said, “Well, yeah, she’s a congenital liar who can’t give a coherent answer to a simple question even with the aid of a TelePrompter and a ventriloquist–but she’s not representative of the new era of Republican leadership.” And then I said, “Oh, yeah? Well, how about Michael Steele, the new GOP chairman, who believes that ‘work’ for the government isn’t ‘a job’ (even though it rewards labor with wages, which are spent by the worker on food, clothing, shelter, and health, which payments go back out into the private economy and provide income for fooders, clothers, shelterers, and healthers), plus this clown Steele says that, while government contracts are temporary, private sector jobs (for some magical reason) aren’t.” And they said, “Oh, yeah? Well who is more likely to pay taxes: a private business owner, or the government?” And I said, “Oh, yeah? Well who is more likely to be in business a year from now: most new private business owners, or the government?” And they said, “Shut up.” Then they came for me because I reminded them that this Michael Steele, who proves you don’t have to be a rich white man to be an idiot Republican, said, “a job is something a business-owner creates, it’s going to be long-term,” but when told that private sector jobs have disappeared in the millions, replied “But they come back, though, George. That’s the point. They’ve gone away before, but they come back!” (Exclamation point added.) And they said, “What’s wrong with coming back? Jesus is going to come back. And when he does he’ll be a small business owner, a one-(Son of) Man entrepreneur employing himself as Messiah looking to grow his business and thrive the economy and flourish the righteous.” So I said, “Okay, but wait. That’s when the private sector jobs are going to come back? With the Second Coming, as thoroughly described in a highly amusing manner here ? What if he never comes? And even if he does, eventually, what if The American People can’t wait that long?” And they said, “He’ll come. He has to come, and he’ll bring those jobs back with him. This is a Judeo-Christian nation. The Founding Fathers were all Judeo-Christians and the Founding Mothers were all virgins before they were married. The American People will wait as long as the Republican Party tells them they have to.” Watch Steele’s interview with George Stephanopoulos, from which one emerges as from a dream, with two questions: 1. What’s with George’s hair? Is he auditioning to be Treat Williams’ stand-in? (You Want: Kurt Russell. You’ll Take: Treat Williams. You Get: George Stephanopoulos.) 2. That’s it? That’s the wisdom of the new (and black!) leader of the GOP? Some yakkity-yak double-talk about “work” vs. “jobs,” and a plea–as though this were 1993–to eliminate rules which “have hindered and frustrated the banking process”? When everyone, from Judeos to Christians, agrees that the banking process hasn’t been hindered and frustrated enough , that it’s been the lack of rules (or of their enforcement) that led us to the edge of this economic cliff? And then I asked them, “Hey. Where does Michael Steele think the Interstate Highway System, the TVA, NASA, and the beloved sex education film Where The Girls Are: VD in Southeast Asia came from? Didn’t the poor shmucks who built, engineered, key-gripped and associate-produced those projects have ‘jobs’?” And they said, “Shut up” again and left me alone. For now. We are witnessing, not so much the collapse of the Republican Party, as its slide into insanity. Granted, some (like my wife) believe it’s already collapsed. Now that the Democrats have stopped shooting themselves in their various feet, it’s the Republicans’ turn, and they’re going after all pedal extremities with every available sidearm–as exemplified by the appointment of Steele, for whom a chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there, but chair is not a house, and a house is not a home, and “work” is not “a job.” Collapse, or craziness? I have my personal opinion. For truly: What was the GOP’s great accomplishment last week, about which they openly admitted they felt good? A show of “unity” enough to block the first stimulus package. That’s what put a spring back in their step: obstructing a desperately-needed solution to a problem rooted in their political philosophy. “Yes, we helped cover your house with gasoline, and we paid private contractors to shoot flaming arrows at it, yes. But we don’t believe in Socialism, so we got the gang together–which wasn’t easy!–and had everyone stand in the street to keep the fire trucks away. Yay us! We feel good!” There are now articles seriously discussing whether–or even why–Rush “America’s Favorite Saloon Loudmouth” Limbaugh is the most influential Republican gracing us with his wisdom (”I hope Obama fails”) here in Freedom’s land. Meanwhile, back at the turkey ranch, “a majority (55%) of Republicans and a plurality (46%) of unaffiliated voters think the GOP should follow Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the future.” (Cf., to your disbelief, here . ) What can that mean, apart from reading “all” newspapers, shoving $160,000 worth of couture into garbage bags, and looking to Joe The Plumber, whose name isn’t Joe and who isn’t a plumber, for advice? We don’t know. We can’t know. For all of our personal and political failings, we are still blessed with half a brain, ten percent of which we proudly use on a daily basis. We simply cannot conceive of what the world looks like to whomever is left still calling themselves a Republican. Sadly, if hilariously, it may be that the usual modalities–psychoanalysis; pharmaceuticals; electro-convulsive therapy; imprisonment in the public stockade subject to shaming, shunning, and the throwing of vegetables–will prove to be of only partial efficacy. In the end, or by this Wednesday, the Republican Party may very well have become an out-and-out cult: self-fulfillingly isolated in its delusions; self-defeatingly exclusive in its narrow insistence on ideological purity; increasingly cut off from the most generous conceptions of reality; and swellingly fervid in its members’ imagined threats and grandiose in their fantasy accomplishments. Don’t believe me? Read their blogs. Can we bear to witness such a metamorphosis? You bet. With popcorn. And when even Michael Steele is purged as not being krazee enough for the Sarah-Palinized party, and returns to government employment in the state of Maryland, we’ll have just one piece of advice for him: “Dude–enough with the work. Get a job .” Cross-posted at What HE Said .

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Ellis Weiner: Steele Crazy After All This Year

Good morning everyone and welcome to your Sunday Morning Liveblog and I am Jason. Look at me, here ! All right, now stop that. I hope you are ready for a stimulating conversation, by which I mean a conversation about stimulating. By which I mean the stimulus package. And whether it stimulates the economy. You know, some people think the economy is best stimulated through tax cuts. Others think that we should pay out on spending projects that get things built and people employed. That’s why I’m glad that Senators Susan Collins and Ben Nelson have taken over, because those two know what the country needs right now - hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. Oh, say! Can you see by the dawn’s early light all of the hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit being tossed at the walls of the Senate? It’s delicious, really. Now, the package probably won’t work, but it will at least be safe, and filibuster-proof. I mean, in the event that we even have a filibuster! Seems like lately, you just say the word “filibuster” and suddenly to can compel Harry Reid to start spinning straw into hyper-timid incrementalist– Well, you get what I mean. But remember! Straight from the White House and President Obama, this bill is supposed to have a bipartisan stamp of approval! That bipartisanship is so important! Seriously. If you don’t believe me, take out your wallet, and start enthusiastically shouting, “Bipartisanship is here!” to your money. See what happens? Seriously, can you tell me if you see anything happening? My money doesn’t do anything when I tell it about the bipartisanship and I am really, really, really hoping it’s broken. So, leave a comment, send an email , and enjoy hearing about how failure sausage gets made. FOX NEWS SUNDAY Oh, joy. Lawrence Summers is on televsion this morning, so maybe Paul Volcker can have a little White House face time while he’s chatting up Wallace. How big a re-write is to be expected, once the stimulus package, or “Stimpy” goes to conference committee? Well, Summers wants you to know that the priority is jobs and that there will be some scrubbing and the nipping and tucking but everyone needs to transcend politics, which is like water trascending wetness. Summers thinks that there’s too much at stake to miss the February 16 deadlines that Obama has sought. Wallace goes down some of the cuts that have been made. The $40 billion to the states that have been cut is a huge loss to Stimpy. Just re-route that money to the states of the Senators that don’t vote against it. Seriously, why should Haley Barbour and Sarah Palin have money forced on them? Enjoy you FEMA trailers and wolf-pelts, Governors! Summers is all a-politicking here. I’m wondering if there’s going to be any actual economic theory here. Wallace hits him with the timely-targeted-temporary tag, and wonders if Stimpy is living up to those principles. Summers notes that hiring on an infrastructure project begins right away. Wallace says that social spending initiatives aren’t targeted, but Summers counters by saying that a family that receives assistance in sending their kid to college helps stimulate the economy in myriad ways (it also tucks someone who’d otherwise be looking for a job in a bad job market into a four year college program). Wallace asks if Obama’s trying to permanently expand the size of government. Isn’t that something the last administration did? Summers says we’re “inheriting the worst financial situation since the Depression.” Which, as you recall, was solved through bipartisanship. Summers addresses the too many chefs criticism by saying that Obama has “final edit” on economic decisions. As for the fact that Summers has been labelled as sort of a dick, Summers says he’s just trying to help Obama with his awesome opinions, and a “high-degree of intensity” is needed. This is where I notice that Summers is answering these questions just like a guy who knows he’s a hothead would, with slow, pointed preambles that allow him to mentally count to ten. He praises Paul Volcker, though, so maybe he got his nuts trod on during the week. Now, it’s time for Representative Chris Van Hollen, who I still have a hard time thinking of as some sort of major player, and Senator John Cornyn, for which I have a boundless contempt for that I shall not even try to hide. This guy is a fool and a horse’s ass and you should all take dizzy pleasure in the way Hillary Clinton emasculated him in the Capitol . Cornyn ran and found someone from the National Republican Senatorial Committee with flowy enough skirts to hide behind and issue a denial, but look, anytime that Glenn Thrush and Megan Carpentier say something happened, print it, grab it, put it in the bank, and don’t look back. Anyway, onto the blather. Why can’t Cornyn support a bill that his party have added so much crap to? Cornyn mumbles, “Guh, this is a political document! I’m going to pretend that the 2% of the total package, which is all we’re objecting to, is worth having a snit-fit over.” Cornyn says, though that it will pass, and then he spits out some Amity Shlaes talking points about how the New Deal didn’t work. Van Hollen, counters with a raft of cliches and platitudes and warnings and admonishments that all come straight from whatever talking point flashcard he was handed. He moves off of those to talk about things he wants back in the final package: classroom building and such. But no one’s going to draw lines in the sand. Does the House need to meet the Senate halfway? Van Hollen issues about a page of words that add up to…uhhh, something on the maybe to not at all spectrum. On to TARP II. Is Cornyn more supportive to the new approach to dispensing the TARP monies? Cornyn was down on the lack of transparency and the strategy that ruled the disbursal of the first half, but he doesn’t seem to be that excited about TARP II. Cornyn wants to “fix housing,” in some inspecific way. Van Hollen says that the second half of the TARP will be disbursed with much more transparency, more accountability, and with a greater target to housing. But that’s Geithner’s baby, and it’s being delivered this week. Cornyn is presented with a raft of polling information: Obama is loved, Congress is not, Congressional Republicans are especially disliked. Cornyn plots the way his party is weaving around the numbers: basically saluting Obama for his effort, talking him up as a fair player, and dumping all over Pelosi and Reid. There’s a brief discussion of the census, and how both parties are really eager to get down to some old-fashioned gerrymandering, without looking like their interested in doing that. Cornyn’s the more worried, because his party’s out of power. Ordinarily he’d be carving up his home state of Texas for MAXIMUM SHRILLNESS.

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TV SoundOff: Sunday Talking Heads

Slumdog Millionaire continued its winning streak this awards season, with Simon Beaufoy winning the 2009 Writers Guild of America award this evening for adapted screenplay. Dustin Lance Black won the award for best original screenplay for Milk. Slumdog has already won DGA, SAG, PGA and Golden Globe awards, and is a multi-award favorite for the Oscars. Milk has won SAG and PGA awards and is also a strong Oscar contender in multiple categories. On the television side, awards went to the writers of Mad Men (drama), 30 Rock (comedy), Recount and John Adams in long-form categories, and In Treatment , Breaking Bad , and The Simpsons in various other fields. Controversially, among other awards was one for videogame writing (to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed ). Some publishers declined to submit their titles for consideration, viewing the award as primarily an organizing tool for a guild seeking to gain a foothold in a non-unionized sector. Writers are a more subdued bunch than actors , but the WGA Awards included a red carpet. Of course, the visiting actors attracted most of the attention. (It’s a tough town for writers.) Sarah Silverman provided a touch of elegance . . . . . . and Rainn Wilson of The Office and writing partner Aaron Lee looked spiffy as well: The awards ceremony was held simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York , with attendees and honorees in each city. See below for a complete list of winners. ————– Subscribe to my blog ( jhandel.com ) for more about Hollywood Labor, or digital media law. Go to the blog itself to subscribe via RSS or email. Or, follow me on Twitter , friend me on Facebook , or subscribe to my Huffington Post articles. ————– SCREEN WINNERS ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Milk, Written by Dustin Lance Black, Focus Features ADAPTED SCREENPLAY Slumdog Millionaire, Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, Based on the Novel Q and A by Vikas Swarup, Fox Searchlight Pictures DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY Waltz with Bashir, Written by Ari Folman, Sony Pictures Classics TELEVISION WINNERS DRAMATIC SERIES Mad Men, Written by Lisa Albert, Jane Anderson, Rick Cleveland, Kater Gordon, David Isaacs, Andre Jacquemetton, Maria Jacquemetton, Marti Noxon, Robin Veith, Matthew Weiner; AMC COMEDY SERIES 30 Rock, Written by Jack Burditt, Kay Cannon, Robert Carlock, Tina Fey, Donald Glover, Andrew Guest, Matt Hubbard, Jon Pollack, John Riggi, Tami Sagher, Ron Weiner; NBC NEW SERIES In Treatment, Written by Rodrigo Garcia, Bryan Goluboff, Davey Holmes, William Merritt Johnson, Amy Lippman, Sarah Treem; HBO EPISODIC DRAMA - any length - one airing time “Pilot” (Breaking Bad), Written by Vince Gilligan; AMC EPISODIC COMEDY - any length - one airing time “Succession” (30 Rock), Written by Andrew Guest & John Riggi; NBC LONG FORM - ORIGINAL - over one hour - one or two parts, one or two airing times Recount, Written by Danny Strong; HBO LONG FORM - ADAPTATION - over one hour - one or two parts, one or two airing times John Adams, “Episode 1, Join or Die,” Teleplay by Kirk Ellis, Based on the book by David McCullough; “Episode 2, Independence ,” Teleplay by Kirk Ellis, Based on the book by David McCullough; HBO ANIMATION - any length - one airing time “Apocalypse Cow” (The Simpsons), Written by Jeff Westbrook; Fox COMEDY/VARIETY - (INCLUDING TALK) SERIES Saturday Night Live, Head Writers Seth Meyers, Andrew Steele, Paula Pell, Writers Doug Abeles, James Anderson, Alex Baze, Jessica Conrad, James Downey, Charlie Grandy, Steve Higgins, Colin Jost, Erik Kenward, Rob Klein, John Lutz, Seth Meyers, Lorne Michaels, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, Simon Rich, Marika Sawyer, Akiva Schaffer, Robert Smigel, John Solomon, Emily Spivey, Andrew Steele, Kent Sublette, Jorma Taccone, Bryan Tucker, Additional Sketches by Robert Carlock; NBC COMEDY/VARIETY - MUSIC, AWARDS, TRIBUTES - SPECIALS 2008 Film Independent Spirit Awards, Written by Billy Kimball, Aaron Lee, Jennifer Celotta, Rainn Wilson; IFC/AMC DAYTIME SERIALS As the World Turns, Written by Jean Passanante, Leah Laiman, Courtney Simon, Lisa Connor, David A. Levinson, Peter Brash, Richard Culliton, Susan Dansby, Cheryl Davis, Leslie Nipkow; CBS CHILDREN’S EPISODIC & SPECIALS “Elmo’s Christmas Countdown” (Sesame Workshop), Written by Joey Mazzarino; ABC CHILDREN’S SCRIPT - LONG FORM OR SPECIAL “Polar Bears” (The Naked Brothers Band), Written by Polly Draper; Nickelodeon DOCUMENTARY - CURRENT EVENTS “Bush’s War: Part One” (Frontline), Written by Michael Kirk; PBS DOCUMENTARY - OTHER THAN CURRENT EVENTS “Secrets of the Parthenon” (NOVA), Written by Gary Glassman; PBS NEWS - REGULARLY SCHEDULED, BULLETIN, OR BREAKING REPORT ABC Weekend News, Written by Joel Siegel, Karen Mooney, David Muir; ABC NEWS - ANALYSIS, FEATURE, OR COMMENTARY “Yankee Stadium and the New Gilded Age” (Bill Moyers Journal), Writers Bill Moyers & Michael Winship; PBS RADIO WINNERS DOCUMENTARY Black History Month, Written by Anthony J. McHugh; CBS NEWS - REGULARLY SCHEDULED OR BREAKING World News This Week, Written by Marianne J. Pryor; ABC NEWS - ANALYSIS, FEATURE, OR COMMENTARY Tributes, Written by Gail Lee; CBS PROMOTIONAL WRITING AND GRAPHIC ART WINNERS ON-AIR PROMOTION (RADIO OR TELEVISION) Jericho : Two-Minute Drills, Written by Eric Jacobson; CBS TELEVISION GRAPHIC ANIMATION “Medical Animations” (CBS Evening News), David Rosen; CBS VIDEOGAME WINNERS VIDEOGAME WRITING Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Writers Haden Blackman, Shawn Pitman, John Stafford and Cameron Suey, LucasArts Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) hosted the West Coast show, which was executive produced by Emmy Award-winning producer Cort Casady. Presenters scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles show included: Josh Brolin, Steve Carell, Frank Langella, Jon Hamm, Kate Walsh, Alfre Woodard, Sarah Silverman, Evan Rachel Wood, Bryan Cranston, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sandra Oh, Dennis Haysbert, Taraji P. Henson, Zach Braff, Jamie Lee Curtis, David Krumholtz, Rob Reiner, and Garry Marshall. John Oliver of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart hosted the East Coast show. The event was produced by Anne Marie Gaynor, supervised by Marsha Manns, and produced under the creative supervision of head writer David Steven Cohen. Presenters scheduled to appear at the show in New York included: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Talia Balsam, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, Marshall Brickman, Christopher Cerf, Alana De La Garza, Susie Essman, Tom Fontana, Judah Friedlander, Terry George, Nancy Giles, Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Irwin, Jack McBrayer, S. Epatha Merkerson, Aasif Mandvi, Ana Ortiz, Linus Roache, John Slattery, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Paul F. Tompkins, Jerry verDorn, and Sam Waterston. Musical entertainment during the ceremony was provided by La Bamba and the Hubcabs. Also in attendance were: Tina Fey, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Robert Siegel, David Simon, and Simon Beaufoy. The Writers Guild of America, West presented special honors to: William Blinn - Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television; Dustin Lance Black (Milk) - Paul Selvin Award; Carl Reiner and Victoria Riskin - Valentine Davies Award; Larry DiTillio - Morgan Cox Award; and Suso D’Amico for the WGAW’s first-ever Jean Renoir Award for Screenwriting Achievement. The Writers Guild of America, East presented special honors to: John Patrick Shanley - Ian McLellan Hunter Lifetime Achievement Award; Norman Stiles - Herb Sargent Award for Comedy Excellence; The Committee To Protect Journalists accepted by Board Chairman Paul Steiger and Executive Director Joel Simon - Evelyn F. Burkey Award for contributions bringing honor and dignity to writers everywhere; Chris Albers and Tom Fontana - Jablow Award for devoted service to the Guild; and Sarah Tobianski - John Merriman Award for Study of Broadcast Journalism at American University. In addition, the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation presented the first Michael Collyer Memorial Fellowship in Screenwriting to Sara Van Acker of New York University .

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Jonathan Handel: WGA Awards Fete Slumdog, Milk, Mad Men, 30 Rock

Newt Gingrich gives Sarah Palin some advice : Alaska’s Governor Palin, John McCain’s running mate in 2008, could be “very formidable” as a presidential candidate in 2012, Gingrich said. But he stipulated that would be the case only if she “seeks out a group of sophisticated policy advisers” and “spends time developing a series of fairly sophisticated positions.” He noted that “Palin starts in Iowa with a substantial advantage. I think she has a very big base among the fundamentalist wing of the party.” Gee. I wonder who would happen to be in that “group of sophisticated policy advisers” he thinks she should seek out, or whose “fairly sophisticated positions” she should adopt.

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From the Department of Transparent Motives …

WASHINGTON — Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was very near the top of President Barack Obama’s list of candidates to head the Health and Human Services Department, a senior administration official said Saturday. The source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private administration deliberations, said no decision was imminent. But the official added the former Kansas insurance commissioner was rising as Obama considers prospective candidates. Sebelius would be Obama’s second choice for the slot. Former Sen. Tom Daschle had to withdraw his name amid an admission he had not paid taxes on a car and driver since leaving Congress as a Democratic leader. White House spokesman Reid Cherlin on Saturday said no decision had been made. Sebelius was an early Obama supporter, picking his presidential campaign over that of Hillary Rodham Clinton, now the secretary of state. Sebelius worked tirelessly for Obama’s bid and was a top surrogate to women’s groups. Advocacy groups like the consumer watchdog role 60-year-old Sebelius played as insurance commissioner for eight years before she became governor. Her name had been floated for several Cabinet posts, but she announced in early December that she had removed herself from consideration from a Cabinet job, citing Kansas’ budget problems that needed her attention. The two-term governor remains popular in her state and comes from a strong political family. Her father, John Gilligan, was the governor of Ohio in the early 1970s. She also advised Obama’s campaign on how to connect with women, especially after Republicans picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as their vice presidential nominee. Sebelius was in town last week to give a pair of speeches, one on clean energy jobs and the other at the National Education Association. She also met at the Ritz Carlton hotel with Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Sebelius’ trip was planned before Daschle bowed out as nominee for HHS secretary as a result of fallout from about $140,000 in back taxes and interest he paid last month. Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen also was on Obama’s list to run the nation’s massive health programs. Already, though, some advocacy groups were lining up to oppose the Democratic governor. He remains under consideration, the senior official said. (This version CORRECTS SUBS graf 11 to correct Bredesen’s political affiliation; Democrat sted Republican.)

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Kathleen Sebelius Near Top For Health And Human Services Secretary

Funny . The Alaska Senate on Friday found Gov. Sarah Palin’s husband and nine state employees, including some of her top aides, in contempt for ignoring subpoenas to testify in the Legislature’s Troopergate investigation. The Senate said it would seek no punishment for the witnesses’ failure to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall in an investigation into the governor’s firing of her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan. “During the Monegan investigation, we were reminded that the legislative branch’s power of subpoena is an important one, and must be respected by the executive branch,” said Sen. Hollis French, D-Anchorage. “With this resolution, the Senate is making it clear that we are a coequal branch of state government.” Those sternly worded letters will sure make clear that the legislature can be ignored whenever the executive wants is a “coequal branch of state government”.

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Sternly worded letters in Alaska

WASHINGTON — The White House won’t say it explicitly. Neither will the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yet there is a whiff in the air that U.S. policy is about to change when it comes to medical marijuana. The message is clear, said UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, a former Justice Department official and an expert on crime and drug policy. “It is no longer federal policy to beat up on hippies,” said Kleiman. Tell that to the DEA. In California this past week, agents raided four dispensaries in Los Angeles and seized 500 pounds of pot. “It’s a little bit surprising, because I think current DEA management didn’t get the message,” said Kleiman. “The message is, this is no longer drug warrior time. We are not on a cultural crusade against pot-smoking.” California law permits the sale of marijuana for medical purposes, though it is still against federal law. Thirteen states have laws permitting medicinal use of marijuana. California is unique among them for the presence of dispensaries, businesses that sell marijuana and even advertise their services. Legal under California law, such dispensaries are still illegal under federal law. “Anyone possessing, distributing or cultivating marijuana for any reason is in violation of federal law,” Sarah Pullen, a DEA spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said Thursday. That may be the law, but it contradicts the medical marijuana position of the new president. “The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind,” said White House spokesman Nick Shapiro, repeating past statements. So on Friday, DEA officials in Washington declined to comment at all on the subject. As a presidential candidate, Obama repeatedly promised a change in federal drug policy in situations where state laws allow use of medical marijuana. “I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate,” Obama told the Mail Tribune of Medford, Ore., in March. A year earlier at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Obama said: “I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users.” At age 47, Obama is part of a generation that had plenty of exposure to pot. In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he described time spent as a youth struggling with questions about his race and identity, and turning to drugs _ including marijuana and cocaine _ to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.” The new president is unlikely to make any official change in policy before he has a new DEA chief and drug czar in place. Yet experts believe it is already clear the Obama administration will change the strategy, if not the law, on medical marijuana. Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who is now a Harvard professor, said it’s time for the agency to put more effort into fighting drugs more dangerous than marijuana. “I do expect him to appoint an administrator who takes marijuana less seriously than is traditional for the DEA, as I think most Americans do,” said Heymann. Heymann said he expects the Obama administration will eventually instruct the DEA to emphatically scale back raids on dispensaries, and conduct such raids only in instances where investigators believe a business is abusing the dispensary system as a cover for other criminal behavior. So last week’s raids in California may be the last of their kind. “The DEA’s not likely to want to confront a new president,” said Heymann. “It may simply be that they’re behaving as they have traditionally, and they haven’t anticipated the change Obama and his spokesman are signaling.” ____ Associated Press writer Michael Blood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Medical Marijuana Policy May Change Under Obama

When picking their new party chair, Republicans apparently skipped the racist ones for the corrupt one . Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors. The claim about the payment, one of several allegations by Alan B. Fabian, is outlined in a confidential court document. Fabian offered the information last March as he was seeking leniency for himself during plea negotiations on unrelated fraud charges. It is unclear how extensively his claims have been pursued. Prosecutors gave him no credit for cooperation when he was sentenced in October. Steele spokesman Curt Anderson said he did not know what information the federal agents were seeking, but he dismissed Fabian’s allegations as patently false. “It’s from, what, a convicted felon? And it has no substantiation in fact,” he said. Patently false? The Post corroborated some details of Fabian’s claims through public records and interviews with former staff workers. Other details were disputed by people involved in the transactions. In one of his allegations, Fabian points to a February 2007 payment by Steele’s Senate campaign of more than $37,000 to Brown Sugar Unlimited, the company run by Steele’s sister, Monica Turner. Campaign finance records list the expense as having been for “catering/web services.” Turner filed papers to dissolve the company 11 months before the payment was received. (Via the Baby Blue Cherub .) Oh, and forget all that crap about the GOP being the party of ideas . The Republican National Committee, under new chairman Michael Steele, has quietly killed an ambitious plan to create the Center for Republican Renewal, a big in-house RNC think tank intended to develop new policies and ideas in order to take the party in a new direction, a Republican official who was directly informed of the decision by RNC staff tells me. The Center’s goal was to help the GOP reclaim the mantle of the “party of ideas,” as RNC officials glowingly announced in December, and the decision to scrap it has some Republicans, including allies of former RNC chair Mike Duncan, its creator, wondering how precisely the RNC intends to generate the new ideas necessary to change course and renew itself. Who needs new ideas when the GOP has Sarah Palin?

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Michael Steele family values

Last July 14, Alaskan lawmakers unanimously voted to investigate the abuse of power allegations against Governor Sarah Palin. At the time, the Governor welcomed the chance to clear the air and had directed her staff to cooperate with the investigations. On August 29, 2008 everything changed. Troopergate was national media. Sarah Palin was picked to be John McCain’s running mate. At 10:09am on February 6, 2009, Senators Johnny Ellis and Hollis French Senate Resolution #5 pass the 16-1 Todd Palin, the Governor’s husband, now guilty of contempt of The Senate of Alaska. This Resolution did not address the actions of Attorney General Talis Colberg. It called for no penalties to the 7 witnesses because they were being guided by the Attorney General and did cooperated with Mr. Branchflower as soon as the lawsuit was thrown out of court. There was very little discussion on the floor.

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Shannyn Moore: Todd Palin Guilty: Contempt of Senate

A federal judge got political Wednesday, taking a swipe at Sarah Palin while powwowing with lawyers in the case of an autistic boy whose parents are fighting a ban on big dogs at their luxury upper East Side building. … “That kid was used as a prop,” Buchwald told lawyers during a hearing on Wednesday. “And that to me as a parent blew my mind.”

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Judge: Palin Used Her Child As A "Prop"

What African-American male politician recently said the following: “I’m in the business of winning elections.” If you guessed President Barack Obama, you’re wrong. Try Michael Steele, the new head of the Republican National Committee who lost his 2006 Senate bid (not as good a record as Obama) but beat a fellow contender who sent out a holiday song, “Barack the Magic Negro.” Despite Obama’s unprecedented and nearly flawless rise from the Illinois State Legislature to the White House in about a decade, he never described his political goals as a “business of winning elections.” He spoke in more profound terms about ushering in an era of politics in Washington based on rescinding the “business-as-usual” sparing between parties that created gridlock. He had an unique ability to unite Americans across racial and ethnic backgrounds to support his political campaign. But more importantly, his run for the presidency brought us together as a national community and helped us to discuss and acknowledge our slavery-based national roots that established — both literally and figuratively — the foundations of our government. But Obama’s candidacy was a major step towards the full actualization of the civil rights movement begun by Dr. Martin Luther King. So, with the international praise and embrace of our first African-American president — accolades George W. Bush never experienced, even at the peak of his presidency (which was a bit of a low peak at best) — the Republicans are now scrambling to keep up with the Democratic party’s historic election and Congressional majority. While the Republican Party is still dominated by white men, those men realized that putting forth yet another white man as their leader wasn’t the best option and chose Steele instead. However, despite both parties unprecedented elections that have turned our racist policies and legacies on their head, there’s still plenty to be done. While listening to NPR this morning, I was overwhelmed by the disturbing story of Timothy Cole , a young African-American male convicted of rape who eventually died while in prison but was posthumously cleared by DNA. His family is now trying to clear his name. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard such a story nor will it be the last. And, it’s the intersection of racist police departments, judges, citizens and policies, supported by shoddy scientific forensic techniques (as covered in the New York Times on Thursday) that have been used to arrest and/or convict thousands of innocent people. While DNA is now being used to exonerate many wrongfully-convicted people, it does not erase our legal system’s egregious policies that have allowed this to happen. And, while the election of Barack Obama and Eric Holder as the first African-American to run the Department of Justice is yet another nail in the coffin of our nation’s racist policies, it’s not the end. The election of Michael Steele is an interesting choice for a party that has woefully used race for political gain. We’ve got a long way to go still. Amazingly, both parties can hopefully provide the much needed leadership and support for leaders who can help our nation reflect upon, address and heal from our racist policies to ensure that there are no more Timothy Cole’s in our country. And, you can do your part by supporting the Innocence Project today , which assists prisoners who could be proven innocent through science-based DNA testing.

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Sarah Newman: Barack, Steele and Timothy Cole

B-movie molls, a mad scientist and Tommy guns figure prominently in Charles Busch’s latest comic turn The Third Story . Busch, who worships at the altar of 1940s screen legends, has parlayed his love of old movies and strong women into an entertaining, lively production. An added bonus: he cast Kathleen Turner, she of the sultry voice, to lead a multitalented cast that is heaven-sent. The Third Story , now at the Lucille Lortel, opens in Omaha, where a mother/son screenwriting team (a terrific Turner and Jonathan Walker) have fled to avoid Hollywood’s Commie hunt. She’s a sassy, boozy broad with a gift for storytelling and a legion of ex-husbands; he’s an ordinary guy craving a normal life. Hearing that a studio is looking for scripts, she begs her son to co-write a celluloid tale, which appears before our eyes. Crime diva Queenie Bartlett (Charles Busch) - imagine a stylish, snarling Eve Arden -rules the underworld. Queenie’s son (also played by Walker) loves his mother and a cheap blonde (Sarah Rafferty). Into this B-movie brew comes a subplot - a high-strung scientist (Jennifer Van Dyck) and Zygote (Scott Parkinson), her lab assistant, share a cloning secret. The Third Story has all the Busch trademarks: razor-sharp dialogue, fast-paced scenes and a hilarious send-up of gangster flicks and sci-fi films. He’s crafted a heartfelt salute to the bond between parents and children; plus, it’s a chance for four cast members to flex their acting muscles in double roles. Charles Andress directs this satire with flair, aided by David Gallo’s smart sets and David Weiner’s spot-on lighting. Cornbury , a ribald play about New York’s first cross-dressing governor, now at the Hudson Guild, is a throwback to the transgressive gay comedies of the ’70s and ’80s. Set in 1702, the Dutch and English are rivals for the New World. The Dutch are known for their Puritanism, sobriety and prejudices, while the saucily foppish Cornbury tolerates Jews, blacks and American Indians. He’s haughty, naughty and stands for the permissive society. This is the culture wars, just set in colonial times and staged in the theater of the ridiculous. The template is dated and the comedy broad, but the cast is solid, and the message eternal. By contrast, The American Plan , at the Samuel J. Friedman, is a dark familial drama that pays homage to Henry James-like characters held hostage by emotional passivity and pain. Here, a strong German Jewish mother who escaped Hitler (a masterful Mercedes Ruehl) and her Sarah Lawrence dropout daughter, the frail but verbally provocative Lili (Lily Rabe), battle on the domestic front. The time is 1960, and the women are caught between two worlds: post-war horrors and the yet-to-be liberated Sixties. Eva’s dangerous motto - “Happiness exists, but it’s for other people” - and Lili’s strange neurotic moods echo a tag-team of despair. There is one disruption to their summer retreat: Über-WASP Nick Lockridge (Kieran Campion), who buoyantly insists, “I cause happiness - that’s what I do.” The claim is deceptive; as is much of what appears on the surface. The setting, a pier jutting into a lake, belies the stormy waters below. When the play was first staged in 1990, sympathy lay with the young 20something dominated by a mother described as a “late Ibsenesque figure with mah-jong tiles.” In this revival, Ruehl brings shading to Eva, who understands life’s innumerable betrayals. The American Plan features convincing actors who hold their own, but it’s Ruehl who commands the stage. The accent, the walk, captures her complicated character perfectly. All struggle to survive; each is burdened by the past. “The world has a wish for you, and it’s never good,” explains Eva. Plan ahead: Still waters run deep. Pre-Post Theater Restaurant: Dhaba Before or after the theater, consider dining at Dhaba (108 Lexington Ave.) a new Indian restaurant that gives the traditional dhaba, a truck stop just outside large Indian cities, a modern, colorfully chic twist. Located in the Curry Hill section of Manhattan, the intimate 62-seat restaurant specializes in authentic Punjabi cuisine - producing creamy, rich food that brings gourmet flair to Indian cooking. It’s beautifully prepared, exquisitely spiced and presented with artistic flourish. After all, 50 of the world’s 80 spices are grown in India and Dhaba makes great use of them in dishes as varied as Sarson Ka Saag, a seasoned puree of spinach and mustard greens, Achari Gosht, curried lamb and fresh coriander, Shrimp Malaiwala, spiced shrimp with tomatoes, bay leaf and fennel, and starters like Mirch Pakora, green chili fritters. A separate menu, “London Calling,” boasts super-spicy dishes with an Anglo-Indian flavor, such as Chicken Balchao, a Goa curry. And don’t miss the Makki Da Roti, pan-grilled corn bread, and the sumptuous mango or rose Lassi Wala drinks. Best of all, the prices are reasonable and the service first-rate. Dhaba: 108 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 212/679-1284; www.highwaydhaba.com/

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Fern Siegel: Stage Door: The Third Story, Cornbury, The American Plan

Ashley Judd is right. Sarah Palin is wrong. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is clueless and should have a nice big cup of STFU. How do I know? I have been fighting the Alaskan Government Policy of Aerial Wolf Hunting for much of my life. The wolves of Alaska don’t know they are Alaskan…or American. Wherever you are, these wolves are part of your world. They represent the best part of the Last Frontier; its wildness, its mystery and its promise of adventure. In short, they represent hope. Their on-going slaughter is whittling away the wolves’ urgent and important role in maintaining healthy moose and caribou populations. In addition, the extermination is having an unknown and unquantifiable impact on peripheral prey animals and ecological systems. Sarah Palin has completely ignored the scientific findings of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Faith based science doesn’t make credible policy. On The View, Mean Girl (and not so clever) Hasselbeck followed typical Republican strategy: Make stuff up, and then change the subject to something completely unrelated…like abortion! Killing wolves saves babies! Is it too late to vote her off the island? Do we have a problem with doctors performing abortions from helicopters or planes? No. SHUT UP, Elisabeth! Just because you can see Sarah Palin on your Blackberry doesn’t mean either one of you are right. This piece was originally written and posted in October 2008. The smell of fresh snow and the burning fuel of a Ski-Doo Olympic Snowmachine are part of my vivid childhood memories. I would hang on to my pop’s snowsuit, as we rode through Alaskan muskegs, down river banks, and up power line trails. Checking our trap line was dirty work. Bait consisted of freezer burnt salmon and road kill rabbit retrieval missions. I grew up with the smell of skinned mink, beaver, muskrats, coyotes, and wolves in my garage. We took the hides to the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage and sold them. Staying in a hotel with plumbing and television was our decadent reward. I learned more about nature from trapping and hunting than I did from any biology class. Habits, tracking, instincts; I was in awe of the Nature around me and then I helped kill it. It wasn’t easy. Mink are smart as white collar thieves. They could get bait out of a trap nine times out of ten, and defecate before departing, a not-so-subtle message to Pop and I. I don’t write these things to brag, just as fact. You may be revolted by this lifestyle, and I won’t argue. I share this to provide you the reference of my horror of aerial wolf hunting. Shooting wolves from planes is to hunting, what hiring a prostitute is to dating. Alaska has a long history of bounties and hunting-much of it controversial. Aerial wolf hunting began in 1948. In 1972, Congress passed a law that prohibited aerial wolf hunting . Problem solved? No, under the guise of “wolf control,” permits were issued to “pilot gunner” teams in 1979. In 1992, under Governor Walter Hickel’s Administration, the Alaska Board of Game initiated a wolf control program with the goal of reducing numbers by 80%. Under threat of a massive tourist boycott, the “land and shoot” policy was reintroduced. During Democrat Governor Tony Knowles Administration, only non-lethal measures were used against wolves. The Wolf Management Reform Coalition collected 33,000 signatures to put an aerial wolf hunting ban on the November 1996 ballot ; 59% of Alaskans voted for it, with the exception being a biological emergency. A Republican Legislature introduced SB74. This bill eliminated the need for a biological emergency to justify aerial wolf control and usurped the will of the people. Governor Knowles vetoed the bill and the Republican majority overrode it. In March of 2000, SB267 was passed which allowed hunters other than the state biologists to aerially shoot wolves. That same year, Alaskans voted on another ballot initiative to ban aerial wolf hunting by a 53% majority. In 2004, then Governor Frank Murkowski reinstated aerial wolf hunting to private hunters. He opened up 60,000 square miles of Alaska for the flying cowboys. All you needed was a plane and a permit. With all of this history, we should have been prepared to deal with a Palin Administration hell bent on killing wolves. She and I were “raised by the same wolves”, and she wants to shoot them out of planes. She stacked the Alaska Board of Game with pro-aerial wolf hunters. She was successful at merging faulty science, extreme trophy hunting interests and state funded propaganda; spinning a web of lies to masquerade as conservation. I’m not sure where it started; maybe a spam email promising penis enlargement from shooting mammals out of planes went viral. Running our policy on “Faith Based Science” hasn’t worked; animals you believe are here for you to rule, and exist because Noah got two of them on a boat and they managed not to eat each other is one thing. But if you refuse to use the brain God gave you for observation and noticing patterns of science, well, how good of a steward of the Earth are you? Years of classic, scientific studies by Adolph Murie and Vic Van Vallenbergh have been mocked or ignored. Their studies were in the field, observing the balance between wolves and ungulate populations. They proved what common sense verifies; wolves take the weak and the sick thereby strengthening the herds. The Alaska Board of Game lacks common sense and ignores science. The Board is loaded with Viagra starved, trigger-happy Alaska Outdoor Council agenda driven thugs. Because of declining hunter success throughout the 1990s, residents of McGrath were vocal about the need for aerial wolf control. They complained loudly and constantly that there weren’t enough legal moose to hunt. The most comprehensive moose population survey to date was done in the fall of 2001. Alaska Department of Fish & Game Biologists documented moose numbers and the bull/cow ratios within a 520 square mile area around McGrath known as the Experimental Micro Management Area or EMMA , as well as the rest of Game Management Unit (GMU) 19D East. 520 square miles is a relatively small area. It is in fact, just under 12 miles north, south, east and west of McGrath. The target ratio for a sustainable hunted population is 30 bulls/100 cows. Within the EMMA, that ratio fell to an unhealthy 18 bulls/100 cows. Outside EMMA and basically outside the range of lazy 4-wheeler hunters, that ratio was 44 bulls/100 cows-well above the healthy target. Here’s the kicker direct from the Alaska Department of Fish & Games official report: “The low bull:cow ratio in this area (EMMA) results from an imbalance between hunting and recruitment. The bull:cow ratio in the remainder of GMU 19D East remains relatively high.” In other words, the science from ADF&G’s own biologists contradicted the need for any predator control. Studies conducted for the McGrath Adaptive Management Team proved that over-hunting was the reason for the lack of moose in the area, not wolves. That data was buried and wolf control was implemented. Right before the 2006 Election, Alaskans for Wildlife submitted 57,000 signatures to get another aerial wolf hunting ban in place. Newly elected Governor Palin and the ADF&G issued even more wolf kill permits and put up a $150 bounty . A state judge ruled Palin exceeded her authority and the bounty was scrapped . At the end of the 2007 legislative session, Palin flooded the legislature with bills to ease up on wolf hunting restrictions, but the bills were held up in committee. In the spring of 2008, Palin tried to declare wildlife an “asset” of the State to make their management off limits to ballot initiatives. She covertly tried to tack a wolf hunting bill on to an animal cruelty bill, SB 273 , introduced by Senator Bill Wielechowski. Pun intended: she got shot down. In August 2008, Alaskans voted once again on Aerial Predator Control. The i ntent of the ballot initiative was simple enough; to prohibit the shooting of wolves and grizzly bears from aircraft. Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, overseer of elections, did his part to i nsure the proposition language was confusing enough to guarantee failure: Ballot Measure 2 Bill Amending Same Day Airborne Shooting BALLOT LANGUAGE This bill amends current law banning same-day airborne shooting to include grizzly bears. The bill permits the Board of Game to allow a predator program for wolves and grizzly bears if the Commissioner of Fish and Game finds an emergency, where wolves or grizzly bears in an area are causing a decline in prey. Only employees of the Department of Fish and Game could take part in the program. Only the minimum number of wolves or grizzly bears needed to stop the emergency could be removed. Should this initiative become law? ___Yes ___No Parnell was dragged into court several times for misrepresenting the intent of the initiative on the ballot. Many Alaskans were confused by the ballot language. My neighbor is a retired state engineer. He is a bright man and a conservationist. He voted no despite being an outspoken opponent of aerial wolf killing. Had I not known to vote yes, I would have voted no too. Now, aerial predator control proponents can disingenuously claim that Alaskans favor killing wolves and bears from planes as evidenced by the 2008 vote on Ballot Prop 2 . Governor Palin did her part to defeat the initiative as wel l. She approved the use of public money and ordered the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to publish a 26-page full color pamphlet called ” Understanding Intensive Management and Predator Control in Alaska. ” It circulated through newspapers statewide and was mailed to tens of thousands of Alaskans just days before the election. The pamphlet emphasized “how well the current system is working.” Jim Marcotte, Director of Support for the Board of Game, said the pamphlet was not meant to influence voters-Really? Spending public money to tell Alaskans that the Aerial Wolf Control Program is necessary to protect our moose and caribou populations just before a statewide election wasn’t an attempt to influence the outcome? The fear machine was in full force. The message was clear: wolves threaten hunters’ ability to put food on the table. But the truth was more about putting pelts on a wall. In addition to the pamphlet and mailers, the state paid for Board of Game members to fly all over Alaska to “educate” the public on the benefits of predator control-again just before the election. This entire predator control program is about turning Alaska into a wild game farm. In response to the allegation that she signed off on a “propaganda campaign to justify the state’s barbaric wolf slaughter from the skies,” Palin said, “My understanding is this program was funded by the Legislature to factually explain game management practices to Alaskans, and I don’t have a problem with that.” The total bill for the “education” was $400,000 . Nearly the same amount of money she vetoed for high school drop out prevention. It’s shameful she spent almost half a million dollars on pamphlets to compensate for Alaska’s prohibition on Cialis. Hey, if you’ve been shooting wolves out of planes, and you have an erection lasting for more than four hours, check the Boone & Crocket stats, you may have a trophy! In June of 2008, the ADF&G broke their own predator control regulations with the slaughter of 14 wolf pups near Point Moeller. Under the ADF&G Wolf Control Regulations (5AAC 92.110(i) ), “Denning, the killing of wolf young in the den, is prohibited.” On site at the scene of the crime were Deputy ADF&G Commissioner for Wildlife, Ken Taylor, and The Director of ADF&G’s Division of Wildlife Conservation, Doug Larsen. Why were suits from Juneau involved in a routine field operation? Why do we pay them salaries to enforce laws they are either unaware of, or choose to break? Perhaps they knew they were breaking their own law and were there to support the cover-up and clean up crew. ADF&G Biologists want to “maintain” caribou herd numbers between 3,000-4,000 animals on the Alaska Peninsula near Port Moeller. A ccording to former ADF&G Commissioner Ron Skoog , the caribou populations on the Alaska Peninsula have fluctuated many times over the last several decades. Indeed, the caribou population on the Alaska Peninsula has dropped to 500 or fewer at least 3 times over 132 years. ADF&G Biologists obtained emergency permission to kill wolves by misleading the Board of Game and Alaskans to think the current decline is unprecedented. This is clearly NOT the case. Sarah Palin has been in a position to do the right thing for the wildlife of Alaska. Independent Alaskan Biologists have been begging for her ear. Faith based science is not science, yet it is what she has used in her policy making; mocking legitimate studies, and embracing big game hunters. The Rapture is not an environmental policy nor is it a game management policy. It’s been a long time since I set or checked a trap. I’ve spent hours behind a camera, camping in bear refuges, in awe of the nature of Alaska. When I was a child, I had no idea how big the world was, or how tamed parts had become. Looking at the world, I know Alaska is precious in its wildness. Why can’t we just let Nature run wild ? If you want to do something to help, please click here. Photos courtesy of Florian Schulz ; Special thanks to Leo and Dorothy Keeler .

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Shannyn Moore: ELISABETH…THE TRIBE HAS SPOKEN…Ashley Judd is spot on.

A striking fact about the current political environment is that despite the ground-breaking Democratic victory on November 4th - whose seeds were planted by progressive online activists - the new administration is dealing with an oddly familiar political brew: the “liberal media” mantra is rekindled , conservative talk radio (i.e. anti-liberal radio) is resurgent , Rush Limbaugh is more relevant than ever, Ann Coulter is once again doing the network rounds, and if online commentary over the past month is any indication, many progressives still feel disconnected from the levers of power. The assumption that the new presidency would transform the political process, usher in an era of unprecedented citizen empowerment and decimate the old conventional wisdom-making machinery, has run into the reality of entrenched power structures, deep-seated rivalries, die-hard habits and Beltway business as usual. That’s not to say that the election of President Obama isn’t momentous - it is - nor is it meant to detract from the astonishing advances in the use of technology to enhance voter participation. And certainly from a policy perspective, we’ve already seen tangible results of a Democratic presidency, from Gitmo to SCHIP to Lilly Ledbetter to an inspiring and long-overdue bluntness about the obscenities of executive compensation. [I remarked in a recent post that the first week of Obama's presidency was as surreal as the first week of Bush's, one for the departure from sane government, the other for the return to it.] Things have changed. But the dynamics and tensions of the past decade remain firmly in play: rightwing noise machine (albeit denuded) versus progressive activists, old-school pundits and politicians versus online powerhouses, netroots versus DLC, frustrated outsiders versus back-scratching insiders, partisanship versus bi/post-partisanship, media versus bloggers, and so on. This isn’t entirely surprising: political mechanisms change, human nature doesn’t. Which brings me to the point of this post: President Obama’s Internet savvy - and that of his advisers - won’t protect him from the formidable Conventional Wisdom Machine. I’ll take as my starting point a piece from Chris Cillizza in which he offers a counterintuitive take on events of the past week. Counterintuitive in the sense that the week has not played out according to the script he elucidates, a script, it should be noted, that has lots of credence among political observers: During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and his team learned a very important lesson that they are seeking to put into practice in the White House: the power of the media is overrated. Time and again during the campaign, Obama used his burgeoning grassroots army — now more than 13 million email addresses strong — to push out the message that he wanted to dominate the day rather than the message the media was focused on. Utilizing You Tube and a variety of other social networking media, Obama was able to speak directly to his supporters and, as importantly, to undecided voters about the issues of the day. That strategy has carried over in the White House, the most striking example of which has been the use of YouTube to turn a non-news event — the weekly Saturday radio address — into a newsmaker. And this week, in the midst of a self-inflicted mini-crisis regarding the withdrawals of Nancy Killefer and Tom Daschle, Obama was at it again. In an email — with an accompanying YouTube video from Obama — campaign manager David Plouffe urged support for the president’s economic stimulus plan. “You can help make sure the American people have all the facts so they can support this crucial effort to boost our struggling economy,” wrote Plouffe. “The President is leading. Help is on the way.” Because of Obama’s reach — 13 million email addresses is a stunning number — these sorts of tactics (Daschle? Daschle who?) have the potential to quickly re-focus the American public on the economic stimulus package rather than allow people to linger on the Daschle withdrawal and what it says about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the president’s judgment more broadly. All of that is not to say the media doesn’t have a role to play. But, Obama has a unique ability to end-run the media filter and use technology to make it stick. In reality, events have unfolded very differently. That’s not surprising; the role of the web has been misstated in the campaign and it is being overestimated in the post-campaign period. On TechPrez , Zephyr Teachout makes an important point regarding the latter: Organizing for America sent out a request for house parties today, asking people to watch a video about Obama’s economic recovery plan, talk about it with their friends, and build support for it. While there will be tweaks, this is the kind of action we can anticipate from OFA. I predict that there will be perhaps a thousand of such parties, then hundreds, then dozens. I think OFA will fail in its mission to directly engage Obama supporters in supporting Obama’s executive actions. And I think this is a very good thing. It will fail because Obama–suiting a President–is not oppositional, conflict-driven, and not likely to pick out particular targets to be won over–all things that are likely to engage people. It will fail because it is from OFA, not from Obama. And it will fail because OFA cannot be a new democratic party, but will have a hard time defining what it is, and what kind of real power ought exist at every level of the organization. This is a good thing because it is not intended to be a representative organization, where people have real power. In a piece where I argued that the only truly revolutionary aspect of the Internet in the 2008 campaign was the emerging power of the online commentariat I wrote, “the truth is that the Obama campaign was a triumph of integration more than technological innovation. It was the wildly successful marriage of time-tested political strategies and tactics, executed with acumen and discipline, seamlessly combined with cutting-edge technology and tied together with an empowering grassroots message. With a brilliant candidate at the helm.” What I left out of that description is the relationship of Obama and other candidates to the media during the 2008 race. Among many other things they did well, the Obama team surfed two cresting media/Internet waves, an anti-Clinton wave and an anti-Bush wave. Lest the point be misconstrued as blaming the media for Clinton’s loss or as a criticism of the Obama team, it’s neither. The Obama campaign expertly utilized the media environment to their advantage, maximized their strengths, minimized their weaknesses, targeted their opponents’ vulnerabilities and wielded their grassroots empowerment message as a potent communications weapon. The deftness with which Obama handled media relations and managed public perceptions has complicated the typical media bias equation, both from the right and left. Conservatives now trumpet a newly rejuvenated ‘liberal media’ argument, but they need only look at some of the reprehensible coverage of Hillary Clinton to rethink their point. Furthermore, those who argue that there is an unmistakable pro-Obama tilt in the media should keep in mind that when Obama was all but written off after trailing by double digits in late 2007, the media hardly favored him. And when Sarah Palin exploded onto the scene, and before her rollout imploded, similar headlines reemerged casting Obama as lost and listless. By the same token, it’s more difficult for progressive media watchers to claim a wholesale rightwing media tilt when Obama clearly received lots of favorable coverage (even if he got it by running a great campaign) and when he won the race. Either way, although media-bashing is a common sport - which I confess to have indulged in - and even though it’s de rigueur online to relish the demise of traditional media business models, in the end, the proclivities and personal beliefs of individual reporters matter less than many political analysts think they do. The political press is just one piece of the CW Machine, which is comprised of pundits, editorialists, reporters, politicians, elected officials, public figures, TV anchors, radio hosts, comedians and the ever-growing ranks of online commenters, working either in tandem or in opposition. When the CW Machine gets cranking, when cable chatter gets going, when Balz and Broder, Gergen and Todd, Brooks and Dowd, Maddow, Scarborough and Mitchell, Halperin and Tapper, Allen and Smith, Leno, Stewart and Letterman, blogs and talk radio, YouTube and Twitter start buzzing, no amount of Internet prowess and no single email list can offset it. Obama’s Internet savvy cannot overcome the CW Machine. The grassroots infrastructure his campaign built may be able to influence some of the commentary, alter portions of the debate and mitigate some of the effects, but overall, the CW Machine, composed of myriad online and offline components, will grind away and do its business, larger than any one candidate, leader, party or movement. Ultimately, the grand political battle in the coming years will be the same as it’s always been: a contest over the shaping and reshaping of public perceptions — both with respect to politics and policy. For Democrats, taking comfort in Obama’s online successes during the campaign is a losing bet: in recent days, Republicans have demonstrated that despite being in the minority and clearly behind in the Internet game, it’s possible for the CW Machine to work in their favor. If hindering the Democratic agenda by exploiting missteps is a core mission for Republicans, Democrats would do well to note how effectively Republicans have done just that in the nascent days of the Obama presidency and how unpredictably the CW Machine has operated (or how predictably for those who are less sanguine about the fungibility of a web-fueled grassroots campaign). Perhaps the best strategy in light of all this is simply to govern based on solid Democratic principles and let the results - and history - trump the CW Machine.

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Peter Daou: President Obama Versus the CW Machine, Round One

The presidential campaign of 2008 seems pretty far off these days. An economic collapse will do that. But given the profound challenges facing the nation and the president these days, it’s worth reviewing the media coverage of the race to see if journalists last year effectively probed the candidates vying to lead the country through a difficult period. Sadly, there were far more media lowlights than highlights during the campaign, as too many reporters and pundits focused on flag pins, bowling, and fairly trivial faux pas. One could do a full article just on William Kristol’s errors and flubs at the New York Times (my favorite coming when Kristol touted Clarence Thomas for vice president long before he fell in love with Sarah Palin). Moreover, it often seemed that America was trapped in an alternative universe shaped by the media, with John McCain running against some scary, inexperienced, part-Muslim who was palling around with Weathermen radicals and terrorists. Then the votes were counted, and the boogeyman was gone. Today, even half the people who voted for McCain say they are optimistic about Barack Obama’s presidency. So much of the media’s performance ended up not mattering–or being trumped by other factors.

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Reporters Behaving Badly: Worst Moments Of 2008 Campaign Coverage

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers makes a great point : Someone should make the point that the theory on which Daschle did not pay taxes on an extraordinary non-salary benefit provided by his employer (car and driver) is exactly the theory on which Palin did not pay taxes on an extraordinary benefit (free air travel for her children, and 60 dollar per day per diem payments for use of her own house). Palin never paid back taxes but simply produced a squirrelly letter from her lawyers saying that someone could believe in good faith that taxes were not owed on the travel or per diems she received, so her failure to report those items as income was excusable. IOKIYAR. And it’s really okay if you are the most popular Republican in the entire GOP, short of Joe Samuel the Plumber War Correspondent Political Strategist .

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What About Palin’s Back Taxes?

President Obama’s announcement of executive pay caps earlier today wasn’t just notable for his new policy on compensation — it was also the first time since the election that he’s given Republicans a dose of what they’ve been dishing out on a daily basis. The President’s remarks were more of a warning than open political warfare, but he did remind GOPers that the economic theories they are fighting for have been tested over the last eight years, and that they have failed. President Obama reminded Republicans that it wasn’t just his opinion that their ideas have failed — it was also the opinion of the American public, who on November 4th soundly rejected the conservative dogma. It was the first time that President Obama invoked the results of the election in a public setting, and it was clearly intended as a reminder to Republican obstructionists that when they block progress on economic recovery, they are not only are they playing with the nation’s welfare, they are also toying with their own political welfare. Without saying it in so many words, he made it clear that if Republicans think he’s going to roll over and not put up a fight, they are sorely mistaken. Here’s the key passage GOPers should contemplate: Now, in the past few days I’ve heard criticisms of this plan that echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis – the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems; that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive. I reject that theory, and so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.  So I urge members of Congress to act without delay.  No plan is perfect, and we should work to make it stronger.  But let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the essential.  Let’s show people all over our country who are looking for leadership in this difficult time that we are equal to the task. The bottom-line is that President Obama signaled his willingness to fight back if the Republicans decide they want to fight. He’s bent over backwards to work with them, but if they won’t reciprocate, then he’s willing to do political battle with them. And this much we know: anyone who would walk willingly into a political battle with President Obama is a fool. Just ask the Clintons, or John McCain, or Sarah Palin. Yet if the GOP has demonstrated one thing over the last few years, it is that among those clowns, there is no shortage of foolishness. Here’s video of President Obama’s remarks. Full transcript after the jump.

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A warning shot to the GOP, from President Obama

Where others fear to tread, a 20-year-old college student from Tequesta, Fla.,boldly stepped forward Tuesday to ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a question he did not like during a public appearance in West Palm Beach. “That’s a nasty, impolite question,” said Scalia, himself an expert on tough questioning, and he at first refused to answer it. This morning we tracked down student Sarah Jeck, the Florida Atlantic University honors college junior who incurred Scalia’s wrath, and she seemed a little stunned, but not cowed, by his reaction. “He can dish it out, but he can’t take it, I guess,” she says. “I’m generally a very polite person. I’m really surprised the way it turned out. It was not a preposterous question.”

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Justice Scalia Lashes Out At Student Questioner

(The following is excerpted from my new book, Why Obama Won .) When the nearly two-year race for the White House ended on November 4, 2008, the solid win for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a vote for hope and change, no longer seemed a surprise. John McCain’s pathetic last ditch efforts — painting Obama as a “socialist,” adopting “Joe the Plumber” as his campaign pet, appearing on Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey as she continued to make his running mate a national laughing stock — could not stem the tide. Going back one year, however — and finding Hillary Clinton labeled the clear frontrunner — puts the Obama victory in perspective. Joe Scarborough wasn’t the only pundit back then to pat Obama on the head for a nice effort and tell him to prepare to get ground up and “spit out” by the unstoppable double-Clinton machine. Instead, Obama, with the help of an unprecedented grassroots funding and organizing effort, battled that machine to a standstill, then knocked out McCain a few months later. How did that happen? The Democratic insurgent made few poor moves, remained calm while avoiding, or wiping off, the mud thrown at him, and continually surprised the pundits, who overestimated both Clinton and McCain (and Sarah Palin) past the point that most voters abandoned them. Then there was the Web. The nomination of an African-American for president by a major party, and the Republicans’ first selection of a female candidate for vice-president, were not the only historic aspects of the 2008 election campaign in the United States. This was also the first national campaign profoundly shaped — even, at times, dominated — by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went “mainstream” to startling online fundraising techniques. You might call it Campaign 2.008. James Poniewozik, the Time magazine columnist, observed at mid-year that the old media are rapidly losing their “authority,” and influence, with the mass market. “It’s too simple to say that the new media are killing off the old media,” he declared, while highlighting a pair of influential scoops for Huffington Post by a hitherto unknown “citizen journalist” named Mayhill Fowler. “What’s happening instead is a kind of melding of roles. Old and new media are still symbiotic, but it’s getting hard to tell who’s the rhino and who’s the tickbird.” He concluded, with an oblique reference to the late Tim Russert: “Maybe we’ll remember this election as the one when we stopped talking about ‘the old media’ and ‘the new media’ and, simply, met the press.” Simply put: The rules of the game have been changed forever — by technology. It was more than the “YouTube Election,” as some dubbed it, or “The Facebook Election,” or “hyper-politics.” James Rainey, the longtime media reporter for the Los Angeles Times , declared that there is a “new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist ‘with absolutely no journalism training’ can alter the national debate,” a reference to Mayhill Fowler. Case in point: In June, the alleged Obama “terrorist fist bump” went from viral to The View in just three days. Fortunately, the candidate was able to laugh it off, which was certainly not the case after the Rev. Wright videos went viral — another example of the unpredictable power of Web politics. More evidence: After wrapping up the nomination in June 2008, the Obama campaign launched an extensive Web site devoted solely to shooting down viral rumors and innuendo. “What’s different this year is that the entire political and media establishment has finally woken up to the fact that the internet is now a major player in the world of politics and our democracy,” said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the TechPresident blog and annual Personal Democracy Forum. “We are watching a conversion of our politics from the 20th century to the 21st.” How did sites with names like Politico and FiveThirtyEight and Eschaton and Crooks and Liars and “HuffPo” collectively come to rival the three television networks in influence, even if partly by influencing the networks themselves? It’s been more than thirty-five years since “The Boys on the Bus” were anointed and celebrated. Now Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” site often made headlines with on-the-scene bulletins and audio/video snippets from some 3000 contributors. It was there that Mayhill Fowler’s two major scoops in the campaign were posted. Defending her second one — on Bill Clinton’s “sleazy” attack on Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair captured along a rope line in South Dakota — Jay Rosen, who runs that section of the Huff Post site, said, “Professional reporters are going to have to decide whether they want to view citizen journalists as unfair competition, which is one option, or as extending the news net to places that pro reporters can’t, won’t or don’t go, which is another — and I think a better — way to look at it.” I would argue that videos featuring Bill, not Hillary, Clinton led to the true turning point in the primary race, when on three separate occasions he was caught making what some took to be “racial” remarks and/or losing his temper with voters or reporters — all in informal settings captured by amateurs or small town reporters and then beamed to millions. Countless Democrats, and particularly African-Americans, who had always revered the Clintons, switched to Obama in the space of a week or two. Even if they still liked Hill they did not want another four or eight years of Bill. Obama won eleven primaries in a row and the race was all but over. Early in the final Obama-McCain showdown, a leading campaign charge from the Democrats was that the Republican wanted to stay in Iraq “for 100 years.” What was the source for this? An amateur video of McCain making a remark to that effect at a small campaign gathering months earlier, spread widely on the Web — in the usual fashion, first by liberal bloggers, then by the Obama campaign itself. Soon it turned up frequently on network and cable TV shows and even in Democratic commercials. Some Republicans lamented that McCain was getting killed on the Web, and he didn’t help his image any when he admitted that he was still an internet neophyte. In June, when Obama passed the magic barrier of one million Facebook friends — a measure that didn’t exist four years ago — it was noted that McCain only had 150,000. Don’t forget: Last autumn, the turning point for the entire campaign might have come when McCain’s gamble, picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, was undermined by the CBS interview with her by Katie Couric and the Saturday Night Live parodies starring Tina Fey. Yes, they were generated in the mainstream but they gained tens of millions of additional viewers online in the days that followed. Another key factor: After the TV pundits scored each of the four big debates about even, instant polling and Web commentary, nearly all giving the the Democrat the win, carried the day. Today, old media still plays a strong role, of course, but even when it is at center stage, which is often, it now comes under withering review from the world of the Web — and in turn, responds to those critiques, and the cycle goes on and on. Even mainstream figures such as Couric, Brian Williams, and Keith Olbermann write blogs, which are quite popular. Yes, the networks and cable news outlets hosted almost all of the candidate debates, but this year they were joined by partners such as Facebook and YouTube. The YouTube debate provided some of the best, and goofiest, questions of the whole primary season (who can forget the query about global warming from a melting snowman). One of the lowlights of the primary season for the networks was the public flogging of ABC anchor Charles Gibson for his often inane questions during one debate. The uproar from the Web was so strong that Gibson had to respond — on the air the next night. As the final week of the campaign approached in October, Howard Kurtz ventured out on the campaign trail for a few days for T he Washington Post and then asked: Have the Web and the digital age doomed the “boys on the bus”? He sketched Obama about to speak to 10,000 screaming fans at a state fairgrounds but observed that before he “took the podium, the text of his speech arrived by BlackBerry. The address was carried by CNN, Fox and MSNBC. While he was still delivering his applause lines, an Atlantic blogger posted excerpts. And despite the huge foot-stomping crowd that could barely be glimpsed from the media tent, most reporters remained hunched over their laptops. “Does the campaign trail still matter much in an age of digital warfare? Or is it now a mere sideshow, meant to provide the media with pretty pictures of colorful crowds while the guts of the contest unfold elsewhere? And if so, are the boys (and girls) on the bus spinning their wheels?” Then, on the morning of Election Day, the New York Times presented, as its banner headline on the front page, “The ‘08 Campaign: A Sea Change for Politics As We Know It.” Adam Nagourney opened it with, “The 2008 race for the White House that comes to an end on Tuesday fundamentally upended the way presidential campaigns are fought in this country, a legacy that has almost been lost with all the attention being paid to the battle between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. “It has rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage — and withstand — political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago.” So blogs, which rarely drew wide notice in 2004 and were derided by some as a silly, passing fancy, now earned a place in the second paragraph of the top Times story on Election Day 2008. “I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004, in that Times article. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.” Terry Nelson, who was the political director of the Bush campaign in 2004, said that the evolution would continue in 2012 and beyond. “We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation of how campaigns are run,” Nelson said. “And it’s not over yet.” As Sarah Palin might say: You betcha. * Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher. “Why Obama Won” is his ninth book.

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Greg Mitchell: Obama, The ‘Revolution’ in Online Politics — And What Happens Next

Living in Missouri, it’s easy to be disheartened by the fact that you share a state with people 51% of whom were ready to transfer the Bush economy-hole-diggin’ shovel to John McCain and Sarah Palin. But for any resident of the Show-Me State looking for a sign that we’ve done something right lately, you don’t have to look far beyond the actions and words of Senator Claire McCaskill. Here’s Claire, as captured by Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post op ed . Sen. Claire McCaskill’s righteous verdict on shameless, clueless, bonus-grubbing executives should be carved on the tombstone of the whole “Masters of the Universe” ethos that brought us to this moment of dire economic peril: “These people are idiots.” Senator McCaskill’s words as she was “ranting for the nation” were satisfyingly direct, but her action was equally direct. McCaskill introduced a bill to limit compensation at any company receiving bailout money to $400,000 — the salary of the president of the United States. It’s hard to improve on her words: “We should have done it in the first place. But I don’t think any of us thought these guys were this stupid. I don’t think any of us believed that they would take billions of dollars in bonuses while their institutions were literally days from being wiped out. But they did. And we’ve learned our lesson.” Yes, they are that stupid . So stupid they’re drooling all the way to the bank. They’ve created a corporate culture that not only fails to punish foolish behavior, it rewards it. On this side of the scale: executives gut their corporation, cripple the economy, and pocket billions in the process, on the other side they work hard to make rational decisions, share the profits with the shareholders, reward employees for their hard work, and take a fair cut that matches their contribution to the company’s long term health. Is it any wonder this scale has tipped completely over?   Tell ‘em, Eugene. Things have changed. No longer does it seem reasonable — if it ever did — that the average CEO makes 344 times as much as the average worker, as was estimated last August by the Institute for Policy Studies and the nonprofit group United for a Fair Economy. No longer does it seem acceptable that John Thain, the since-ousted Merrill Lynch chief who ordered the accelerated bonuses that so irked McCaskill, would spend $1.2 million of his fast-sinking firm’s money to redecorate his office — and then, with Merrill’s losses being revealed as even greater than feared, request a bonus of up to $10 million for himself. The idea that executives and boards will undertake this reform on their own? Now that really is stupid. If we want this changed, it’s going to have to come from the ground floor, and from Capitol Hill, not from the board room.

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Earth to Wall Street

It’s been a long time since I’ve heard these words from any politican, much less from a President : I’m here on television saying I screwed up, and that’s part of the era of responsibility. It’s not never making mistakes; it’s owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that’s what we intend to do. When the nation watched horrified while the Department of Homeland Security fumbled painfully in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Michael Chertoff blamed it on phantom headlines, George Bush assured Brownie he was ‘doing a heckuva job,’ and right-wing pundits eagerly acquitted the Whitehouse by trying to lay the whole mess at the feet of the victims and any democrat within 1000 miles. When George Bush and his merry band of neoclowns stampeded a panicked nation into an ill-conceived war against Iraq and rolled snake-eyes on catching bin Laden it was all because of ‘bad intel’ and blown all out of proportion by biased, ‘liberal reporters’ feeding the progressive pathology of ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome.’ On and on it went like a runaway freight train. The economic meltdown was brought on by the unbridled greed of middle class wage earners; politicization of the Justice Department was an artifact of an overzealous congressional witch hunt; Sarah Palin was a superbly qualified candidate unfairly slimed by savage bloggers. If excuses were assholes, the conservative beast would be studded with ugly sphincters oozing an endless stream of foul bullshit from head to toe.   I’d prefer a President who is flawless. But after eight years of conservative ‘blame gaming,’ endless Republican evasion and stone walling, and crazed wingnut finger pointing, I’d have settle for one that can construct coherent sentences and tell the truth at the same time. I’ll happily support a President with enough basic respect for We the People to look us in the eye and own up. We’d almost forgotten what honesty looks like. It looks like change.

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What Change Looks Like

Newt Gingrich this week prophesied that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin could become “very formidable” in the coming years as long as she “seeks out a group of sophisticated policy advisers”. I daresay the latter clause of this statement is more likely than the former. But maybe I’m not being fair. Governor Palin does indeed have the potential to be a “very formidable” and viable GOP presidential candidate in 2012. However, the journey before her will be nothing short of a modern-day Pinocchio story–an endeavor to transform from a cartoon character into a real person. Tina Fey was successful in lampooning Palin on SNL by using almost exact copies of her disastrous interview transcripts, rather than writing much original material (though Fey is no doubt a gifted and prolific comedic writer). Fey’s impression delivered, and is now famous, primarily because of this authenticity–it required little embellishment to achieve comedic absurdity because the raw material from which it derived was sufficient enough. For many, even the most oblique reference to the Alaska governor had, by the end of the campaign, become a punch-line in and of itself (such as we’ve recently seen with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich). Recall the presidential campaign last fall, when McCain camp aides speculated that Palin had “gone rogue” to lay the foundation for a 2012 or 2016 presidential bid. These political oracles reportedly went so far as to describe her as a “diva” and a “whack job” after she began deviating so ruinously from her script. However, perhaps a more accurate retrospective diagnosis is that we were witnessing the full-blown manifestation of a self-caricature that developed throughout the campaign–and which was necessary for selling the previously unheard-of governor to the base. If Palin hopes to lead the GOP out of its rut, alongside the symbolically significant new RNC Chairman Michael Steele, she will first and foremost need to transcend her current role as the character children see on the front of a GOP cereal box. To become “formidable” Palin must reverse this self-caricature, which will require an understanding of how it arose in the first place. The genesis was perhaps her first one-on-one, high pressure experience: the interview with Charlie Gibson, which revealed someone unlettered, unprepared and presumably in over her head. Her fight-or-flight response, following the even more cringe-inducing Katie Couric interview, was to transform into a mascot–something abstractly symbolic–to stave off the overbearing demands for a demonstration in policy acumen. Indeed, a mascot need not bother his or herself with matters of such gravitas . To introduce herself to the national political stage, Palin went overboard in creating the image of a Washington outsider, “maverick”, bucolic, moose-hunting, hockey-mom who was just right for “Joe Six-pack”. (By the way who was Joe Six-pack, Joe Camel’s cousin?) The “don’tcha knows” and “gosh darn it’s”, coupled with that idyllic wink immortalized during the Vice Presidential debate, could probably not have been any more contrived at the time. But these antics creepily sank in and eventually appeared sincere. Though this caricature-like effect led to the intended saturnalia among ardent party loyalists–Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder, and the rest of the “Village People”–it had an adverse effect on anyone who was even the least bit skeptical of such an inchoate candidate. We now find ourselves three months hence, and three months since the self-caricature trajectory was at its apex. Admittedly, the Alaska governor may be improving her image by using more respectable political avenues than just spectacle-driven talk show appearances. This week she authored an op-ed for the Minneapolis Star Tribune to argue against a bill that would prohibit drilling in ANWR. And she has also entered the gubernatorial fray in Texas by endorsing Republican Rick Perry . But it is not yet clear whether these maneuvers will benefit her credibility. One thing that surely won’t help is her ongoing row with “the media”. Her media-blaming gambit with filmmaker John Zeigler following the election was ill-received and seen as gratuitously souring, revealing that she is still rather naive when it comes to safely navigating the public sphere. Needless to say, the video footage of Palin in front of a turkey-beheading machine is precisely the type of thing she needs to avoid. Much of this will depend on luck, but Palin should indeed follow Gingrich’s advice to recruit the best and the brightest advisors available. Still though, beyond cramming up on policy, the “hockey mom” must become a real person again. She has a few years to wipe the slate clean and to make everyone forget the days where she was naught but a party mascot, prone to cutesy winks and demotic catchphrases. It won’t be easy though, with a public that thrives on schadenfreude and that is unlikely give up such a public wellspring for ridicule as the Palin we all remember from the election. She has likability, but so does Tony the Tiger. What would help her most is to be taken seriously–to achieve the “Pinocchio effect” that will furnish her with the more subtle authenticity she so direly needs.

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Stuart Whatley: Advice To Palin: Give The GOP Elephant His Job Back

There she is…the former Miss Wasilla, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, entering the deep bastion of America’s corporate elite, The Alfalfa Club, in “a black satin evening gown and matching wrap” that doesn’t quite look like it’s been worn too often in the Last Frontier. Proper moose hunting attire it is not, even if one is hunting from an airplane . Video footage of Palin’s entrance reveals that she was accompanied by her fellow Alaskan pit bull in high heels, Meg Stapleton, who headed up the GOP hit squad in Alaska last fall when Palin was on the campaign trail with John McCain; and a couple of elder stiffs in black ties behind them, one of whom looks ever much like her Alaska security detail, Bob Cockrell (one wonders, was he there on state time?), and the other like her latest right-wing Republican patron du jour , Fred Malek–the notorious “hatchet man” for Richard Nixon who only a few years ago was busted by the SEC for investment fraud. By all accounts, it was a fairly tepid affair , as these things usually are, at which Palin gushed her way up to that renowned pal of terrorists, President Barack Obama, made nice-nice, as politicians often do, and returned to her table to sharpen her stiletto. That would be the same Barack Obama whom she trashed on the campaign trail for “pallin’ around with terrorists” and declaring that “he’s not one of us.” Palin was in Washington, allegedly to advocate for the interest of her state, but given the fact that she formed a PAC last week in Virginia, it was clear that she was there to promote her own political ambitions and to establish a national platform from which to launch her campaign for the presidency in 2012. The night before, Malek hosted an even more intimate dinner at his home for Palin and her former running mate, McCain, who hadn’t seen each other since that fateful evening in Phoenix, when McCain made his concession speech and Palin was left with tears in her eyes, forbidden from delivering a speech of her own. In many ways, Malek would seem to provide the perfect entrée into Washington’s conservative corporate elite for Palin. He fits nicely into the circle of corruption that has followed Palin throughout her political career. In a current blog of his, Malek declares that “Palin will have an important role in the future of the Republican Party.” During the embryonic days of Watergate, Malek served as a special assistant to Nixon in his corrupt bid for re-election, where he palled around with the likes of real terrorists, including H. R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, Charles Colson and E. Howard Hunt. Malek distinguished himself in the Nixon circles by providing the anti-Semitic president with information about the number of Democrats and “important Jewish officials” working in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon was convinced that a “Jewish cabal” had taken over the agency. Timothy Noah of Slate , in a brilliant series of investigative reporting, has dubbed it “the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government.” The incident was first brought to light by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their celebrated work, The Final Days . Malek, who Noah has dubbed “Nixon’s Jew counter,” has attempted to minimize his role in the affair. But as Noah points out, recently released documents reveal that Malek played a central role in getting those who were suspected of being Jewish (Malek based his assessment on surnames) removed from their posts in the BLS. Following the Watergate revelations and Nixon’s shameful departure from office, Malek left government and headed into the private sector, where his behind-the-scenes activities in hotel management, airline ownership and investment packaging were far less scrutinized. A decade later, Malek resurfaced in Republican circles, when he was temporarily placed in charge of the 1988 Republican National Convention, only to be forced to resign because of the Nixon controversy. Four years later he served as campaign manager for George H. W. Bush’s unsuccessful re-election bid against Bill Clinton. The Republicans lost the federal government, but Malek had been politically rehabilitated. In the private sector, while Malek built up a massive investment portfolio and founded Thayer Capital Partners, he ran afoul of the SEC. It was a sleazy affair –involving undeclared political payola– that has been fully recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Thayer Capital paid a civil penalty of $150,000, and Malek personally paid a fine of $100,000. Then McCain named him as national finance co-chairman of his campaign. Malek would feel right at home in Alaskan politics. But there’s one sordid tale in Malek’s background that might give Palin the pit bull some pause. As Washington Post columnist Colbert King reported a few years ago, Malek was involved in a gruesome incident in his home state of Illinois, shortly after he graduated from West Point. In the early morning hours of August of 1959, sheriff deputies outside of Peoria discovered a vehicle covered in blood and a group of drunken young men, also covered in blood, nearby. Some were hiding in the bushes. The men told the deputies that they had accidentally hit a dog. Then their story changed. And then it changed again. Finally, one of them confessed. They had captured the dog and had barbecued it in a nearby park. The deputies returned to the scene and found a skinned and gutted canine on a spit in the park. An empty booze bottle was also nearby. Fred Malek was one of the five young men arrested for the crime, though the charges against him were eventually dropped. Malek’s come a long way since that drunken barbecue and canine slaughter. But the Alaska pit bull had better watch her back.

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Geoffrey Dunn: Dog Eat Dog: Palin Patron’s Checkered Past

Sad , but hilarious, too: Fresh off his stint as a war correspondent in Gaza, Joe the Plumber is now doing political strategy with Republicans. When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week. And somehow fitting for the party base that wants to be more like Sarah Palin .

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From Lee Atwater to Joe the Plumber in one generation

This year’s Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum has been unprecedented on many levels. I’ve blogged about the apprehension in the air, but I’ve also written about how the world leaders at Davos seem to be open to new ideas in a more significant way than ever before. The girl effect is a perfect demonstration of that. People here in Davos have been talking about it all week and it was clear after the session, The Girl Effect on Development, that people really understood why investing in adolescent girls in poverty is central to just about every decision we make. On a related note, I know I promised some thoughts on the “Important Dinner for Women,” hosted by Wendi Murdoch and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. As usual, the dinner didn’t disappoint. The main focus was improving maternal health and infant mortality around the world. It was a pretty unbelievable roster of business, media and government leaders: HRH Princess Mabel of Orange-Nassau, Cherie Blair, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Arianna Huffington, the Council of Women World Leaders’ Laura Liswood, Goldman Sach’s Dina Powell, the World Bank’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Wikimedia Foundation’s Sue Gardner, Naomi Campbell and more than 100 others. I was very lucky and sat next to the amazing Susan Hockfield, the President of MIT University. We had a great discussion about the Poverty Action Lab at MIT and her experience as the first female leader of the university. Indra Nooyi really personalized the importance of girls and women to her and to Pepsi. She talked about a girl-focused program Pepsi supports and we agreed to connect after the craziness of Davos to see what we could do together. Melinda Gates spoke from her personal experience as well, having just been to Ethiopia and Tanzania the days before coming to Davos. You can actually see Melinda sharing some of these stories at the Girl Effect on Development session on the Forum’s multimedia site. Sarah Brown, spouse of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and a tireless champion of the white ribbon campaign to fight maternal mortality, gave a speech that focused on results and momentum. After the dinner I talked with my close colleague and fellow girl champion, Jennifer Buffett of the NoVo Foundation about her reactions to the focus on mothers and women. By that I mean, the thought that mothers are women. The truth of the matter is, “girls” and “mothers” are one in the same. This is an important point I’m hoping this amazing group of women will begin to think about in their work. Jennifer said, “Everyone in the room was picturing an older woman, maybe a mature, self-sufficient woman with a husband and a nuclear family and her basic needs taken care of… We know, however, the reality is that these girls are 11, 12, 13, 14 years old. It’s not just that they can’t reach the health clinics to have their babies, but that their bodies actually aren’t ready even if they make it to the clinics. They’re children themselves having children, so I was struck that wasn’t mentioned.” Jennifer was referring to the fact that one-quarter to one-half of girls in the developing world become pregnant before the age of 18. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth are, in fact, their leading cause of death. Another thing that struck me from the dinner was the acoustic of the room. After five days in Davos, you get pretty used to the sound of thousands of male voices. Suddenly finding yourself in a room full of women’s voices is a bit of a shock. The energy in the room was exciting and powerful. It was inspiring to be around such a remarkable group of women who often seem scarce in the sea of men at the main Davos congress hall. The dinner was full of inspiration and a remarkable spirit of collaboration. The theme may well have been “How can we work together to make things better?” Everyone was very focused on practical ideas to address critical issues. With its emphasis on the crisis, that kind of laser-sharp focus would have been beneficial across the Davos agenda - not that there weren’t great ideas, but there were more than enough generalizations too. I’ve been blogging about girls at Davos all week; we started this work four years ago when many others (like the Population Council’s Judith Bruce, International Women’s Health Coalition’s Adrienne Germain, for example) had already been pioneering girl-focused work for decades. I am struck at how daunting the challenge of getting the issues of girls on the global agenda has been, but the progress has been amazing. As far as Davos goes, I’m most excited the door for girls has been opened. It’s a watershed moment for a population that was virtually invisible just a few years ago. However, I want to be clear. Davos is only a geographical destination. As far as girls are concerned, this is just the beginning. Resources must be mobilized and systems must be adjusted to reach and serve girls. Now the job is to continue the momentum and turn this into concrete actions for girls around the world. There’s a lot of work left to be done and everyone is responsible. If we do what we need to do, everyone’s future will change for the better. All it takes is one new corporate best practice that creates economic opportunity for girls, one head of state to commit to girl-focused policy, one major donor system to adjust to serve girls, one influential person to use their voice (loudly) on girls’ behalf. Once that happens, the results will bring everyone else on board. As Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus put it, “If it works for people, nothing in the world can stop it.” In signing off from Davos, I want to take a moment to share a few great quotes I’ve heard about girls. I can write all day about how important this is, but it’s the wide range of support that–after girls themselves–gives the girl effect the power it needs to be unleashed. And don’t forget to check out girleffect.org to see how you can do something for girls. Thanks for tuning in. The Sounds of Davos “In the midst of such grim news, people have picked up a wonderful idea.” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director of the World Bank, on the girl effect “If you’re in a position where you need to cut budget spends on certain issues, extend economic growth and improve all kinds of social indicators without the resources you’ve had in the past, if you bypass the girl effect, then you’re really almost a negligent policy maker or leader. Common sense is embedded into this.” Lee Howell, Annual Meeting Director, World Economic Forum “You can look at almost any global health issue and realize that girls tend to be disproportionately impacted.” Helene Gayle, M.D., President and CEO of CARE “I’m hoping there will continue to be a focus on girls because they are really so key to successful development and progress.” U.S. Representative Nita Lowey (D-NY) “You can trust girls. When you invest in them, they will take that investment and run with it, more so than any other investment you can make. You should have a great deal of trust that that investment is going to give you a very high return in many, many ways. All she’s asking for is some support.” Mark Parker, President and CEO, Nike, Inc. “Whether you care about the environment, health or poverty, education or aids… by working with girls, you can affect all of those things positively.” Jennifer Buffett, President, NoVo Foundation “You have to break things so you can create new cultures…you have all kinds of opposition…but if it works for people, nothing in the world can stop it.” Professor Muhammad Yunus, Founder, Grameen Bank on overcoming cultural barriers to lending to girls and women “We have to think about creative ways to use existing technologies to ensure that girls get economic opportunity. They exist, but to connect them is a big issue.” Geeta Rao Gupta, President, International Center for Research on Women “Gender violence accounts for more ill-health than malaria and car accidents combined…What’s needed are some models of hope where public justice systems that do not protect women and girls from violence are now actually able to do so.” Gary Haugen, President and CEO, International Justice Mission

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Maria Eitel: For the First Time in History, Girls Were All Over Davos

Rasmussen recently polled what should be the fundamental question being asked by all committed Republicans: what direction should the Republican party take to arrest its downward slide in to weakness and unpopularity. Unfortunately, the writers of the questions at Rasmussen appear as bereft of new ideas as is the leadership of the Republican party. The poll asked only four questions, and the results lead Rasmussen to conclude that Republicans like GOP’s conservative direction, Democrats don’t . That may or may not be, but the poll exposes the weakness of polling when the questions are poorly conceived, as well as a lack of “the vision thing” within the Republican party: Coming off a shellacking at the polls in November, the plurality of GOP voters (43%) say their party has been too moderate over the past eight years, and 55% think it should become more like Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the future, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just 24% think failed presidential candidate John McCain is the best future model for the party, and 10% are undecided. Only 17% of Republican voters say their party has been too conservative, and 30% say its actions and positions have been about right, with nine percent (9%) not sure. There is one area of agreement though: Just 11% of Republicans and six percent (6%) of Democrats say the party should become more like former President Bush. One of the fundamental problems of the Republican party is its dominant fundamentalist faith that Republicans should not do anything to upset its fundie base. It’s sort of laughable that Bush, McCain and Palin are put forward as three different models of candidates and governing philosophies from which Republicans can choose. In the real world, we know that Bush is the embodiment of the complete capture of the GOP by the fundies, that McCain made every effort to court the fundies in the primary (and only got the nomination as a plurality candidate, because the fundies were mostly split between other candidates such as Romney and Huckabee), and that Palin was added to McCain’s ticket because McCain’s effort to appeal to the fundies was proving insufficient to inspire them to vote in November.   Thus, none of them offer any compelling shift from what’s prevailed in the GOP over recent years. One might criticize Rasmussen for such a poor choice of options in the poll. But is their slate of options really any less imaginative than what’s being pondered within the Republican party? Even presenting Palin as a model for moving the party more to the right—it’s hard to imagine that’s even possible, but as Republicans are repeatedly beaten in competitive and somewhat Republican districts and states, it leaves only the most conservative whackjobs representing the most heavily Republican parts of the country—is somewhat coherent. As Markos pointed out yesterday, the darling of the conservative movement can’t run her state according to conservative “principles,” and is lined up with most other Republican governors asking for Congress to pass the recovery bill with its share of aid to state governments. So, while she’s mouthing conservative nostrums, her governance doesn’t offer a coherent contrast to the Democrats that’s consistent with her rhetoric and public positioning.   When the GOP met last week and almost elected as RNC chair a South Carolinian who pines for the good ol’ days of segregation, they showed that they still haven’t faced the reckoning that one would think a party that’s been decimated in two straight elections would face. But it shouldn’t surprise us that a party so oriented toward faith-based governance and belief would ignore the results of the last two elections and believe they need to move further to the right, and lack the imagination to do it in any way that offers a substantive break from the failures that have led to two straight staggering defeats.  

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GOP: If We Do What Isn’t Working, But Do More of It and Do It Harder, THEN We’ll Be Successful!

With Republicans having coalesced around State Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco as their candidate to succeed now-Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in New York’s 20th Congressional District, the Democrats have countered with a lesser-known, but similarly promising candidate; former political operative and venture capitalist Scott Murphy. Murphy, 38, is a graduate of Harvard College (where he served as president of the campus’ progressive newspaper, the Perspective ). He worked as a Democratic operative in Missouri, serving on the staffs of Governors Mel Carnahan and Roger Wilson. He has touted his experience as a fundraiser in Missouri politics, as well as his experience creating jobs in the private sector, as his primary assets in running for office. He has already raised over $200,000 on ActBlue for the race, which should give him a nice boost as he faces off against Tedisco. Tedisco will start with a significant name-recognition advantage (even though, unlike Murphy, Tedisco doesn’t live in the district). This is not lost on party leaders: Saratoga County Democratic chairman Larry Bulman said the party is excited to have Murphy as its candidate despite his lack of name recognition. “We all know that he doesn’t have the recognition that Tedisco has. But he doesn’t have the negatives either. Kirsten Gillibrand was a big unknown and look how that turned out,” Bulman said. Murphy is a Harvard graduate. In addition to working as an executive with Advantage Capital, a private equity investing firm that finances small businesses, he also has served on the staffs of two Missouri governors, and founded three different Internet-related businesses. Murphy has certainly indicated he will be able to raise a substantial amount of money - and tap his own financial resources - so as to expand his name recognition considerably. He should certainly be a competitive candidate in the district. Still, the election will be held very soon, within 30-40 days after Gov. David Paterson sets a date. That isn’t a lot of time for an unknown to get his name out there. In addition to financial resources, Murphy is likely to have better surrogates than Tedisco - while Democrats can send people like Sen. Gillibrand, Vice-President Biden, and former President Clinton to the district, the list of Republican surrogates who would have any sway in upstate New York is fairly limited (Giuliani? Pataki? D’Amato? Sarah Palin?) We’ll see. If this were a full length campaign, Murphy would appear to have a great shot. As it is, he has obvious strengths (young, telegenic, record of job creation, strong fundraising skills). It remains to be seen whether he has the time to make his pitch.

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NY-20: Dems Pick Scott Murphy To Run For Gillibrand’s Seat

Image from eatmedaily.com The ” Chewable Pampers ” commercial on Saturday Night Live last weekend was pretty hilarious, turning brown to green with an eco-friendly edible diaper that comes in three different flavors: “tangy cheddar, spicy lentil, and corn chowder.” Gag me with a biodegradable bamboo spoon. OK, so it was funny–but how farfetched, really? Thanks to our tanking economy, folks are eating crap en masse. Who knew that a pyramid scheme would generate its own food pyramid? Frank Rich took a peek at the ponzi’d-out pantry in his Sunday op-ed in the New York Times : What are Americans still buying? Big Macs, Campbell’s soup, Hershey’s chocolate and Spam — the four food groups of the apocalypse. So, we’re responding to a bankrupt economy by turning to nutritionally bankrupt foods. George Will cited this phenomenon as an example of capitalism at its finest when he was on ABC’s This Week last week. As Jed L noted over on Daily Kos : George Will argues that the rising consumption of cheap fast food during the Bush Recession shows the market works, saying the boost in quarterly profits at McDonald’s is a perfect example of “the market sorting this out.” Oh, really? Given that Agribiz is a major corporate welfare queen, the resurgence of cheap convenience foods hardly constitutes a victory for free market principles. Our schizoid USDA perpetually lectures us to eat more fruits and vegetables even as its agricultural policies ensure that fresh, wholesome, unprocessed produce will continue to be a luxury item for affluent urbanites with the means to shop at farmers markets and Whole Foods. The rest of us can eat shit, to put it bluntly. This warped Western diet is killing us on a scale that our enemies in the Middle East can only dream of. You hear a lot about diabetes and obesity these days, but a diet deficient in nutritious foods is also a major factor in nearly half of all cancers. Our fondness for salty convenience foods also leads to high blood pressure and heart attacks, which is why New York City recently launched a campaign to persuade the food industry to lower sodium levels by 50 percent over the next decade. Such a measure could save 150,000 American lives a year, according to NYC health commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden. In the meantime, we, the people, will continue to foot the bill for this food system that’s poisoning us, just as we are paying for the bungled bailout and an unjust, unnecessary war. Did I say war? Make that wars , plural. Because, in addition to the War on Terror, we’re waging the catastrophically wrongheaded War on Drugs. Our celebrity-besotted media’s too busy tarnishing Olympic swim star Michael Phelps over his golden boy-with-bong photo-op to focus on the faceless fatcats who are doing infinitely more to undermine our way of life than an athlete blowing off steam–or sucking up smoke. Does it really make fiscal–or moral–sense to persecute pot smokers and squander billions to incarcerate marijuana merchants while the robber barons of Wall Street remain free to fleece us all? What would founding father (and hemp grower) Thomas Jefferson make of the fact that we now have more prisoners than farmers? The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the western world. What a collosal waste of human capital, as well as tax payer dollars . Why not fund a program to convert all those renegade hydroponics experts to “aquaponics,” the brilliant marriage of fish farming and greens growing perfected by MacArthur genius Will Allen at Milwaukee’s Growing Power? But wingnuts would rather invest in misguided, unwinnable wars than fund frivolous things like health care, education and infrastructure. You know, porky kinda stuff like healthy school lunches for our kids, say, or high speed rail, or rebates on renewable energy. Anyone remember Dubya dissing Al Gore’s proposed tax credit for solar panels in the 2000 presidential debates? He could barely conceal his disdain, spitting out the word “pho-to-vol- taic ” with the same scorn that “real Americans” Sarah Palin and Rudy Guiliani heaped on community organizers in our last election. Barney Frank called out Senator Jim DeMint and his Republican colleagues on their demented priorities last Sunday on This Week when DeMint started carping about how President Obama’s stimulus plan relied too heavily on spending–as opposed to those conservative cure-alls, tax cuts and a blank check for the military-industrial complex: …And I don’t understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care– that’s wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us over $1 trillion before we’re through — yes, I wish we hadn’t have done that. We’d have been in a lot better shape fiscally… …That’s the problem. The problem is that we look at spending and say, “Oh, don’t spend on highways. Don’t spend on health care. But let’s build Cold War weapons to defeat the Soviet Union when we don’t need them. Let’s have hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars going to the military without a check.” What we have here isn’t really capitalism at all; it’s what Paul Krugman aptly titles ” lemon socialism ,” a form of government in which corporations and their CEOs make out like bandits on the basis of corrupt business practices while the rest of us pick up the tab for their toxic mortgages and toxic food. Our bridges and roads are crumbling, our students are stumbling, our Wall Street wizards and the Beltway brigade are fumbling. But it’s scary muslims and scummy socialists who purportedly pose the greatest threat to America, according to Rush Limbaugh, that ” corpulent oxycontin aficionado ” and climate change naysayer who is famously praying for our new president to fail. In fact, it’s our dependence on fast food and fossil fuels–aided and abetted by the idiotic ideology of Limbaugh and his ilk–that truly jeopardizes America’s future.

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Kerry Trueman: The Bitter Taste of "Lemon Socialism": Let Them Eat Crap

One of the big journalistic lessons of the Iraq War was that “embedded” reporters who get one side of the story are not well suited to give accurate information to the public. Americans now depend on the media for accurate information about the financial crisis. This Sunday’s Meet The Press made something absolutely clear: Journalists who are “embedded” on Wall Street and depend on Wall Street execs for access on a day-to-day basis are ridiculously unqualified to give the public good information about the economic crisis. Indeed, NBC has an Erin Burnett problem. Watch and see for yourself how Burnett consistently serves an an apologist for Wall Street’s worst practices: NBC even (accidentally?) admitted Burnett’s pro-Wall Street bias. Just look at the headline they put up after the show, summarizing her main message: ” Erin Burnett: We must help banks .” Really? At the end of this post, I’m going to ask you to email Erin Burnett ( erin.burnett@nbcuni.com ) and ask her to reform her ways. But first, here are a few of her gems from this Sunday–all of which are also in the video. Burnett got warmed up by talking about how the public is completely confused when we’re worried how bailout recipients are spending our money: It is amazing, when you listen to so much of the commentary out there, that it focuses on bonuses or private jet use or, or also just that they’re not lending. None of these things, really, are, are the real issue here…it isn’t choosing Main Street vs. Wall Street. That is a completely false choice that is being put out there. Her “embed” status was on full display when Claire McCaskill’s comments about Wall Street bonuses came up. Notice how dismissive Burnett is of populism (aka, politicians speaking to the will of the people — that quaint and silly notion): SEN. CLAIRE McCASKILL (D-MO): They don’t get it. These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses. What planet are these people on? (End videotape) MR. GREGORY: Fair question, Erin? MS. BURNETT: I understand the outrage, and you understand the populism. There are, though–well, how should we say this? The taxpayer money is not being used to pay the bonuses. I think people could understand if you work for a company–right? If the three us worked for a company, your guests, and I lost $10 billion but Steve [Forbes] over there, he made a billion dollars. So overall the company actually loses money, but Steve went and did his very darndest for that company and he made money. So should he be paid for his work? That’s essentially what we’re talking about here. And reasonable people could argue about this, but many reasonable people would conclude, yes, he should be paid for that. And I think, David, you’ve raised a fair point, which is maybe it’s the whole use of the word “bonus.” MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm. MS. BURNETT: If you explained to people this is how they are compensated, that might make a difference. But there is also a fundamental misunderstanding. The taxpayer money isn’t being taken and paid out in the form of bonuses. It goes in a, a separate pool, shall we say, a separate account for banks. So maybe people don’t care about that distinction, but it is there. Say it with me: Wow! First of all, I hope you caught the channeling of Sarah Palin in there. Knowing that Wall Street execs are doing their “darndest” to make money shines a whole new light on things, doesn’t it? Second, isn’t it good to know that you’re, how should I say this, stupid? You thought an executive’s “bonus” was a bonus! Silly member of the public. If only you understood. Third, can I borrow ten bucks? Thanks. “Hey, everyone, watch me make a paper airplane with this ten bucks, and…there it goes away!” What? No, I didn’t just throw away your ten bucks. That came from a “separate pool.” Who are you anyway? Oh, a member of the public. That explains it. You just don’t, how should I say it, understand anything. Can I borrow another ten bucks? I’ve worked with a lot of reporters, and most of them are very nice people. I’m sure Burnett is pleasant as well. But what she’s doing here professionally is a real problem, and it’s NBC’s problem at the end of the day. The public simply can’t afford to have economic news given to us by Wall Street “embeds.” We need Burnett to listen to her Wall Street sources, be skeptical of them, ask them very tough and sometimes uncomfortable questions, and be willing to report negatively on them when they abuse the public trust. If they never talk to her again, so be it. Donald Rumsfeld won’t talk to some reporters either — and where is he today? Disgraced in history. Please email Erin Burnett today and let her know we need responsible reporting: erin.burnett@nbcuni.com (It’s also worth noting that the guests Meet The Press invited on to discuss the economic crisis were Erin Burnett, Steve Forbes, and Moody’s Mark Zandi — all Wall Street voices. There was no progressive voice like Paul Krugman there to stick up for the public. If you want more balance on Meet The Press roundtables, take a moment to give them feedback here. )

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Adam Green: NBC Has An Erin Burnett Problem

In the wake of this week’s House vote on the Obama economic recovery package, we learn that our brave new post-partisan world, as mcjoan wrote this afternoon , sure looks awfully similar to the old bitterly partisan world we’ve always lived in. And, as ever, we have the Republican Party to thank for this. Let’s not pretend that the House bill, which passed 244-188 with precisely zero Republican votes, was exactly a shining moment for the party (although the fact that it has passed at all is certainly something of a victory for the administration). House Republicans see this as their own victory, and for the short term, they may be right. They’ve managed to exact major concessions from the administration and House leadership on the $819 billion stimulus package, including the excision of family planning, of funding for public works projects on the National Mall, and the addition of major tax cuts for businesses…and proceeded to vote unanimously against the package anyway. Furthermore, they managed to turn the stimulus into a political wedge issue, even after winning on the oh-so-sacred tax cuts for big business (apparently the only issue of any consequence to today’s Republican Party). It’s an impressive, if cynical, example of political gamesmanship. It does not , however, have to be yet another case of the Democratic Charlie Brown trying once again to kick Lucy’s football. In fact, there’s no reason the administration and party leadership can’t use the stimulus vote as an opportunity . House Republicans are laughing their tails off, and it’s no surprise; the Republicans trumpeted to every reporter within range the need for “bipartisanship”, but when the administration and Democratic leadership tried to negotiate in good faith – and made many of the concessions demanded by Republicans – the GOP threw it directly back in the Democrats’ faces. This should not have come as a major surprise. As Paul Krugman wrote , House Republicans have no concept of things like “compromise” and “consensus”; even when Democrats enjoy an 89-seat majority, it’s still the Republican way or bust. That’s how they define “bipartisanship”.   Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they’ll demand 100%. Then they’ll start the thing about how you can’t cut taxes on people who don’t pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they’ll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid — which would undermine that part of the plan, too. When push came to shove, the same Republicans who demanded bipartisanship turned the true partisans. President Obama and Democratic leadership went well out of their way to bring Republicans into the fold on the stimulus, only to learn that the Republicans don’t know the meaning of compromise. Being bipartisan –or post-partisan – only works if the other guys are willing to play along. Republicans seem intent on defining “bipartisanship” as, “getting everything we want even though we’re in the minority”. And if that’s the definition of bipartisanship, fine then. Forget about bipartisanship. It’s not as though Democrats are the ones who need it.   Let’s be clear; American voters soundly rejected Republican governance in 2006 and 2008. If bipartisanship means governing like a Republican, then we don’t want it, the Democratic Party doesn’t want it, and most importantly, America doesn’t want it. The country has spoken clearly on the relative merits of Democratic and Republican governance; if the choice truly is binary, we win. Now, Democrats have shown their willingness to make serious concessions in the spirit of cooperation. Obama and the House Democrats have indicated their willingness to negotiate in good faith. If House Republicans won’t respond in kind, then that’s their hangup. We don’t have to make any concessions to Republicans from now on. Our House majority is sufficiently large – 256-177, pending the nomination of Hilda Solis and the special election to replace Kirsten Gillibrand – that Democrats can essentially pass what they want without Republican support. We don’t need to win Republican votes with this kind of majority, at least not in the House. All the House leadership needs to do to pass your legislation is win a few Blue Dogs, and it’s not even necessary to win all of them. The majority is big enough that you can live not only without Republican support, but without 20-30 Blue Dogs on any individual vote. Granted, legislation may subsequently be watered down so as to get through the Senate, but that’s going to happen fairly routinely in any case. Democratic leadership has treated House Republicans with a level of consideration and respect that they’ve clearly indicated they don’t deserve. Very well, then; they shouldn’t get it from now on. We’ll win without them, we’ll pass what we want to pass, and they can do with that what they will. Republican conduct on the stimulus wouldn’t be so offensive if it were purely ideological, but what is most galling about the House vote is that House Republicans treated the stimulus vote like a political game. This vote was about the Republicans wringing every last tax cut they could out of the administration…and still getting to use the vote as a political football against the new President and the Speaker. The new RNC chairman, Michael Steele, thinks it’s all very hilarious : Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele moved swiftly into the role of GOP partisan-in-chief Saturday, appearing at a House Republican retreat to praise members for their unanimous vote against the Democratic stimulus package this week. Steele, who unseated incumbent RNC Chair Mike Duncan in a heated election Friday, jokingly told members that “we’re living in an era of bipartisanship.” But, he continued, Republicans sent a message with their staunch opposition to the White House-backed stimulus plan. The House Republican whip, Eric Cantor, has the gall to continue screaming “bipartisanship” immediately after he personally defecated all over the spirit of bipartisanship: “The onus is on Speaker Pelosi. She needs to meet with us. She needs to open her doors. We need to begin to work truly in a bipartisan fashion,” he said. “We’re trying to work with the White House. President Obama said he has no pride of authorship, so we want to go forward and make sure that we get a stimulus bill that works.” Republican Pete Hoekstra, putting the “twit” in “Twitter” , had by far the most amazing interpretation yet seen of the House vote: Interesting! The bi partisan vote on stimulus was no. It wasn’t the winning vote but the only vote that received both R and D votes. The NRCC, of course, has wasted no time in targeting Democrats on the stimulus package; in their infinite wisdom, they went after at least one Democrat, Bobby Bright, who wound up voting against the stimulus. This could be interpreted as a typical NRCC screwup, but my own opinion is that Republicans don’t really care how he or anyone else voted. For House Republicans, this was solely a political issue they could use to make hay in the future against the Big Spending Democrats. Now, some Republicans are actually serious about the recovery package. Republicans who actually have to govern amid this disastrous Bush-led economy, Republicans who prioritize economic recovery over gaining House seats, actually support the stimulus. This includes the de facto leader of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin: Their state treasuries drained by the financial crisis, governors would welcome the money from Capitol Hill, where GOP lawmakers are more skeptical of Obama’s spending priorities. The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, planned to meet in Washington this weekend with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other senators to press for her state’s share of the package. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist worked the phones last week with members of his state’s congressional delegation, including House Republicans. Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, the Republican vice chairman of the National Governors Association, planned to be in Washington on Monday to urge the Senate to approve the plan. For those who aren’t playing political games, the stimulus package actually brings both archconservative and moderate Republican leaders, like Sarah Palin and Charlie Crist, together with Democratic leadership. That sounds pretty gosh darned bipartisan to me, also. But House Republicans, knowing the bill would pass the House anyway, had nothing to lose by prioritizing politics over recovery. Now, this should not merely be a teaching moment, but an opportunity, for Obama and House leadership. This will not be the last piece of critical legislation over the next four years, and it will not be the last time the Republicans cry wolf on bipartisanship. From now on, not only should Eric Cantor be ignored every time he mentions the “B” word, but the administration and their allies on Capitol Hill should take every opportunity to beat the Republicans over the head with this stimulus vote. Every time the Republicans demand any kind of concessions in a House bill over the next two years, Democratic leadership should take the opportunity to point out the stunningly cavalier and cynical manner in which they handled the stimulus vote. Every time the Republicans protest that Obama is ignoring them, the President should take the opportunity to remind one and all that it was he who extended an olive branch to the Republican Party, and it was Eric Cantor who broke it over his knee. The Seminal’s Jason Rosenbaum opines : I don’t think Obama had to give up so much to get this result, but he’s in a perfect position to make the case that Republicans actually don’t want America to move forward, that they actually don’t want to get us out of this recession, that they have no new ideas and they are sitting there blocking the road, out of touch and uninspired. And what’s more, if Obama and his strategists learn the right lessons from this fight, they may well be carrying a golden key that will unlock other major pieces of legislation like economic recovery part II (this bill is likely too small to do the whole job), health care, or the Employee Free Choice Act. Next time a big fight comes up, Obama has a perfect reason to not compromise - he did it last time and got nothing from it. I’m sure the post-partisan rhetoric will continue. Let’s hope going forward, it stays in the meaningless camp. I don’t care how many lunches he has with the opposition. Or how much he talks about compromise. I just hope next time, he sticks to his guns, or at the very least, doesn’t give up anything without getting the votes in return. I couldn’t agree more. It’s all well and good that House Republicans aren’t actually ready or inclined to work in a bipartisan fashion. Let’s hope that our Democratic leadership has taken this lesson to heart, and that they will respond in kind in the future.

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Economic Recovery And The "B" Word

Of course she does . Their state treasuries drained by the financial crisis, governors would welcome the money from Capitol Hill, where GOP lawmakers are more skeptical of Obama’s spending priorities. The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, planned to meet in Washington this weekend with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other senators to press for her state’s share of the package. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist worked the phones last week with members of his state’s congressional delegation, including House Republicans. Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, the Republican vice chairman of the National Governors Association, planned to be in Washington on Monday to urge the Senate to approve the plan. “As the executive of a state experiencing budget challenges, Gov. Douglas has a different perspective on the situation than congressional Republicans,” said Douglas’ deputy chief of staff, Dennise Casey. Forced to actually govern rather than grandstand on failed ideological tenets, Republican governors are headed to DC to beg for their share of the bailout money. That part may not be so surprising, but that Sarah Palin is among them is pretty hilarious. It complicates matters for the anti-stimulus ideologues who see starbursts in the presence of Palin. Then again, Palin had no trouble lying about her support for the Bridge to Nowhere. Nothing will stop her from trying to rewrite history three years from now.

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Palin supports stimulus

RNC Chairman Michael Steele took to the Sunday talk show circuit for the first time since he was elected to the post. And while he pledged to help restore the Republican Party to a more powerful perch, he outlined a game plan that seemed reminiscent of years past. Pressed by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, Steele diagnosed the GOP ills as a problem of the messenger but not the message — he even suggested that the party should look back to New Gingrich’s Contract With America for inspiration. “We failed to lead,” said the former Lt. Maryland Governor. “The principles we espoused [in 1994] are still true and good today and that’s not what people moved away from us for. They moved away from us because we behaved badly. We came to Washington and we became like the people we were sent here to replace. And they replaced us.” That mindset extended itself throughout the conversation on policy and politics, where Steele did little to distance himself from the issues that defined the GOP’s poor showing in recent elections. He put forward Gov. Sarah Palin’s name — among others — as the future of Republican leadership. And on immigration, he pledged “no change in the position on the party…” “The GOP position is secure our borders first,” he added. “Let us know and let us make sure the American people know that we’ve taken care of the important business of dealing with the illegal immigration into this country.” Steele also restated his support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and applauded the united GOP front to the stimulus bill currently making its way through Congress. He brushed off concerns that the party would look like obstructionists if not one member supported the president’s plan. “The Republican Congress did a great job in drawing the line,” he said. “I hope the Senate will follow.” There were aspects of the program where Steele discussed the need to forge a different path for the GOP. He talked openly about his work with the centrist Republican Leadership Council, and — more broadly — about the need to recruit moderates back into the party tent. At one point, he highlighted poverty and education reform as two issues that could be new areas of focus for the party. But mainly the ten minutes Steele spent on the show were aimed at propping up the Republican brand as it currently exists — the byproduct of the race he just ran, in which he largely played down his more moderate roots in favor of positioning himself as a conservative standard-bearer. “For those Democrats who want to put up road blocks, the name calling and the obfuscation,” Steele said early on, “I don’t have time for it.”

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Steele: GOP Does Not Have A Message Problem