Surprise Surprise (VIDEO)

The Fireside Chat for April 9th, 2011 (VIDEO)

The President discusses the importance of the bipartisan budget agreement that represents both a significant investment in the United States' future - and the largest annual spending cut in our history.

President Obama's Statement on the Budget Agreement (VIDEO)

President Obama addresses the bipartisan agreement on the national budget from the Blue Room of the White House.

Rachel Maddow sez "People who take Paul Ryan seriously, shouldn't be taken seriously..." (VIDEO)

Seriously, stop with the Smoochy-Smoochy.

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Yeah, sure. She blew it on the GITMO story, but she's right here.

From our "That Was Fast" Department...George Allen strikes again...

Via Think Progress. Ugh.

Former Sen. George Allen (R-VA), who is running again for Senate in 2012, was called out in Twitter on Tuesday night for repeatedly questioning NBC4 anchor-reporter Craig Melvin about his nonexistent sports career. The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman reported on Allen’s apparent stereotyping of Melvin:

NBC 4’s reporter-anchor Craig Melvin is a tall African-American. Which apparently led to this exchange with former Sen. George Allen, according to Melvin’s Twitter account Tuesday night: “For the 2nd time in 5 months, fmr. gov. and sen candidate George Allen asks me,”what position did you play?” I did not a play a sport.”

The President's Town Hall Meeting on Energy and the possible Shutdown from Fairless Hills, PA (VIDEO)

Haven't gotten one of these in a while...

Randi Rhodes' Interview with Rick Ungar of Forbes Magazine... (AUDIO)

Rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers:



To see some of Rick's material, click here.

I can't take Andrew Sullivan (@dailydish) seriously anymore...on the deficit or anything else.

It's like I said before. Andrew Sullivan can never be trusted on the debt.  In this matter, he is an intellectual fraud.  He will only tolerate one opinion (his own), and no others.  So in this matter I have no use for him.

But because the toxin of that idea is spreading to the rest of his ideas, I'm starting to question if he's someone worth reading at all.

After reading how Democrats were already ripping into Ryan's Budget Plan, Andrew wrote this:

We have a serious and flawed plan to get the debt under control - and the Democrats' immediate response is to go into total opposition. The president has been more muted in his response. But the onus is on him now to provide a plan that matches the impact on the budget that Ryans' does, with different emphases.

So where is that plan? Or does the president have none?

I'm sorry, but Ryan's plan projects 2.8% Unemployement in 2021. If you take a Budget Plan with a figure like that seriously, I'm sorry, but you can't be taken seriously.

Then again, if Andrew had spent a little more time looking on the Internets, he would have found where the President's plan was...with Kent Conrad, you know...the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and the place where most likely, any long term, deficit reducing Budget Deal would originate:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad is holding back the Senate Democrats’ budget plan to give a bipartisan group of senators more time to strike a deal on a long-term deficit-reduction proposal.

Conrad (D-N.D.) is one of the “Gang of Six” negotiators working on a budget deal based on the recommendations of President Obama’s debt commission. The group hopes to put the debt commission’s proposals into legislation that could win a vote from Congress.

If the group fails to reach a deal, Conrad said he might include portions of its work in his budget proposal.

“I’ve prepared several different budget resolutions,” Conrad said. “I’m trying to give the Group of Six effort every chance.”

Conrad said he has not made a final decision on whether to use the Senate Democratic budget proposal to advance the recommendations of the fiscal commission.

Conrad made clear on Tuesday, however, that he would not advance Medicare overhaul such as that proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) or former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Alice Rivlin, a former Democratic White House budget director.

I'm really getting tired of Sullivan's bullshit deficit scolding.  I'm also tired of his tendency to leap before he's looked.  (Betcha wish you had this one back...or maybe you don't).

On Deficits, he doesn't get to tell me what level of pain is acceptable. He hasn't been in this country long enough to wag his finger about deficits at any citizen.  More to the point, the people he's supported in the past are the ones who spent us into this position.

For him to get high and mighty on the spending is as vile, and as typical and anything any other Republican has coughed up the last ten years.

Of course, it's more important to me that Goolsebee is a Mac User...

Let's not play games. This Tax Cut Calculator is an important thing to learn about, but seeing that 15-inch MacBook Pro is somehow reassuring.

If you don't mention Congress in your pushback of the President, @Maddow, then you are lying to us

Per yesterday:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you have piece about Obama's retreat on GITMO, you are of course free to blast the President.  That is your right.

However, if you don't mention Congress's responsibility in this, you are lying to us, and wasting our time.

Anybody who slams the President over GITMO, and leaves out Congress, isn't worth your time. That includes you, Keith

It's a pity, because Keith did make an attempt at fairness by slamming New York, but he forgot to mention Congress's complicity in this decision, and that's a big deal.



It's not like Keith is under a Network's time constraints. He could have put it in there. It's not like he had a Producer saying "Hey, we have to trim five seconds off Worst Persons". So, the only excuses for Keith were that either he didn't want it in there, or he forgot.

Either way, bad call.

A sentence you're going to LOVE reading if you support Unions...

You know there's a Judicial Election in Wisconsin for the State Supreme Court, right?

You know that one of Scott Walker's buddies has been running (and has been in biiig trouble recently for some comments he made).

So what sentence would you like to read if you're hoping for Walker to get his @#$ kicked today?

Howzabout?:

"We're expecting the equivalent of a regular presidential election," Horvath said in regards to the Madison polling place. "Seventy-five to eighty percent is what we are guessing."

(Political) Eaaaaaarrrrrrthhquake.

The President's surprise appearance at today's WH Press Briefing (VIDEO)

From Talking Points Memo:

President Obama strongly scolded congressional Republicans on their failure so far to reach a budget compromise that would avert a government shutdown by the end of the week, instructing them to start acting like "grown-ups" and to stop playing political games.

"We don't have time for games," he told reporters during a rare appearance in the White House briefing room. "We don't have time to score political points."

Obama, who met with Republican and Democratic leaders at the White House Tuesday, said he would make himself available to meet again Wednesday and Thursday if lawmakers cannot come to some consensus today. He also criticized Republicans for saying they don't agree to the $33 billion in cuts that Democrats have agreed to and for including extraneous politically motivated policy riders.

"What we can't do is have a my way or the highway approach to this problem," he said. "If we start applying that approach, that we can't get 110 percent of everything we want, than we're not going to get anything done this year."

"And I said, No..." (VIDEO)

The basic play is the Republicans and Democrats have hashed out a figure of around $33 Billion in cuts. It would be the largest single cut of the Federal Budget in U.S. History, even if we're talking 1-4% of the total budget.

The problem isn't the figure. The problem is three-fold.

One, the Democrats want that number to be at least somewhat temporary, i.e. when they win Congress next time, they don't want to have to pas another law in order to get those cuts restored. Boehner is saying no.

Two, I'm pretty sure Boehner is okay with the $33 Billion number, but his caucus isn't...particularly the incoming Tea-Party Freshmen. They're demanding all of their cuts from H.R. 1, things that the Senate is never going to pass.

Three, Boehner is demanding all his noxious, toxic riders, like the NPR and Planned Parenthood defunding. Democrats are balking at that.

In the end, there is no resolution in sight to any of these problems. The House seems fixed on its solutions, seeming to forget that identical bills must pass the GOP-led House and the Democratic-led Senate. A compromise MUST be in the offing for anything to pass. (That means, we're not going to get everything we want either, fellow Libruls.) But the House GOP is in no mood to compromise, and may actually want a Shutdown. Boehner is cornered. He knows what damage a shutdown will do to both parties (but his in particular). Still, if he doesn't go to balls-to-the-wall to show he fought the White House every step of the way, he'll be ousted as Speaker...and Lord knows, his being Speaker is the most important thing right now, isn't it?

So the GOP's solution? Pass another Continuing Resolution, with 12 Billion in cuts (half a trillion annualized).

Actually, it's not a solution, its a way for the GOP to say "look, we didn't shut down the Government". It's a similiar trick to the one they pulled in 1995.

Apparently, what happened in this video is happened this morning, with Barack Obama playing the role of Jed Bartlett.

He said, no.



Remember, that episode aired about eight years ago.

A little perspective on GITMO always helps...as Democrats allow us to cower in fear in the face of Terrorism

Well, we got the announcement that shocked absolutely no one:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four co-defendants accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will be prosecuted in a military commission, a decision that reverses the Obama administration’s long-held goal of bringing the men to trial in federal court as part of its overall strategy of closing the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the decision during an afternoon news conference. He blamed barriers thrown up by Congress for the administration’s abandonment of one of its signature goals.

Holder called Congress’s intervention “unwise and unwarranted” and said he continues to believe that the case could have been tried in federal court in Manhattan or, as an alternative he proposed, in upstate New York. He said the Obama administration would continue to work for repeal of the restrictions Congress imposed and would prosecute other terrorism cases in federal courts.

But he said he decided that prosecution should go ahead in a military tribunal because the restrictions were unlikely to be repealed any time soon and because the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks have already waited too long for justice, which he said is “long overdue.”

You thought I was talking something else, weren't you?

Reverses. Really?

The Post makes it sound like the Administration up and changed its mind. Steve Benen speaks about what really happened:

The Attorney General "changed his mind" after Congress "imposed a series of restrictions"? That's a bit like saying I changed my mind about getting up after I was tied to my chair.

Holder told reporters this afternoon that his original decision was still the right one, but blamed Congress for "tying our hands."

He happens to be right. Even today, Holder wants to do the right thing, and so does President Obama. And yet, Gitmo is open today, and KSM will be subjected to a military commission in the near future, not because of an administration that backed down in the face of far-right whining, but because congressional Republicans orchestrated a massive, choreographed freak-out, and scared the bejesus out of congressional Democrats. Together, they limited the White House's options to, in effect, not having any choice at all.

There's plenty of room for criticism of the administration, but those slamming Obama for "breaking his word" on this are blaming the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And Andrew Sullivan (gasp!):

The decision to try KSM in a military tribunal is as sad as keeping Gitmo open. He has, of course, been hemmed in by an irrational, panicked Congress. Maybe a civil trial would be impossible because of the torture inflicted on KSM by the last administration.

Of course, Chuck Schumer disappointed the hell out of me:

Chuck Schumer, New York’s senior Democratic senator, expressed relief that the trial would not take place in his home state. He said the move to put the 9/11 plotter through a military commission at Guantanamo Bay will allow him to get the “ultimate penalty,” and he said the decision is the “final nail in the coffin” of the “wrong-headed idea” to try Mohammed in New York.

“I have always said that the perpetrators of this horrible crime should get the ultimate penalty, and I believe this proposal by the administration can make that happen,” Schumer said in a statement.

Granted, Chuck is just out there representing his State, but I'll never call him a statesman. He's pandering to the baseless fears of New Yorkers. We have prosecuted Terrorists in this country, and jailed them int his country. 9/11 is no different.

Let me say that again: 9/11 is no different.

We could handle it then, we can handle it now.

Instead of standing up to Terrorism, like we imagine we do, we've caved to it, and a lot of Senators (like Charles Schumer) have enabled that cave.