Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) blasts the Beltway Culture (VIDEO)

Wow.



Traffic? Seriously, dude? Have you been to L.A.??

Also, as a Native D.C.er, as in born and raised in D.C., I have to admit, I've ALWAYS called it a Subway. "Hey, Malcolm...what's the Metro?" "Well, that's our Subway System." I don't know what else you'd call it.

President Obama's super-quick statement at the Washington Auto Show (VIDEO)

Okay, now a D.C. Court has upheld HCR. You know what that means?

...absolutely nothing.

Still goin' to the Supreme Court, where Anthony Kennedy (and probably Anthony Kennedy alone will decide its fate).

Still the decision by Gladys Kessler was welcome news.

Why I still have very mixed-to-bad feelings about Michelle Rhee.

For every article about Michelle Rhee that I save in Evernote that's positive, there's at least one that's negative. In my gut, for me personally, I think she's a little too fascinated with herself.  (A chronic case of Ed Schultz disease, and in this case it's not a TV Show that's gone to her head, but a whole movie).

I think one of the points in this Slate piece summarized this doubt nicely:

The fact that Rhee is a hard-working Ivy League graduate makes the elite press respect her as one of their own. And Rhee's flair for the dramatic makes her irresistible. In his well-written and highly favorable biography, The Bee Eater, Richard Whitmire recounts that as a teacher in Baltimore, Rhee grabbed the attention of her students one day when she swatted a bee flying around the classroom and promptly swallowed it. As a chancellor, Rhee once told a film crew, "I'm going to fire somebody in a little while. Do you want to see that?"

If she's not careful (and Michelle Rhee often isn't), she can come off as..."Hey, if we just treat these brown kids rougher, they'll do better with less money!"

Why?  Because you say so?

I don't think Teacher's Unions are to blame for what's happening in Education.  I think it boils down to what usually ails progress in America, our fellow Americans.

We still keep falling for this bull@#$% about a free lunch.  We demand first class Government, with Third World Tax Rates.  We want the best, as long as we don't have to pay for it...ever.  We want to do things on the cheap, and are somehow shocked (shocked I tell you) that the kiddies grades and test scores are suffering.

Only we are that myopic, and Michelle Rhee didn't help.

At the same time, I think that Michelle Rhee's right about the problems we face.  I do think its too hard to fire problem Teachers.  I personally don't have problem with merit-based pay, but if we're going to do that, we really need to start paying Teachers like Doctors or Lawyers (Public Universities do it at the collegiate level).  And the notion of a Teacher spending even a fraction of their own meager pay to cover for supplies or books is obscene.

Still, I thought this paragraph really encapsulated my doubts about her, or at the very least, the rhetoric that blasts Teacher's Unions:

Most education researchers, though, recognize that Rhee's simple vision of heroic teachers saving American education is a fantasy, and that her dramatic, often authoritarian, style is ill-suited for education. If the ability to fire bad teachers and pay great teachers more were the key missing ingredient in education reform, why haven't charter schools, 88% of which are nonunionized and have that flexibility, lit the education world on fire? Why did the nation's most comprehensive study of charter schools, conducted by Stanford University researchers and sponsored by pro-charter foundations, conclude that charters outperformed regular public schools only 17 percent of the time, and actually did significantly worse 37 percent of the time? Why don't Southern states, which have weak teachers' unions, or none at all, outperform other parts of the country?

The Daily Show on my hometown of Washington, D.C. (VIDEO)

For the record, the in-jokes about my Hometown (especially K Street S.E.) are 100% funny and unfortunately 100% accurate.

Except for the Metro. I'm sorry, that's excellent. Suck on it, New York City!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - Extreme Makeover DC Edition
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

President Obama's Backyard Discussion on Women and the Economy (IVDEO)

President Obama holds a discussion on ensuring economic stability and opportunity for women in the backyard of the Foss family in Seattle, WA. October 21, 2010.



Highlighting a portion of his talk, that was aimed right at the Tea Party:

I think people have a legitimate concern, a legitimate worry, as to what are we doing to start -- now that we’re out of the immediate crisis but we’re only experiencing sluggish job growth at this point and sluggish economic growth -- how do we get back to a point where we’re living within our means? That’s an entirely legitimate concern. It’s a concern that I have. And we’re going to have to have a serious debate over the next several years about how to do it.

The problem I have with the argument the way it’s playing out right now in the country is that there’s a suggestion on the other side that somehow the problem with our debt and our deficits all arose magically the minute I took office, whereas in fact when I arrived at the White House I was inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit. We had taken record surpluses last time there was a Democratic President, and over the course of a decade moved to record deficits.

The big problems we have in terms of debt and deficits have to do with structural gaps between the amount of money we’re taking in and the amount of money we’re spending. And if we’re going to get serious about the deficit, then we’re going to have to look at everything: entitlements, defense spending, revenues. How do all those things fit together so that we can have a sustainable budget that invests in the things that we absolutely need for our long-term future, and we stop funding some things that are nice to have but we can’t afford.

And that’s going to be a tough conversation -- which is -- it’s interesting now when you listen to the Republicans talk about out-of-control government spending, and then you ask them, well, what would you cut, and there’s this deafening silence. And they’ll say things like, well, we’ll roll back health care -- except it turns out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the health care bill is actually going to reduce our deficit by over a trillion dollars over the next 20 years. So that would add to the deficit.

Then they’ll say, well, we’ll pull back the unused portion of the stimulus. Well, first of all, that’s -- most of it has already been spent and a big chunk of what hasn’t been spent are actually tax cuts, which they say they’re for.

And then they’ll say, well, we’ll roll back spending back to 2008 levels, without being clear that that would mean, for example, a 20 percent cut in education spending.

So one of the things that I think as voters everybody here should be doing is constantly asking people, when you say you want to get the budget under control, what exactly do you mean? What exactly are you going to do? And if they can’t answer the question then it means they’re not serious about it.

Albert Pujols turns out to be a Beckhead. Go Cubs!

I can tell this is going to be an awful morning.

First, Economic Growth was revised downward from 2.2% to 1.6%, feeding the Austerity Caucus, but as Mathematician Dad reminded me that the German's 2.2% is the best they have done in decades. Still, it's going to feed the Pain Caucus, and cause the Congress to do even less when they come back to actually address the Economy.

Then, I learned that St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony LaRussa and Cardinals Superstar Albert Pujols are going to attend Glenn Beck's Goldline-sponsored "reclaiming" of the Civil Rights Movement on Saturday. Now, I'm not a Cards fan (actually, I'm a long-suffering Orioles fan), and the fact that LaRussa is a Right-wing douchebag is not a total surprise. The fact that Albert Pujols is attending shocks me.

Now, both LaRussa and Pujols are using the fact that the Beckocalypse is "non-political" to justify their attendance. Bull@#$%! If they don't know, they don't want to know. They're Beckheads, plain and simple. Go Cubs.

I hope Albert realizes that this is going to damage his brand with African-Americans for a long time, probably for good. What I want to know is what his Latino fans are going to do with this. After all, he's siding with the people who hate Latinos almost as much as they hate gays, blacks and everyone who's not white and Christian. I'd love to be surprised, but I'm not optimistic.

The Teabaggers "avoid Black people" guide to Washington, D.C. Part 2 (VIDEO)

Rachel Maddow on the racist Metro Guide being handed out ot the TeaBaggers coming to Glenn Beck's crapfest on August 28th. (And if you listen carefully, there's now a safety issue in that Democratic Lawmaker's home addresses have been listed.)

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

Let's think about this Glenn Beck is claiming to be the ideological heirs to Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, but at the same time...it seems that the ideological heirs want to avoid Black people at all costs.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

The Teabaggers "avoid Black people" guide to Washington, D.C.

Again, my two regular readers should know by now how I feel about the Huffington Post, and how I grit my teeth when I forward along a story from them.  But this one deserves forwarding.

But there's another thing you should know about me, I'm an actual native D.Cer. Yup, born at Georgetown University Hospital (D.C.), raised in College Park and Seabrook, Maryland. I love my hometown...especially now that the Teabaggers don't:

A blogger at Maine Refounders has taken it upon himself to offer repost a DC visitors guide to anyone coming to the Rally For Glenn Beck's Material Wealth, scheduled for August 28th. So, if you want some not-half bad restaurant recommendations or are interested in learning how you can avoid Nancy Pelosi's house, get thee hence. That said, I find this take on the DC Metro system to be sort of comical:

If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.

Let's be honest, this is a "avoid the Black People guide to the D.C. Subway."

You were saying Half-Governor Palin?

I love the French...

Yes, that was French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni going to Ben's Chili Bowl today.

Word up.

WSJ: Teabaggers complain about Metro...

The Teabaggers complained...apparently bitterly at the Government run Metro System in D.C.

But I love the Murdoch Street Journal's opening paragraphs on this:

Protesters who attended Saturday’s Tea Party rally in Washington found a new reason to be upset: Apparently they are unhappy with the level of service provided by the subway system.

Rep. Kevin Brady asked for an explanation of why the government-run subway system didn’t, in his view, adequately prepare for this past weekend’s rally to protest government spending and government services.

Seriously.

The Press blew it...

Sorry, but it's striking me that CNN blew this story. They were the first go on the air with reports of "shots fired" at a Boat near a restricted zone in the Potomac, without checking any Coast Guard sources to see just what the hell happened.

In other words, CNN was so hot to make sure they were first with the story, they didn't check to see if they had a story...and thus...wound up creating a story where there wasn't one.

Now, instead of admitting that this was a Journalism f-up, the Journalists of the world are locking in step behind their colleagues. They're saying that the Coast Guard should have shown greater awareness.

Josh:

CNN's Kyra Philips says that CNN went up with the story as breaking news without confirming what was happening with the Coast Guard. That looks sort of iffy in retrospect. But when you think about it, if reporters hear Coast Guard officials talking on an emergency frequency about firing on a suspicious vessel in the Potomac on the anniversary of 9/11, I think there'd be a pretty decent rationale for sounding the alarm.

Dana Milbank trying to have it both ways:

On the eighth anniversary of the terrorist strikes, the incident served as an unwelcome reminder of two facts of life in the capital: Homeland-security authorities continue to bear an occasional, unnerving likeness to Keystone Kops; and the cable-news-driven, minute-by-minute news cycle has a unique ability to sow mass confusion and misinformation.

But what about CNN??

Salon: D.C. Nepotism

I'm not a Glenn Greenwald fan, but this was funny.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment. They can interview Lisa Murkowski, Evan Bayh, Jeb Bush, Bob Casey, Mark Pryor, Jay Rockefeller, Dan Lipinksi, and Harold Ford, Jr. about personal responsibility and the virtues of self-sufficiency. Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz can provide moving commentary on how America is so special because all that matters is merit, not who you know or where you come from.