The Fireside chat for January 31, 2009

Time to get off the stick, and to finish the Financial Recovery Act. Oh, and Wall Street, stop with the bonuses, already!

Proud to be an American...

Arkansas...

A resolution congratulating Barack Obama on his election as president was rejected by a committee of the Arkansas House of Representatives after lawmakers objected to language in the measure that referred to the United States as “a nation founded by slave owners.”

TPM: Well, there's your problem right there...

It began with a 17-2 vote. The Senate Judiciary committee voted "controversial" Attorney General Appointee, Eric Holder, out of said committee and onto the full Senate where he's expected to be confirmed. My bet is that, despite the hemming and hawing of the Senate Republicans, no one wanted to be on the wrong side of history and vote against the first black Attorney General in U.S. History.

And for the record, the two Senators who were more than comfortable being on the wrong side of history (and being labeled as racists by me, personally) were: John Cornyn of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

To my Father, who is planning on moving to Texas (voluntarily), all I can say is way to go. Your Senator at work!

Then one local paper stepped up with this tasty nugget of news:

President Obama's choice to run the Justice Department has assured senior Republican senators that he won't prosecute intelligence officers or political appointees who were involved in the Bush administration's policy of "enhanced interrogations."

Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, Missouri Republican and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.'s nomination for attorney general because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama's Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

Kit Bond...one of the original, and greatest of the Reagan Airheads.

All of the sudden, everyone is running with that quote: TPM, Huffington Post (well, HuffPo did cover the story at some point, and fortunately changed it)…

…finally, Holder's aides called bull!@$%.

"Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted," the aide said via e-mail. "He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions."

Even Judicary Chairman Pat Leahy of Vertmont cracked back on the supposition that the Nation's Top Cop would fail to prosecute crimes where he saw them.

"It would be completely wrong if a senator said, 'I'll vote for you if you promise to withhold prosecution of a crime'," Leahy told me. "No senator would make a request like that. It'd be improper."

In fact, in a written response to a question by Torture defender John Kyl of Arizona, Holder said:

Prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law. But where it is clear that a government agent has acted in "reasonable and good-faith reliance on Justice Department legal opinions" authoritatively permitting his conduct, I would find it difficult to justify commencing a full-blown criminal investigation, let alone a prosecution.

Not comforting, but acceptable...provided no one gets in the way of Congress investigating this mess.

So where did this story come from?

Well, all one has to do is look at the original source of the Kit Bond quote.

The Washington Times, the Fox News of Newspapers.

There's your problem right there.

Times of London: Reporting, Optional.

Is the British Press any better than the American Press when it comes to abject laziness??

Here's the headline: "Freed Guantánamo prisoners taunt US as closure plan falls apart"

Falls apart...

Falls apart???

So...there's a quote in this piece saying conclusively that the President has abandoned his plans to close GITMO?

Oh, there's not?

So what the @$%@#$ are you talking about??

There's plenty of stuff (stuff not being the same thing as quotes mind you) about EU Ministers saying they won't take back GITMO Prisoners:

At a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels yesterday, the idea of taking in about 60 Guantánamo inmates cleared for release received a far from enthusiastic response, with some members, including Britain, appearing to reject the prospect.

But, looking at other papers you get a slightly different response...and by different, by which I mean completely the opposite:

"This is an American problem and they have to solve it but we'll be ready to help if necessary … I think the answer of the EU will be yes," Javier Solana said before the gathering of European foreign ministers, when asked whether the EU could take some former Guantánamo prisoners.

In case the Times of London isn't familiar with the concept, that was a quote...

Granted, there is some resistance to the proposal. The Guardian goes as far as to say that the issue threatens to split the E.U., but...

Those harbouring doubts – including Germany, Austria and the Netherlands – are concerned about the possibility of accepting former inmates who might still prove a danger, a risk highlighted when it emerged last week that Said Ali al-Shihri, who was released from Guantánamo in 2007, is now al-Qaida's deputy leader in Yemen.

"There is no question that chief responsibility to do with solving the problem of this detention centre lies with those who set it up, the Americans themselves," Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, said. "But it is also a question of our credibility of whether we support the dismantling of this American camp or not."

SunTimes: This is what I was talking about...

All you folks out there supporting Burris (Dad), now you see what I was worried about, and why I think this guy is scum:

“If there was no Martin Luther King Jr. and no Roland Burris, there would be no Barack Obama in the White House today,” Burris said to cheers at a Rainbow PUSH Coalition breakfast in Chicago. “We must recognize, friends, that we all stand on each other's shoulders.”

The Fireside chat for January 24, 2009

His first as President...

Obama's Negotiating Style (VIDEO)

Keith: Bush targeted Reporters for Surveillance (VIDEO)

According to a former N.S.A. Analyst, Russell Tice, the Bush Administration's surveillance program was far, far, far wider than earlier guessed. The Bush Administration was targeting specific groups for surveillance, especially Journalists.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

TPM: Your take #28

Mea culpa.  I confess.  I am reader MJ.  Duh.

BBC: MLK...Negro President in 25 years or less...

Martin Luther King...from a BBC Interview in 1964 (embeding not available), saying that there will a Negro President in 25 years or less...

So he was a little off...

HuffPo: Are you @#$% kidding me??

Is there any wonder why I remain a Liberal who doesn't like other Liberals?

From today's Huffington Post:

Obama's First Betrayal?

Has President-elect Barack Obama committed his first betrayal? Has he turned away from his most exalted ideals in an act of such spiritual malfeasance that it will condemn his administration?

Some observers cite the fact that the stimulus package contains money for AmeriCorps but nothing for the Peace Corps as evidence that the president-elect has turned his back on his pledge to double the size of Kennedy's most noble child. There is buzz among former Volunteers and others associated with the Peace Corps that the expanded future of the organization is in immediate and dramatic peril.

If this is really what this article is about, we deserve to lose.

The Next Step...(VIDEO)

"As President, I will need the help of all Americans to meet the challenges that lie ahead. That's why I'm asking people like you who fought for change during the campaign to continue fighting for change in your communities. Since the election hundreds of thousands of you have shared your ideas about how this movement should move forward..."



It is time to bring our Army to Washington, and demand the change we voted for.

The Fireside chat for January 17, 2009

Sullivan: Taibbi vs. Friedman...

This originally comes from Andrew Sullivan.  It's Matt Taibbi being Matt Taibbi, but since's absolutely obliterating Thomas Friedman, it's all so especially enjoyable:

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan [Tom] Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone. So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be?

And, according to Sullivan, that was one of the nicer paragraphs.

FiveThirtyEight: Is Nate becoming the Anti-Sirota??

Sirota blasts Obama.  I'd rip him, but since I didn't bother to read his piece, that'd be unfair.  Instead, I'll just ignore him.

Still, Nate Silver steps up.  He doesn't blast Sirota, but he does refute him, and the knee-jerk anti-Bailout mania that seems to be sweeping the country...

The reason, of course, that Coburn and the other 18 senators changed their stance on the bailout is not because of any underlying change in philosophy but because of political opportunism. The Obama administration has now inherited the burden of the bailout package from the Bush administration; as such, it is easier for Republicans to oppose it. Likewise, it is harder for Democrats like Jeff Merkely and the Udall Cousins, who railed against the bailout on the campaign trail, to vote to oppose it.

The bailout, undoubtedly, is highly unpopular. Getting to run a commercial that accuses your opponent of having voted for "a $700 billion giveaway to Wall Street" is the sort of stuff that can win you an election.

But does the fact that the optics of the bailout are poor mean that it is poor policy? Does it mean, moreover, that opposing the bailout is the right "progressive" policy stance?

On the contrary, the fact that the Republican and Democratic positions on the bailout appear to be so fluid would seem to indicate that it not an issue particularly well described by traditional ideological frameworks like liberal versus conservative. Either the bailout is a necessary evil to get the economy moving again -- a goal that benefits progressives and conservatives alike -- or it isn't. This is largely an empirical question rather than an ideological one.

WaPo: Spare me the sanctimony...

I love hearing such moral certainty out of blank Newspaper Editorial pages: "The attorney general nominee must explain his role," the Washington Post demands.

Must, explain his role.

So...people should be held accountable for the crap they've committed in the past?

People like...the Washington Post Editorial Board who cheerleaded us into the Iraq War.

Courtesy Think Progress:

After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. [2/6/03]

The Perils of Passivity [2/13/03]

But the United States cannot again join the Security Council in backing down from a confrontation with the Iraqi dictator, as it did repeatedly during the 1990s, also under pressure from France and Russia. [2/16/03]

In the case of Iraq, the functioning of American democracy has been pretty straightforward. President Bush has been respectful of opponents, at least at home, as he should be on such a momentous issue. [2/23/03]

Raw Story: That's NOT what he said...

The Raw Story headline says it up front: "Obama: Killing bin Laden may not be essential".

Problem, that's not what he said.

You be the judge.

The quote-misquote is taken from a leaked CBS Interview. Here's what the President-Elect said.

"I think that we have to so weaken his infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function," Obama said.

"My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he's in a cave somewhere and can't even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America."

When you lead with a headline that says Killing bin Laden may not be essential, A) you've made it sound like that's a direct quote, when it's not. B) It further makes it sound like Obama's taking the Bush cue of "I don't think about him very much." It suggests a lackadaiscial attitude toward pursuing Bin Laden.

Was there anything lackadaiscial in that statement?

I'm sorry, but what part of "my preference obviously would be to capture or kill him" didn't Raw Story understand??

The word "essential" appears once in the Raw Story story...in the headline, odds are written by someone else.

UPDATE (12:02pm): To clarify, a far more accurate, and simpler, take on what Obama said, is "We don't have to kill him to neutralize him as a threat."

But by saying what they said, how they said it, they're making it sound like Obama said "Killing Osama? We can take it or leave it". It's a subtle change, but it changes the meaning of the quote.

Obama at Harvard. Obama Now.

The story of the President-Elect's rise to become the first African-American to be the Editor of the Harvard Law Review is pretty well known.

But consider the parallels of those heady days, and compare them to now:

Ideological battles raged at the law school. Students clashed over faculty diversity and political correctness. Some even booed and hissed one another in class.

Obama, though liberal, was elected with help from conservatives. He prompted criticism from more liberal classmates by putting conservatives in key editorial positions. Some of his toughest critics were black students who complained that he didn't appoint more African Americans to top posts.

“That was the first time I had to deal with something that I suspect I'll have to deal with in the future, which is balancing a broader constituency with the specific expectations of being an African American in a position of influence,” he would later tell biographer David Mendell. “As for the criticism, I'm not sure there was anything all that surprising about that.”

The controversy mirrors the backlash from liberals today who fault some of his early appointments as well as his choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation.

“He struck me as moderate in the context of campus politics,” says classmate Adam Charnes, a Republican who would work in the Bush Justice Department and now practices in Winston-Salem. “His cabinet appointments are consistent with the Barack that I knew, someone who doesn't take a hard and fast ideological position on things.”

But as an editorial point, remember this story for future days...

[Sarah] Higgins [one of the lead interview subjects of the McClatchy Story] recalls Obama walking in during another argument.

He summoned one editor to a meeting and began climbing the stairs to his cramped second-floor office. The editor made no move to follow and kept arguing. Obama paused.

“Upstairs, now,” he said firmly. He kept walking. The editor sheepishly followed.

When he's ready to strike, he will strike.

Obama to America: Stay Home!! (VIDEO)

Okay, just kidding. He doesn't say that...

...exactly.

Obama's given an pre-Inaugural Video about what he expects (crowds, difficulty getting around) and what events are out there (plenty), and what he'd like us all to do on MLK Day.

TPM: Even Josh is starting to annoy me...

First it was, Obama's not being aggressive enough to beat Hillary in the Primary. Then, it's he's not doing enough in the General to take down McCain. Now, he's not being ambitious enough in pursuit of the stimulus.

I'm sorry, but when is Josh going to get it through his head that Obama moves at a different clip than he's used to. Josh has been massively wrong about Obama in the past, and frankly I could give a rat's ass if he's got a problem with the pace Obama's moving at. He's smarter than you are. Get used to it, or don't. I could care less one way or the other.

He pulls back. He plans. He strikes. That's pretty much the basic Obama modus-operandi.

Last I checked, we're in planning mode for another 5 days.

January 20th, 12:00pm Eastern Standard Time, I think we'll see some action.