Saturday Shuffle

Pancake - Tori Amos
2HB - Roxy Music
Animal Mass - Machines of Loving Grace
Ed Is Dead - The Pixies
Almost Cried - Duke Ellington
Ticket To Ride - The Beatles
Hot Wire My Heart - Sonic Youth
Last Night - Lush
Roxy (live) - Concrete Blonde
Reprise - DeVotchKa

Profiles in Cowardice

Please call the Congressional switchboard if anyone finds a missing spine:

 

(CNN) – Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia apologized Wednesday for criticizing conservative hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity, assuring his supporters that "I am one of you."

 

...The mea culpa comes one day after Gingrey appeared to take issue with Limbaugh's recent criticism of congressional Republicans. The conservative radio host said GOP leaders weren't adequately challenging President Obama on his proposed stimulus package.

"I mean, it's easy if you're Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or even sometimes Newt Gingrich to stand back and throw bricks," Gingrey told the Politico. "You don't have to try to do what's best for your people and your party."

The comments, published in a Politico story Tuesday afternoon, immediately prompted a flood of calls from aggrieved conservatives to Gingrey's congressional office, prompting the Georgia Republican to issue a clarification reasserting his conservative bona fides.

I always wondered what it takes to "aggrieve" a conservative.

 

Not that much, apparently.

 

Pathetic that an elected official falls over himself to bow and scrape just for telling the truth: that, unlike our representatives (and most other people in society), bloviating gasbags like Limbaugh and Hannity have no accountability for what they do.  These hacks don't have to accomplish a damn thing except agitate from the sidelines--which they do purely out of their own self-serving interest to keep their ratings up, which sells commercial time, which lines their pockets.

 

And these blindly contrarian, foot-stomping, overgrown children are the people that "conservatives" find to be above criticism?

 

A telling choice of sacred cows, to be sure.

Saturday Shuffle

There She Goes, My Beautiful World - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
You and Whose Army - Radiohead
The Times They Are A-Changin' - Bob Dylan
Lucretia, My Reflection (Extended Single Mix) - The Sisters of Mercy
Cease - American Lesion
Sorrow - David Bowie
Battersea - Hooverphonic
If This Is It - Huey Lewis & The News
I Can Do Anything (Delacratic) - De La Soul
She (live) - Kiss

Balls.

Obama has them.

Obama to GOP: ‘I Won’

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

Kind of puts the "Chief" back in chief executive, doesn't it?

Now I cast ballots for both of them, but I really can't imagine hearing Al Gore or John Kerry saying anything like that. And unfortunately, since 2006, we haven't heard anything remotely like that from our Congressional leadership, either.

This is the first time in recent memory that we've seen any Democratic politician show some confidence in the confidence the people showed in him/her. Candidates win elections for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that the people want you to do what you say you'll do. Unfortunately, the Reids and Pelosis can never seem to remember that simple fact, choosing instead to huff and puff and then fold like a card table.

There's a new sheriff in town.

Hopefully the deputies finally learn a thing or two...

Elections have consequences, Part II

The end of another "long national nightmare":

Obama signs order to close Guantanamo Bay facility

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Promising to return America to the "moral high ground" in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.

...A second executive order formally bans torture by requiring that the Army field manual be used as the guide for terrorism interrogations. That essentially ends the Bush administration's CIA program of enhanced interrogation methods.

...A third executive order establishes an interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases.

This week keeps getting better and better.

It was all well and good to be excited about the prospect of things being different, but it's something else to actually see steps being taken to get us back to that whole "nation of laws," thing.

And, it may be petty, but it puts a grin on my face to think about the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's going on in the right wing circles that think the scripts from 24 represent sound policy plans.

Elections have consequences

Hitting the ground running. Me likey.

Obama Halts All Regulations Pending Review

WASHINGTON - One of President Barack Obama's first acts Tuesday was to put the brakes on all pending regulations that the Bush administration tried to push through in its waning days.

The order went out shortly after Obama was inaugurated president, in a memorandum signed by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Former President George W. Bush's administration moved into overdrive in the last year or so on a host of new regulatory proposals. Now the Obama administration will review everything that is still pending.

Can I say again how good "Former President George W. Bush," sounds?

Theres a helluva lot of garbage to clean up after the last eight years. These last frantic tweaks and alterations are but the top of the heap. You have to start somewhere, though.

Good to see Obama putting the work gloves on from the get-go and showing he's not looking to easy into things.

Winning is a beautiful thing

President.

Barack.

Obama.

Has a hell of a ring to it, doesn't it? Almost as good as "former President George W. Bush."

Saturday Shuffle

Anything, Anything (I'll Give You) - Dramarama
Change - Killing Joke
Transylvanian Transmissions, Pt. 1 - Rob Zombie
Norwegian Wood - The Beatles
Falls Apart - Stabbing Westward
Wrong To Love You - Chris Isaak
What's Going On - Marvin Gaye
Duel of the Iron Mic - GZA
Vodevil - Marilyn Manson
Do Your Thing - Basement Jaxx

KHAAAAAN!

Ricardo Montalbán, 1920 - 2009

In case you couldn't see what the problem is

This might help you put your finger on it. From The Politico:

GOP sees Franken as top public enemy

With only a longshot court appeal standing in the way of Democrat Al Franken’s election to the Senate, Republicans are gritting their teeth and bracing for the arrival of a new senator whose every utterance will sound like nails on a chalkboard to them.

While Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) has filed suit to contest the results of a disputed recount process that turned his narrow lead into a 225-vote deficit, his likely defeat stands to turn Franken, the polarizing former “Saturday Night Live” writer, into the senator who launched a thousand direct mail fundraising appeals.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever had an opponent who is so disliked by Republicans as Al Franken,” said Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey, who cautioned that Coleman’s election challenge could still turn the results back his way. “It’s one thing to lose to an honorable opponent, but Al Franken is not considered an honorable opponent by Minnesota Republicans.”

“It’s going to be hard for Franken to be very effective with any Republicans, in terms of having any credibility with us, just because he’s been so nasty in the past,” (Marty) Seifert said. “He certainly has callous and very partisan behavior in the past that is beyond the pale.”

According to Carleton College political scientist Steven Schier, Franken’s record as a “flamboyant and aggressive partisan” would make him ripe for criticism back home.

“I think it’s impossible to overstate the hostility Minnesota Republicans feel toward Al Franken,” Schier said. “He will be a very useful fundraising tool.”

Republicans outside Minnesota are equally apoplectic when it comes to Franken. Prominent conservative Rush Limbaugh, who Franken mocked in the title of one of his books, has already jabbed Franken on his radio show, telling listeners in December that Franken “won’t quit [the Senate race] because he doesn’t know how to get a real job…He’s a pathetic figure.”

...Matt Entenza, the former DFL Party leader in the Minnesota House, said Franken had defied expectations in the Senate race by restraining his sense of humor and campaigning as a sober workhorse.

“The struggle for the campaign was always trying to communicate that he was a serious guy, and in some ways I think they toned him down almost too much, tried to be almost too serious,” he explained. “You would see local TV anchors giving him questions that were designed to give him an opportunity for a humorous response. He would give a very serious, wonkish policy response.”

Former DFL Sen. Mark Dayton agreed: “He had to show people that he was really serious about issues, that he had a depth of policy understanding.”

Tim Penny, a former DFL congressman who joined the Minnesota Independence Party to run for governor in 2002, said he expected Franken to be hyper-cautious about reviving concerns about his past career as a comedian and political provocateur.

“I expect that on Capitol Hill he will be a very serious legislator – almost to the extreme,” Penny said."

Economic disaster, ever-increasing instability in the Middle East, energy crisis and the GoOPers are focusing their frustration on

Al.

Franken.

A (likely) freshman senator, with no clout, whatsoever, all because he used to say nasty things in his books. Congress as "Washington Junior High" at its finest.

By all means, focus on Franken for his barbs and the desire to fundraise and eventually oust him. All he has to do is stick with his metamorphosis into policy wonk and he'll be working for the people, while they'll be grinding an axe for the past.

See how *that* plays at the polls...

Saturday Shuffle

Angel - Masive Attack
Wish - Cranes
Nothing's Changed - Chris Isaak
Part of the Process - Morcheeba
Tic (live) - Helmet
Taboo - Treat Her Right
All Mine (live) - Portishead
Goin' Out West - Tom Waits
Departure - R.E.M.
777 - Danzig