I just got my copy of Arianna Huffington’s new book Right is Wrong and I wanted to let you know that Arianna’s going to be joining us in early June at the TPMCafe Book Club. So read up to be part of the discussion.
From the Northwest Indiana Times …
A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.
Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana’s 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.
“I’ll speak before any group that invites me,” Zirkle said Monday. “I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.”
…
The event was not the first time Zirkle has raised controversy on race issues. In March, Zirkle raised the idea of segregating races in separate states. Zirkle said Tuesday he’s not advocating segregation, but said desegregation has been a failure.
We go through the same routine every few years when oil prices rise. Republicans and their big oil benefactors assure us that opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas production will cure whatever ails us: dependence on foreign oil, high oil prices, soaring gasoline prices.
The drumbeat has started again as gasoline prices have pushed toward $4 per gallon. Here’s the President in his Rose Garden press conference this morning, where he made ANWR the centerpiece of his political and policy arguments for our energy dilemma:
So in the interest of once again knocking down this bamboozlement, here’s a decent Reuters rundown on why, independent of any environmental protection considerations, the President’s arguments don’t add up.
I’ve seen plenty of people fired from the Bush administration. But I’m not sure I can remember one who sent out an (immediately leakable) email to her department announcing she’d been fired. But that’s pretty much what the comically unethical chief GSA did tonight.
The first line of her email reads …
Early this evening I was asked to submit my resignation, and I have just done so. It has been a great privilege to serve with all of you and to serve our nation and a great President.
Let’s go through the list.
Had already been caught in numerous unethical acts which caused the administration great embarrassment? Check.
Firing comes Tuesday night to guarantee substantial mid-week press attention? Check.
Canned appointee miffed enough to act out and say she was fired? Check.
What’s up?
Noam Schieber has an interesting take on why Obama chose Trinity United as his church and Jeremiah Wright as his pastor.
McCain reintroduces Bush health care plan in effort to show he’s his own man.
Scot Paltrow has a new piece out for Portfolio on a Pentagon accounting system that is so antiquated that it is unauditable. This graf perhaps captures it best:
To enter the Indianapolis center is to pass through a time warp, to a place where the most critical software programs date from the dawn of the computer age. They run on old-style I.B.M. mainframes and rely on Cobol, the ancient Sumerian of computer languages. “This was a bunch of systems patched together,” says Greg Bitz, a former director of the center. “I never went home at night without worrying about one of them crashing.” Bitz predicts a crisis as older programmers retire. “Try to find somebody today who knows Cobol,” he says.
Late Update: Who knew so many COBOL programmers read TPM? Here’s a sample of the response, from TPM Reader MP, who is not a programmer per se, but it captures the reaction:
Just a comment re: the DoD COBOL item (I work in the IT industry):
While I have no doubt that the Pentagon’s IT systems and processes are awful, it’s worth noting that the use of IBM mainframes and COBOL for core computing is by no means unique. The primary backend applications of nearly every major business run in these types of environments: think core banking systems, insurance claims processing, shipping logistics applications. As a coworker says, with only mild exaggeration, every “regular” PC and server could blow up one day, and it would be an inconvenience; if every IBM mainframe stopped working, the world would basically shut down.
A flurry of superdelegate endorsements this morning:
Indiana Rep. Baron Hill and Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley each go for Obama.
Pennsylvania AFL-CIO president Bill George announces for Hillary.
It turns out that a hundred years in Iraq really is for wussies. TPM video czar Ben Craw has just dug up this January appearance in which Sen. McCain upped the ante to a million years in Iraq …