In the new era, congressional Republicans discover the virtues of foreign diplomacy … as a tool against the Obama administration.
Sandra Day O’Connor calls herself “a little bit disappointed” with the Supreme Court’s dismantling of precedent she helped set. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
The FBI has been questioning former aides to disgraced ex-state Sen. Mike Duval about his sex-with-lobbyist braggadocio.
SNL gets pretty brutal on Obama’s list of accomplishments in office. Let’s see. There was that time he killed a fly on TV … Watch.
When the birther movement was really starting to hit its stride over the summer, lawyer Orly Taitz was on the cable nets presented as a leading figure albeit in a fringe movement. But as the legal cases she’s pursued to declare Obama ineligible to be President have fallen apart and I’ve gotten a chance to see some of the pleadings she’s filed, I’ve started to wonder if her apparent prominence in the birther movement isn’t some big joke. Or maybe it just drives home how fringe these folks are.
In either case, her motions read like the whacked out inmate lawsuits I used to come across occasionally when I was practicing. A lot of them were written by hand, describing vast yet inexplicable conspiracies to keep them incarcerated, maybe with a mention of UFOs, and naming dozens if not hundreds of defendants, including most members of Congress. Taitz doesn’t go quite that far, but then again she’s actually a licensed member of the bar. I’ve sort of begun to feel sorry for her.
The vote on the Baucus bill scheduled for tomorrow in the Senate Finance Committee may be delayed until next week.
Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater, says there is no connection between it and American Private Police Force (until this weekend, known as American Police Force), the secretive company that took over that jail in Hardin, MT. “It’s bizarre,” an Xe spokesperson tells TPMmuckraker. “They have nothing to do with us. We have nothing to do with them.”
How long should you be sidelined for circulating an anti-reform email featuring Obama as a witch doctor? The Florida doctor who stepped aside from public activism this summer is back in the game — and being hailed as a “rock solid patriot.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) pens a book with a decidedly pro-reform and pro-Obama slant on health care. He even went so far as to tell Time over the weekend that he’d vote for the Baucus bill if he were still in the Senate, though today he seemed to back track in an interview with ABC News.