Bob Dylan, on Obama:
He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage – cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it’s just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you’re into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.
We’ve compiled some of the most compelling of the initial photographs of the devastating earthquake that struck central Italy overnight.
David Axelrod and Tim Geithner had decidedly different answers when pressed yesterday in separate interviews on whether the Obama Administration really was working to circumvent the executive pay limits imposed by Congress, as the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Let’s go to the video.
If Senate Republicans follow through on threats to filibuster Dawn Johnsen’s nomination as head of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, one liberal advocacy group will be ready, TPMDC reports.
In addition to allowing media coverage of the return of fallen soldiers to Dover AFB, the Pentagon is releasing its own photographs of the ceremonies (when families consent).
From ABC News:
Over the skies of the Midwest, two F-16 fighter jets are escorting a private Cessna 172 aircraft stolen from a flight school in Ontario, Canada, whose pilot has been unresponsive to multiple requests that he establish communications with ground controllers. …
The plane entered American airspace over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at 3:25 p.m. today and has been trailed by the military aircraft since 4:43 p.m. as it has flown over Minnesota, south through Wisconsin, Illinois and Missouri.
The aircraft went past St. Louis and is now flying south about 30 miles east of Salem, Mo. At one point, the Wisconsin state capitol building in Madison was evacuated as a precaution as the plane flew over the city. …
Late Update: NORAD tells Canada’s CTV that the Cessna will soon run out of fuel.
Later Update: This one is getting weirder. The plane has landed near U.S. Hwy. 60 in the vicinity of the southern Missouri Ozarks town of Ellsinore, and the pilot has fled on foot, according to CNN.
With his assets, including his private planes, frozen by the SEC, Sir Allen Stanford discovers to his horror that TSA makes you take your shoes off to go through security when flying commercial. Oh, the indignity.
Zack Roth has more from ABC’s on-camera interview with Stanford.