There was good reason to think that the whole point of President Obama’s deficit commission was to take the issue of deficits off the table until after the midterm elections. With the commission now unable to reach the 14 votes necessary to force Congress to take up its recommendations, Obama may have succeeded in a strictly technical sense: He punted the issue to a commission, where it went to die.
But that’s an awfully generous read on what happened. You might say that Obama dodged a bullet — that he fired, in an enclosed room, and that’s been ricocheting around him for the last 10 months. Read More
Jeff Gerth, on the $16 billion that blue-chip General Electric borrowed from the Federal Reserve to stay afloat in late 2008.
I really didn’t think the deficit commission members could slink off the stage this shamelessly. But they just wrapped up their “work” without even holding an official vote on their recommendations. They needed 14 of the 18 members to approve the recommendations. By the statements of the members, we know only 11 were in support. But actually put their votes on the official record? Nah.
These photos of Bahnhof AB, Wikileaks Internet Service Provider whose headquarters are literally carved into the rock of a Swedish mountain, confirms my working assumption that Julian Assange may actually be a James Bond villain in training.
Jon Stewart, on John McCain’s new-found ways of opposing of DADT. Watch.
President Obama has released a statement thanking the deficit commission for its work and making no acknowledgment of the fact that the whole thing just crashed and burned.
Republican governor candidate Tom Emmer admits the Minnesota recount won’t change the outcome of the election he lost but vows to keep fighting anyway.
The Library of Congress (the Library of Congress!) has blocked access to Wikileaks on staff computers and via the wireless network that serves patrons, TPMmuckraker reports.
I have to say that I’m astonished at the speed with which bureaucrats in Washington are scrambling for cover in advance of the arrival of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
Already this week we’ve seen two examples where government entities whose funding is directly controlled by Congress have compromised their core missions in the face of political pressure, mostly from conservatives. Read More
From TPM Reader BA:
Speaking as a member of the library profession who interacts with the Library of Congress in various ways, I do not find this at all surprising. The Library of Congress (“LC” in librarian’s parlance) is a rather conservative, though non-partisan, establishment. They are nowhere near as concerned about or active in promoting free access to information as one might think or hope.