“If you don’t hold us accountable, we’ll do some real bad things in Washington, D.C.”
—Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), speaking about … the economy

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will begin direct negotiations today at the State Department.

Chuck Norris makes a cameo in a new video produced by the NRA that actually made me chuckle.

Would be hate crime ends poorly for the assailant.

Corporate Tea Party-backer FreedomWorks made a very big deal last week about having to move its DC headquarters to a different, more secure building because of all of the threats it’s received from liberals. But we looked into it a little more, and it turns out that FreedomWorks’ current lease was already set to expire in February, it isn’t moving until then, and its new office offers cheaper rent.

Christina Romer, the outgoing chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, calls for more stimulus: “The only surefire ways for policymakers to substantially increase aggregate demand in the short run are for the government to spend more and tax less.”

The evil part of me is enjoying the schadenfreude of watching Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) totally botch her opening statement in last night’s gubernatorial debate: Read More

I’m seeing a lot of chatter citing the explosion on the Mariner Energy, Inc. rig as good evidence of the need for a moratorium on deep water drilling. But based on the initial reports we know two things that make talk of the moratorium somewhat extraneous.

First, this was not a deep water well. It was drilling in the Gulf in waters reported as being 340-feet deep or 450-feet deep, depending on who’s doing the reporting. That’s shallow compared to the mile-deep water BP’s Deepwater Horizon was drilling in when it went down. So the moratorium doesn’t apply.

Second, this was a production platform, not a drilling platform, according to the initial reports. There’s been some conflict in the reports about whether it was actively producing at the time of the explosion, but regardless it’s not an exploration platform. The moratorium applies to drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf. Production in the deep waters of the Gulf has been ongoing ever since the BP disaster.

Two points of clarification to keep in mind as this story unfolds.

I’m on the mailing list for the Turkish Embassy in Washington. And I’m sort of a turkophile so I’m always interested to see what they have to say. Then just now I received their latest email entitled “Reviving Jazz at the Turkish Embassy & Washington.” And I was like, huh?

I know about the late founder of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish-American who played a hugely influential role in the second half of the 20th century in American Jazz, Blues, R&B and Rock and a lot else. But I wasn’t aware of Ertegun’s full background.

See the email after the jump … Read More

House Dems will send Obama a letter: If your Budget & Deficits commission comes back recommending cuts or changes in Social Security, we’ll go 100% against it. Pretty much a line in the sand. Brian Beutler got a copy of the letter.