Steny Hoyer says his members are ready to debate the GOP Shadow Budget, asks why Republicans don’t seem to want to discuss it.
I’m not sure how reliable this number is, or could be, but Haiti has raised the death toll from the January earthquake to 230,000.
Chris Matthews has gotten to a whole new level on how crazy Sarah Palin is, calling her “frightening” a short while ago on Hardball for her discussing President Obama needing to “declare war” on Iran to buoy his political standing. An even more dramatic moment came a moment later, though. Palin’s so crazy now that even Mark Halperin thinks she’s nuts and out of her depth. Truly a watershed moment. Read More
You’ve probably heard of Lt. Dan Choi, a gay West Point graduate and New York National Guardsman, who was recommended for discharge after publicly coming out of the closet and becoming an advocate for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’s become a very public advocate for repeal all across the media over the last year.
He’s now back on duty with his National Guard unit.
As you can read in the piece at TPMMuckraker, it doesn’t seem to stem from an explicit change of policy at the Pentagon. But it does seem like a sign of which way the winds are now blowing, and an assumption, based on last week’s events, that Choi’s discharge may never go through.
Okay, Bob Dylan performing live at the White House tonight as part of a celebration of the music of the Civil Rights movement.
Not sure what else to say beside that.
(Lotsa others beside him, needless to say.)
Can’t help but remind me of this…
“But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.”
Watch it live after the jump. Read More
The problem for the GOP congressional leadership on the Hill is that when you put the facts together it’s clear that it didn’t occur to them that anything to do with Abdulmutallab’s handing was a problem until days later when Dick Cheney started gunning them up over the red herring of ‘mirandizing’ him.
So basically all the stuff about what Brennan told them or didn’t tell them in that briefing is beside the point. They knew exactly how Abdulmutallab had been handled. And they didn’t think it was a problem until days later when Dick Cheney told them it was. Then they went back and came up with a story about how if they only would have known they would have been screaming to high heaven.
We’ll have more on this on Wednesday.
Classic moment last night on The Daily Show when Newt Gingrich explained that it was okay to mirandize “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and not Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because Reid, unlike Abdulmutallab, is a US citizen.
Only, of course, Reid is a British citizen. Watch the video here.
What was so classic about this to me isn’t that Gingrich got a fact wrong. That happens, though to some more than others. But it was a larger illustration of how much Republicans are flailing to find any ‘fact’ to plug in to explain why the Abdulmutallab arrest was an outrage even though it went down just like every other arrest of a terrorist on American soil in like forever.
Reid’s a US citizen, had a lot of facial hair, used his shoes not his underwear, had an easier to pronounce name, didn’t have federal holiday miranda exception. Just anything you can come up with. Toss it against the wall, see if it sticks.
The big story is the ridiculous amounts of snow. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
One of the amusing things about the emerging debate over Rep. Paul Ryan’s GOP “shadow budget” is that there’s really no dispute about what Ryan’s budget proposes to do. The debate is over whether what it proposes is desirable (and, not for nothing, over whether the assumptions it rests on are valid). But I guess pointing out that Ryan’s budget privatizes Social Security and eliminates Medicare is just a political attack — even if everyone on both sides agrees that’s what it will do.