How DARE you say 9/11 happened on Bush's watch!

post from They gave us a republic... - Front Page on 11 March 2009 08:12:06 PM. © They gave us a republic... - Front Page

Oh boy...popcorn all around! This from the Bush Legacy Revision Tour (tm).

video details and more

Chris Matthews asks Ari Fleischer about how Bush left the economy.

Fleischer answers 9/11! 9/11! Then the money shot...

Matthews: We were attacked on your watch. If you start getting into who was attacked when, we suffered the worst domestic calamity in history on your watch.
Fleischer: Chris, how dare you!

Priceless!

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheyGaveUsARepublic-FrontPage/~3/zZleGNQK9wY/showD
iary.do

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"Republicans Are In A Different World"

post from MyDD on 11 March 2009 08:08:55 PM. © MyDD

There's been some disagreement on the left as to the wisdom of going after Rush Limbaugh. My view has been that portraying the GOP as the party of Limbaugh is a winner because it will create an irreconcilable divide between conservative and moderate[...]

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mydd/~3/JllXzdCK7_8/5571

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"Republicans Are In A Different World"

post from MyDD on 11 March 2009 08:08:55 PM. © MyDD

There's been some disagreement on the left as to the wisdom of going after Rush Limbaugh. My view has been that portraying the GOP as the party of Limbaugh is a winner because it will create an irreconcilable divide between conservative and moderate[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mydd/~3/JllXzdCK7_8/5571

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A Nation Neither United Nor Divided

post from FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right on 11 March 2009 08:06:00 PM. © FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right

The Center For American Progress has a terrific new survey out on political ideology. The material in the survey is right up our alley, and is probably deserving of several posts, but I want to start with a relatively quick, 30,000-foot question: ideologically speaking, is there more that unites us as Americans or divides us?

The CAP survey posed 40 political and ideological statements to a group of 1,400 American adults, and asked them whether or not they agreed with them. You can answer the questions for yourself here; they cover a wide range of topics in the areas of economic and domestic policy, foreign affairs, societal and "values" issues, and the proper role of government. Although benchmark surveys of political ideology are nothing new, this is one of the most comprehensive and best-constructed efforts that I've seen.

But let's not worry too much about precisely what those questions were for now -- we'll look at that in a subsequent post. Let's simply take the answers to all 40 questions and plot them on a graph. On the vertical axis, we'll plot the percentage of self-described conservatives that agreed with a particular statement, and on the horizontal axis, the percentage of self-described progressives and liberals who did the save. (The CAP survey included separate categories for "progressive" and "liberal", which is another thing we'll look at sometime soon, but I've combined their answers for the time being). This is what we get when we do that:

If you're having trouble picking up on a pattern in that data, that's because there isn't one. The correlation between the fraction of conservatives and the fraction of liberals agreeing to a given question is essentially zero.

Is this surprising? Perhaps. If conservatives and liberals had fundamental disagreements on most major political questions, you'd expect to see a statistically significant inverse correlation in their responses. But you don't see that. Conversely, if they agreed on most of these fundamental questions, with the differences being only around the periphery, you'd expect to see a statistically significant positive correlation in their responses. But you don't really see that either.

Rather, it seems there's about as much that unites us as divides us. And although it's possible that this result is just an artifact of the particular questions that CAP posed, for some reason it feels like the "right" answer. Americans like appeals to bipartisanship and post-ideological politics -- but they also like good, old-fashioned partisan red meat. We're a complicated country, and we have complicated politics.

Read The Full Article:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/nation-neither-united-nor-divided.html

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Prosecutors To Focus On Financial Fraud

post from TalkLeft on 11 March 2009 08:04:00 PM. © TalkLeft

“It will be a top priority of the Justice Department to hold accountable executives who have engaged in fraudulent activities.”

-Justice Department spokesman Matthew A. Miller

As opposed to the attitude towards investigating the abuses of the Bush Administration, it seems that the Obama Administration is foregoing the Establishment-favored "Lets not bicker over who killed who" approach and is gung ho for prosecuting financial fraud:

Spurred by rising public anger, federal and state investigators are preparing for a surge of prosecutions of financial fraud. Across the country, attorneys general have already begun indicting dozens of loan processors, mortgage brokers and bank officers. Last week alone, there were guilty pleas in Minnesota, Delaware, North Carolina and Connecticut and sentences in Florida and Vermont — all stemming from home loan scams.

With the Obama administration focused on stabilizing the banks and restoring confidence in the stock market, it has said little about civil or criminal charges at the federal level. But its proposed budget contains hints that it will add to this weight of litigation, including money for more F.B.I. agents to investigate mortgage fraud and white-collar crime, and a 13 percent raise for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

. . . “It’s clear that [Attorney General Eric Holder] and other top-level members of the Obama administration want to seize the opportunity to send a message of zero tolerance for mortgage fraud,” said Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who attended a meeting with Mr. Holder and a number of state attorneys general last week in Washington. “The only question is when and how they will do it.”

but what about the big fish?

With all the state activity and portents of a new resolve at the federal level, lawyers who defend white-collar clients sense growing momentum to perp walk and prosecute executives involved in the mortgage meltdown. “It’s going to be open season,” says Daniel M. Petrocelli, a defense lawyer whose clients include Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former chief executive of Enron. "You’ll see a lot of indictments down the road, and you’ll see a lot of prosecutions that rely on vague theories of ‘deprivation of honest services.’ "

Many financial executives have hired lawyers in the last few months, either through in-house counsels or, more discreetly, on their own, several lawyers who defend white-collar clients said. While assorted Wall Street executives have been prosecuted over the years, any concerted legal attack on the financial sector would have little precedent.

Could this be a stimulus designed for the white collar criminal law bar?

Speaking for me only

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/4LUl9IfJRaM/25366

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Pastor, wife mock 12 year old girl

post from Jesus' General on 11 March 2009 08:04:00 PM. © Jesus' General

Here's the latest news from the Faithful Word's Baptist Church's war against the Edwards family.

Helen Edwards created a new blog to replace the one seized by Pastor Steven L. Anderson, and his darling wife, Zsuzsanna.
Capitalizing on the Edwards' innate inability to spell the word "phony" correctly, the Zsuzsannites parody David's blog:

David: real/parody

Pastor Anderson's disciples open a new front in the war by mocking the Edwards' twelve-year-old daughter on the parody of David's blog.

Update: The good pastor's wife and followers created a parody of the 12-year-old girl's site.

Read The Full Article:
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/03/pastor-wife-mock-12-year-old-girl.html

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Moos take on Cramer vs Stewart

post from Where's the Outrage? on 11 March 2009 08:01:30 PM. © Where's the Outrage?

I talked about Jim Cramer before. I think that Jon Stewart was/is right. Many of these financial[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.whereistheoutrage.net/wordpress/2009/03/11/moos-take-on-cramer-vs-stew
art/

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Radio host Mike Gallagher blames President Obama
for not being able to sell his house after 3 weeks

post from Crooks and Liars on 11 March 2009 08:00:00 PM. © Crooks and Liars

This article just highlights how out of touch the Limbaugh National Committee really are:

Nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher lamented this morning that his failure to sell his own house, that he recently placed on the market, was due to the psychological effects burdening the wealthy resulting from the class warfare propagated by President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats.
Gallagher was attempting to make the case that the economic policies of Democrats in D.C. have driven fear into the rich, which has translated into the wealthy being too scared to spend their money. As a result, wealth is not having the ?trickle down effect? on the nation?s working class who rely on the nation's upper class for jobs.
--
"I decided to put my house on the market. Three weeks. And it?s a house ? and I?m not bragging ? it?s a house with a ?wow factor.? You walk into the house and you go, ?Wow.? It?s got all the nice little bells and whistles, it?s got the electric shades that go up and down, and the sound system, and the beautiful pool. I?m a lucky guy. Three weeks ? not a single phone call."
Dripping with irony, Gallagher, a fierce proponent of ?individual responsibility,? recently lambasted home buyers facing foreclosure who had purchased homes they could not afford and were seeking bailout money or to have the federal government intervene and stop foreclosures. Last week, Gallagher highlighted the story of a bus driver who had purchased an $800K home, which is now only worth $600K:
"I dare you to feel sorry for her?how about this, honey? Pay your mortgage!"
In short, Gallagher believes in individual responsibility and the importance of micro-economic behavior when it comes to people who can?t afford their mortgages, but attributes (Democratic) macroeconomic governmental policies for his inability to sell his own house.
Gallagher, by the way, did not mention the listing price of his home on the air.

Maybe people are making responsiblitiy a high priority? Gallagher, not the comedian is complaining becasue his house has been on the market all of three weeks without even telling us what his selling price is. Welcome to the horrors that all of Americans are facing, but at least he isn't in foreclosure.

Read The Full Article:
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/radio-host-mike-gallagher-blames-presid

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Steele Says He’s Pro-Choice: Abortion Is
‘An Individual Choice’

GQ has a new interview with Michael Steele, in which the embattled RNC chairman says that he is pro-choice:

GQ: Are you saying you think women have the right to choose abortion?
STEELE: Yeah. I mean, again, I think that?s an individual choice. […]
GQ: Are you saying you don?t want to overturn Roe v. Wade?
STEELE: I think Roe v. Wade?as a legal matter, Roe v. Wade was a wrongly decided matter.
GQ: Okay, but if you overturn Roe v. Wade, how do women have the choice you just said they should have?
STEELE: The states should make that choice. That?s what the choice is. The individual choice rests in the states. Let them decide.

Steele is shifting from what he has said in the past. As recently as November 2008, he supported the GOP platform on a constitutional ban on abortion, although he was “skeptical” of tinkering with the Constitution:

In an editorial board meeting at The Washington Times on Tuesday, Mr. Steele clarified his stance, saying that he thinks Roe should be overturned as a sloppy piece of decision-making, favors state regulation on abortion, and supports the Republican party’s platform that calls for a constitutional ban on abortion. … Mr. Steele added however that he is skeptical of changing the Constitution, fearing that the process will get out of control.

Steele, in fact, presented himself as a strong pro-life candidate when running for the RNC chairmanship. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said that Steele had “shown a commitment to the values that were once the GOP’s guiding light,” including on abortion. Here’s how Steele pitched himself on his campaign website (cached site here):

No one should ever doubt Michael Steele’s commitment to life. He has been pro-life his entire adult life. In 2006 he was endorsed for US Senate by National Right to Life and Maryland Right to Life. He ran as a staunchly pro-life candidate in a state that rarely elects pro-life candidates.

In its Oct. 25, 2006 endorsement of Steele’s U.S. Senate run, the Washington Times wrote, “Mr. Steele is staunchly pro-life (parting with many Republicans who support abortion in cases of rape and incest) and he is a free trader.”

This announcement will likely add fuel to the fire of his critics, who are already upset that he slighted their real leader.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/11/steele-gq/

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Steele Goes From Being ‘Pro-Life His Entire
Adult Life’ To Believing Abortion Is An ‘Individual Choice’

GQ has a new interview with Michael Steele, in which the embattled RNC chairman says that he is pro-choice:

GQ: Are you saying you think women have the right to choose abortion?
STEELE: Yeah. I mean, again, I think that?s an individual choice. […]
GQ: Are you saying you don?t want to overturn Roe v. Wade?
STEELE: I think Roe v. Wade?as a legal matter, Roe v. Wade was a wrongly decided matter.
GQ: Okay, but if you overturn Roe v. Wade, how do women have the choice you just said they should have?
STEELE: The states should make that choice. That?s what the choice is. The individual choice rests in the states. Let them decide.

Steele is shifting from what he has said in the past. As recently as November 2008, he supported the GOP platform on a constitutional ban on abortion, although he was “skeptical” of tinkering with the Constitution:

In an editorial board meeting at The Washington Times on Tuesday, Mr. Steele clarified his stance, saying that he thinks Roe should be overturned as a sloppy piece of decision-making, favors state regulation on abortion, and supports the Republican party’s platform that calls for a constitutional ban on abortion. … Mr. Steele added however that he is skeptical of changing the Constitution, fearing that the process will get out of control.

Steele, in fact, presented himself as a strong pro-life candidate when running for the RNC chairmanship. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins said that Steele had “shown a commitment to the values that were once the GOP’s guiding light,” including on abortion. Here’s how Steele pitched himself on his campaign website (cached site here):

No one should ever doubt Michael Steele’s commitment to life. He has been pro-life his entire adult life. In 2006 he was endorsed for US Senate by National Right to Life and Maryland Right to Life. He ran as a staunchly pro-life candidate in a state that rarely elects pro-life candidates.

In its Oct. 25, 2006 endorsement of Steele’s U.S. Senate run, the Washington Times wrote, “Mr. Steele is staunchly pro-life (parting with many Republicans who support abortion in cases of rape and incest) and he is a free trader.”

This announcement will likely add fuel to the fire of his critics, who are already upset that he slighted their real leader.

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/11/steele-gq/

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