I think he is advocating for a hard capped quota on black callers to Washington Journal. Or he just hates blacks.

photo credit: Lars Plougmann

StrangeAppar8us at Rumproast thinks the left shouldn’t be going too crazy over the Obama Administration’s off shore drilling permit allotments because there isn’t that much oil down there to make extraction worthwhile at current prices.

… Obama has—at literally no political cost—blunted (if not mooted) the whole Wingnut/Palin “Drill, Baby, Drill!” canard, and effectively called their bluff. Certainly, the Right will be able to attack the plan for being selective in scope and for blocking some planned Alaska drills. But, even if there’s more oil in America’s coastal waters than the relatively paltry amounts that have been estimated in the past, we are many years of costly exploration and qualification away from quantifying—let alone extracting—it. And until the price of a barrel of crude rises above the $90-$100/barrel level again, the sound you hear is unlikely to be the rush of American oil companies anxious to spend billions of dollars to find out what, exactly, is down there.

via Chill, Baby, Chill: Obama Lifts Ceremonial Ban on Hypothetical Oil Reserves | Rumproast.

I don’t even think the political calculation is to blunt or “pre-negotiate” with the right wing. The political calculation is to negotiate in good faith with Blue Dogs and Centrist Dems from Red States so they can continue to help pass legislation heading into the mid term elections of 2010. Yes, this is so McCaskill, Landrieu, Nelson, and even the most despised hippie puncher Blanche Lincoln can turn and say: look at the concessions we got from our party. It allows them to say “We are Democrats, but we hold conservative values.” including no Public Option, Drilling for Oil and of course fighting terrorism there than here.

Obama’s health care plan is what the GOP proposed in the 90’s and Romney implemented in Massachusetts. His energy plan includes allowing oil exploration off shore and nuclear energy development. Financial Regulation comes with political capital built in. Contrast that with Well Point’s rate hike, GOP’s lack of affirmative platform initiatives, Steele’s RNC ballin’ ways and tea baggers gone wild and Obama is effectively taking away the GOP ability to effectively make November a clear referendum on the Democrats. The main miscalculation was the size of the stimulus spending. More needed to be spent and in more directed ways to get unemployment lower.

Obama is not playing 11th dimensional chess, he is quite simply protecting the flanks of his big tent so that the Dems can accomplish something while under it and still compete in state and national elections. After 40 years of Republicans setting our political climate in this country with the strategy of Nixon and the tactics of Reagan, progressives now have our own strategist in Obama who followed after the tactician Bill Clinton. Between the two maybe there will be decades of progressive politics defining the future of America.

The break down so far:

At least 37 people have been killed after two female suicide bombers blew themselves up on Moscow Metro trains in the morning rush hour, officials say.

Twenty-four died in the first blast at 0756 (0356 GMT) as a train stood at the central Lubyanka station, beneath the offices of the FSB intelligence agency.

About 40 minutes later, a second explosion ripped through a train at Park Kultury, leaving another 13 dead.

via BBC News – Commuter describes Moscow Metro blasts.

Sinead O’Connor’s WaPo editorial is a believer’s powerful rebuke of the Vatican and the Catholic church for its despicable role in decades of sexual abuse of children in her homeland of Ireland.

To Irish Catholics, Benedict’s implication — Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem — is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn’t believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That’s how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.

Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and in a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.

via To Sinead O’Connor, the pope’s apology for sex abuse in Ireland seems hollow – washingtonpost.com.

Three Labour MPs and two Conservatives voted unsuccessfully for the recommendation to be dropped but were over-ruled.

The committee said that the relationship was more associated now with the perceived support Britain gave to President George W Bush over the Iraq war.

“The perception that the British government was a subservient ‘poodle’ to the US administration leading up to the period of the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath is widespread both among the British public and overseas,” it said.

“This perception, whatever its relation to reality, is deeply damaging to the reputation and interests of the UK.”

The committee also said US President Barack Obama had taken the same “pragmatic” attitude as it was recommending now since entering the White House in 2009.

It said: “The UK needs to be less deferential and more willing to say no to the US on those issues where the two countries’ interests and values diverge.

“The UK’s relationship should be principally driven by the UK’s national interests within individual policy areas. It needs to be characterised by a hard-headed political approach to the relationship and a realistic sense of the UK’s limits.”

via BBC News – Special relationship between UK and US is over, MPs say.

Heck of a job W.

photo credit: Fibonacci Blue

One of the more baffling things about the media coverage of the Tea Party movement is that very seldom are these self anointed patriots asked to reconcile their alleged views with their own reality. They are literally taken seriously by the main stream media because they make the most noise and when they do make noise they are angry, really angry. For too long reporters in the MSM never asked Tea Partiers: how do you pay the bills? How do you pay for your health insurance? How do you put food on the table? When these questions are actually asked, stories like this pop-up.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.

Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.

[…]

The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.

Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”

“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.

via With No Jobs, Time for Tea Party – NYTimes.com.

The reporter rightfully asks Grimes what he did when he lost his job, and how gets by. He asked for Big Government help when he lost his job and he receives Social Security payments a few sentences later, the reporter writes that The members of the Tea Party “vehemently wants less” government. Huh? They say they want less, but their own actions betray what they truly vehemently want.

Continue reading

February 18, 2010, Obama is an empty suit/celebrity meme (in the form of Obama = Captain Teleprompter) being bandied about by all hat no cattle conservatives was still worth mention.

The Conservative Political Action Conference opened Thursday morning in Washington, and one leitmotif has emerged as an early favorite: noting that President Obama likes to use a teleprompter when delivering a speech. It was mentioned by David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union, in his introductory remarks; by Stephen Baldwin, of the famous Baldwin brothers, as part of an attack on Mr. Obama; and by Marco Rubio, the Tea Party-backed candidate who is challenging Gov. Charlie Crist for the Republican senatorial nomination in Florida. Mr. Rubio is clearly a star of the gathering here.

He offered a riff on why it was such a good thing that Washington was shut down by a snowstorm last week. “And the president couldn’t find anywhere to set up a teleprompter to announce new taxes,” he said to laughter.

via CPAC Speakers Mock Obama’s Teleprompter – The Caucus Blog – NYTimes.com.

What was missed by most of the people at CPAC still have no substantial plan, inspiring rhyme or coherent reason to deal with the challenges our country faces. So Republicans ridicule Obama for using a teleprompter, like every President since they were invented. Republicans call certain Senate procedures “unprecedented” even when they know damn well they used the same methods to pass bills around slimmer majorities. Republicans also claim every policy Obama wants to implement is some ism related to tyrants of yesteryear, even though his policies like health care reform match GOP policy proposals of the last 20 years.

So while they talk in circles, this President works. In just over a year he has taken a huge first step towards strengthening Americas social contract with its citizens. If you listen to Republicans, they still say the sky is falling, but not many people want to visit the losing locker room.