Let us savor

Along with Marvin Gaye’s rendition of the national anthem at the 1983 All-Star game, this is the clip that makes me feel best about being an American.

Wow! Wow, what an honor! The White House Correspondents’ dinner. To actually—to sit here at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what? I’m a pretty sound sleeper; that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face.

What’s remarkable watching it again is that it’s fairly tame by any reasonable standard. Villagers are nothing if not thin-skinned.

I’ll bet they’re yukking it up over Leno tonight tomorrow.

You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out

The amount of thought going into this idea is self-evident:

Van Cleave said one proposed bill would allow no one but an on-duty officer doing undercover work to drink alcohol while carrying a concealed weapon. The other bill will say that anyone can carry a concealed gun and drink if they wish, “as long as they are not drunk.”

“Whatever the General Assembly assumes will apply to everyone,” he said. “Police officers and permit holders are all in the same tent; so I say: General Assembly, you choose. But whatever it is, we’re equal.”

If there was any way to make sure that these guys would be segregated and there would be no collateral damage inflicted on innocent citizens, I’d completely support the idea of gun nuts being allowed to drink while packing heat. Thinning the herd, if you will.

Failing Up

Once you are deemed a serious person, there is literally no mistake too big to keep people in DC from listening to you:

Robert Rubin is poisoning Washington again.

The former Treasury Secretary who presided over the nearly-fatal deregulation of the financial industry—then made $126 million nearly killing Citigroup—had been keeping an appropriately low profile in the nation’s capital ever since everything he wrought went pear-shaped.

But now he’s back, and once again trying to influence public policy.

On Friday he made his third major (and apology-free) Washington appearance in two weeks, delivering opening remarks at a conference that his pet think tank, the Hamilton Project, co-sponsored with the liberal Center for American Progress.

But the last thing Washington needs right now is another infusion of Rubinomics—by which I mean the combination of deregulatory zeal, deficit obsession, free tradeism and general coziness with fat-cat Wall Street bankers that Rubin epitomizes.

Can’t we just give this guy an op-ed column at the Washington Post with the rest of the DC fuck-ups and be done with him?

Just Shoot Me

I see Randy Scheunemann posted another idiotic message to Sarah Palin’s facebook page, so I guess we all know what the topic of discussion will be Sunday morning.

Open Thread

Pens hockey tonight.

BTW- a quick update on the bird feeder obsession. I’m now up to four feeders- one in front and three in the back, and I have quite a chirpy posse these days. My latest addition was one like this that I filled with sunflower seeds, and the cardinals are all over it.

And the craziest thing is my favorite birds to watch are actually the ones who don’t care about the feeders- the robins. I like how they just sort of hop around doing their thing then WHAMMO- out of nowhere a worm gets it. They don’t even see it coming. I saw a robin eat a worm so big this morning it could have been a snake.

Wait For the Seamless Transition

Here we go:

Federal and state officials criticized BP on Friday for what they said was an inadequate response to the growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They urged the oil company to do more to stop a leaking undersea oil well 50 miles offshore as floating crude oil imperiled the fragile marshes of the Gulf coast.

At an afternoon press conference with other officials in Louisiana, Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, said he told BP officials and engineers at their command center in Houston “to work harder and faster and smarter to get the job done.”

“Those responsible,” he added, “will be held accountable.”

The disaster began with an explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig last week, which sank the rig and left 11 people missing and presumed dead and three more critically injured. The well the rig was drilling, 5,000 feet below the surface, is now leaking oil at a rate of about 5,000 barrels a day.

The rig was owned and operated by Transocean under lease to BP. Under federal law, BP must pay the cost of containing and cleaning up the oil.

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who also spoke at the news conference, was forceful in his criticism of the company’s efforts to cope with the disaster.

“I do have concerns,” he said, “that BP’s current resources are not adequate to meet the three challenges we face.” For one, he said, the company had not managed to stop the well from leaking. For another, he said, the floating booms being used by the company had not been effective in halting the progress of the slick.

You all know what is going to come next, don’t you? After spending a few days getting no traction calling the oil spill in the Gulf “Obama’s Katrina,” it is going to be most excellent watching the usual suspects pirouette and attack Obama for being too hard on the oil industry.

Also, place your bets on which Sunday bobblehead will still attempt to call this “Obama’s Katrina.” My money is on David Gregory, as always.

Hard Times

I guess the NY Times has finally run out of gangster bankster sob stories and now is profiling the financial woes of actual gangsters:

This is Joe DeFede, a retired New York gangster who oversaw the rackets in the city’s garment district in the 1990s, a perch that provided him with a Cadillac, a driver, three horses stabled at Aqueduct and a home entertainment system columned in the style of ancient Greece. Like many mobsters, he walked through life with dignity and pride and, usually, with several thousand dollars in his pocket.

These days, though, he walks with a faltering step of age and with the weight of financial worry. After a five-year prison stint, legal fees and the crushing costs of creating a new identity — he entered but then left the witness protection program — the boss is almost broke. He and his second wife, Nancy, live on an annual income they said was not much more than $30,000: Social Security, a modest annuity and her pension from 20 years of working in a bank.

“That’s the fear we got,” said Mr. DeFede, 76, a slight man with a bookmaker’s grin who is known as Little Joe. “We try to keep our payments up” — for the car, the house, a recent hip replacement — “but sometimes we can’t hack it.”

Or as Mrs. DeFede, 74, explained, “We’re just scraping by.”

Who will speak for Joe DeFede’s out there?

James Pethokoukis? Rick Santelli?

A Fun Fact for Happy Hour Chit-chat…

Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has this Fun Fact about BP:

BP, by the way, is British Petroleum, a descendant of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Iranian parliament asked for a better deal from the AIOC in the late 1940s and early 1950s (they wanted a 50/50 cut of the profits, which was what ARAMCO offered Saudi Arabia). The AIOC absolutely refused. In response, the Iranian parliament nationalized the AIOC holdings in 1951. It was in order to restore Western Big Oil to its Iranian holdings that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, putting the shah back on the throne as a megalomaniacal capitalist dictator and puppet of Washington. The enraged Iranian public overthrew the shah in 1978-79, establishing the Islamic Republic that has been a thorn in Washington’s side ever since. So, BP’s earlier arrogance helped produce our current crisis with Iran, just as it’s current incompetence has produced the massive Delaware-sized oil slick now devouring Louisiana.

As you can see, it is all part of the circle of life.

Cheers

dengre

Kucinich Will Pay

Gawker has posted the guest list for tomorrow’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I would call the gathering, to use a fine British slang phrase, a dog’s dinner, but then we BJers are all responsible pet owners who feed our dogs a well-balanced diet.

Those sensible progressives who’ve been less than entranced by certain of Dennis Kucinich’s “more emo leftist than thou” political gambits can now enjoy the schadenfreude of the Washington Times table:

Dan Snyder
Donovan McNabb
Mike Shanahan
Bruce Allen
Rick Perry
Ben Nelson
Dennis Kucinich
Thad McCotter
Jack Evans
Robert McDowell
Andrew Breitbart

I’m guessing they invited Donovan McNabb expressly to keep Perry from eating Cleveland’s second most notorious ecological disaster as an hors d’ouevre, or possibly to fish His Elfishness out of the pool of Breitbart’s spittle.

Alas, it is almost certain that Jack Evans is not the professional wrestler...

The Most Amusing Spin Ever

Ed Morrisey with an instant classic:

In January, Barack Obama and Democrats insisted that the 5.7% annual growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009 showed that their stimulus plan had set the American economy back on track for rapid growth and job creation. The administration needed a big number for 2010 to allay fears that unemployment would stagnate at the current high levels for the long term. Unfortunately, they didn’t get it, with the 3.2% annualized GDP rate for the first quarter of 2010 falling below analyst expectations…

Ed’s so full of shit he can spin 3.2% GDP growth as a bad thing without even breaking a sweat.

Simply hacktacular.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

If we let gays in the military, there will be videos of men wearing only their underwear and suspenders and a sign that says “STEAM” over their heads as they dirty dance with other men!

Might be time for the military to institute “Don’t Ask, Don’t You Tube”.

*** Update ***

Had no idea Anne Laurie posted this early morning.

Freakonomics

The National Review sure has some strange views on economics. First of all, they now believe that economic growth equals communism (via Brad DeLong).

And then there’s this, from one of John Derbyshire’s bankster friends:

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

I have to wonder if this isn’t a joke, but who can tell these days?

Really- This Is All About Border Security

Race and racism has nothing to do with it:

Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

***

Arizona’s superintendent for public instruction, Tom Horne, has said he’s backing the measure because ethnic-studies programs encourage “ethnic chauvinism”; he’s also suggested that such programs could breed secessionist sentiment among Hispanic students.

Since when is secessionist sentiment bad? Also, apparently accents will soon be verboten:

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

State education officials say the move is intended to ensure that students with limited English have teachers who speak the language flawlessly. But some school principals and administrators say the department is imposing arbitrary fluency standards that could undermine students by thinning the ranks of experienced educators.

Arizona wants to make it clear that the only acceptable accent is a proper German one.

Built to spill

Could this be the same black ops SWAT team that gunned down those grandmas in Illinois earlier today?

Limbaugh laid out his conspiracy theory, “Now lest we forget, ladies and gentlemen, the carbon tax bill, cap and trade, that was scheduled to be announced on Earth Day, I remember that, then it was postponed for a couple of days later, after Earth Day…This bill the cap and trade bill was criticized by hard core environmentalist wackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants, nuclear plant investment, so since they’re sending swat teams down there folks, since they’re sending swat teams to inspect the other rigs, what better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants than by blowing up a rig? I’m just noting the timing here.”

SWAT teams

I wonder if this has legs:

I like to keep track of fables and narratives within the tea party movement, and we learned of a new one this week—the story of the “SWAT team” called out to threaten tea partyers in Quincy, Ill. In the words of Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit:

The SWAT Team was called in today at the Quincy Tea Party Rally … local Quincy Tea Party Leader Steve McQueen was directing protesters when the SWAT team was called in.

The only problem with that? The SWAT team wasn’t called in. Local police, wearing riot gear, briefly marched down the street to clear it for the president’s motorcade.

You know, if these patriots would just agree to be implanted with microchips, maybe they wouldn’t get attacked by jack-booted government thugs so much.

Update. NRO and Redstate are already on it.

Update. Wonkette really captures the enormity of what happened.