This:

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.

Inouye’s office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up. The Senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.

“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms—with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely.”

A supermajority voted for the amendment, as it passed 68-30, but big business can come in and grease the palms of one Senator and the will of the people is thwarted. And politicians wonder why people have no faith in government or think the government isn’t looking out for the little guy.

Who needs Republicans with folks like this?

And I now have my desktop running Vista at half the functionality it was working at before the “upgrade.” I have no video card drivers and am looking at everything in 800×600 on a 24” lcd, no virus protection, and for some reason or another, my secondary monitor is now recognized as my main monitor. Why?

Why the fuck not? This is Microsoft!

I have a local Italian deli that delivers that is a lot like a Microsoft product. Sure, you can order whatever you want, but you never know what you are going to get. I’ve had an order of wings and blue cheese come as chicken tenders with ranch and a large fry, an order of lasagne and a salad show up as stuffed shells and cheese sticks, and so on. If you point out they have made a mistake, they get huffy and then take two hours to get you the right order. By then you are full on the cold cereal you ate while waiting the three hours for your food to show up.

At any rate, the new plan is to just put everything on my external hd, take this upgrade back to the Best Buy people and throw it at them, and then do a full install of Seven tomorrow.

If any of you rocket scientists at Microsoft want to try and fix this disaster you have created, feel free to email.

Did precisely what I was asked, uninstalled my antivirus, uninstalled itunes, and uninstalled my ati drivers, followed all the instructions, and now my desktop PC is in an infinite loop with Microsoft 7 halfway installed. It restarts, boots to the Windows 7 install screen, sends me an error message that the “install can not be located,” and then reboots. Rinse and repeat.

Heckuva job, guys. I now have a several thousand dollar paperweight.

BTW- That Windows Upgrade Advisor was teh awesome. I like downloading shit that tells me stuff will be fine before installing software that kills my computer.

And not to reignite the Mac v. Windows flame wars, but I am writing this on my MacBook because my windows “upgrade” has left my PC worthless as breasts on men.

Never had a problem with Vista, but am about to upgrade to Windows 7. If you don’t hear from me again, you know why. Also, vote for Little Bitsy:

Every vote counts.

Have any of you heard of this before:

Our plan is to retrace the route of the automotive CEOs who went to Washington DC asking for government loans. But instead of looking for aid, we’d like to present President Obama with a homegrown solution to the transportation crisis. And instead of flying in a corporate jet, we’re riding Brammo Enertia powercycles. We’re just a couple of guys who work for Brammo, but we want to show that there’s a better way to get from Point A to Point B. And we want to have a little fun while we’re doing it. So join us as we surf from plug to plug in a quest to meet Obama, fueled by nothing more than electricity and the kindness of everyday Americans.

I honestly don’t think I have ever heard of an electric motorcycle before. At any rate, looks like they are having fun, although I would think it would be a touch chilly to be on a bike in Michigan. Apparently the bike can travel 15,000 miles on 100 bucks worth of electricity.

If you ever give another cent to NPR, you are a stooge. Here’s their political editor, Ken Rudin (joined here by sob-story memoirist David Carr) with the whole kit-and-kaboodle—- Obama is Nixon, if Bush had done this, imagine how the media would haver reacted, etc. (via Steve Benen)

The problem, of course, is that Bush did do this, and no one in the media (except the specific journalists being attacked) said a word. They don’t even remember it happened.

There was the time the Bush administration attacked Newsweek over a controversial story about the treatment of the Koran at Gitmo. Newsweek backed down.

There was the harsh criticism of NBC news, noted here by Dan Froomkin.

There was the time they included a picture of journalist Ron Suskind in a Republican National Committee email.

There was the time Ari Fleischer told Houston Chronicle reporter Bennet Roth that his question had been “noted in the building”.

Let’s be honest: part of the difference here is that the national media simply doesn’t fear Obama the way it feared Bush. In the end, they’re probably right: Ken Rudin can call Obama “Nixonian” all day without fear of repercussion. If he had said this about Bush, you’d better believe he’d be afraid he’d lose his job.

This made me wonder:

Yesterday saw some rare good news on the health-care front, with the stealth Democratic plan to move $247 billion in ObamaCare costs off the books collapsing in the Senate on a procedural vote of 47 to 53. Maybe there’s more anxiety among Democrats about a huge permanent increase in government health spending than the White House is willing to let on.

A dozen Democrats (plus independent Joe Lieberman) voted against Majority Leader Harry Reid’s gambit, which would have superseded automatic cuts in Medicare payments to doctors scheduled for 21% next year and higher after that. Democrats had included this fix as part of “comprehensive” reform but that pushed costs too high, while President Obama is insisting on a bill that doesn’t increase the deficit on paper.

So Mr. Reid’s inspiration was to decouple these payments from ObamaCare as stand-alone legislation, while hoping everyone ignored the phony budget math. The media did mostly ignore this subterfuge. But enough Republicans developed enough backbone that they spooked Democrats like North Dakota’s Kent Conrad, who for once stood by their supposed deficit-hawk convictions. Notwithstanding the anesthetizing effect of Congress’s now-routine trillion-dollar cost estimates, more than a few Democrats are still capable of sticker shock.

Does anyone remember any op-eds from the WSJ regarding sticker shock for the war in Iraq or the prescription drug plan? I’m honestly asking, because there may have been.

It just sort of cracks me up that one party is basically allowed to do whatever they want, no matter the damage it does to the budget, while another party tries to do the right thing budget wise, and it is continuously used against them.

After Tunch’s Excellent Adventure (aka John Cole’s Very-Bad-No-Good-Terrible-Horrible Evening), possibly I was just primed to pick up this local news story…

In defending her and Jake Tapper’s freak-out over the Obama administration’s decision to begin describing Fox News accurately, Ruth Marcus lets something very telling slip:

One of my sentences provoked particular derision from the left. “Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC,” I wrote. I confess to having forgotten about the Bush administration’s public tangle last year with MSNBC. White House counselor Ed Gillespie wrote to NBC News president Steve Capus complaining about a “deceptively edited” quote from President Bush, but he used the opportunity to complain about other allegedly slanted coverage and “the increasing blurring of those lines” between the “news” as reported on NBC and the “opinion” as reported on MSNBC.

Hissy fit? Well, Dan Froomkin, then a liberal blogger for The Post, cited “the White House’s unprecedented attack on NBC News,” noting what he termed “the White House’s outsized reaction,” and he hypothesized that an infuriated Bush had ordered the attack: “So is it a stretch to suspect that Bush told his counselor to get a little revenge?”

So let’s get this straight, she asks us to imagine an outcry if the Bush administration had attacked MSNBC. Then she admits that Bush did this but she forgot. It must have been quite an outcry! And then she cannot find a single member of the mainstream media that complained about it. Not one! (I’m not sure Froomkin is really a “liberal blogger” but he’s not really part of the regular media, either.)

It would be hard to make my point better than Marcus already made it.

That while half of the beltway media have the vapors over Obama being too mean to Murdoch’s hacks, Chris Matthews is on my television debating with his guests whether or not Obama is “tough enough.”

I think DougJ said it best a while back:

I’m watching Monica Crowley and Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin group and so help me God, I am praying for a dirty bomb in Georgetown.

These people will destroy us all.

Was it always this bad?

When we last visited steely-eyed warrior Peter Wehner, he was leading the chairborne rangers in an epic battle against George Will, who Wehner decided had grown weak at heart over Afghanistan. That was but a few weeks ago, but since then our valiant warrior has left the fields of battle and taken to the fainting couch:

The term “sister organizations” is important because it shows solidarity with a news organization under fierce attack by the White House. This is the kind of question one would hope to see when a president and his top aides target a news organization and then, for good measure, try to dictate to other news organizations what they should do, how they should act, and which stories they should follow. But so far, stunningly, the media — including the White House press corps — have mostly been quiescent. One might have expected more in the face of these extraordinary efforts at media intimidation and media control. If the situation were reversed, and a Republican White House were targeting an entire network in a similar fashion, criticisms, condemnations, and thundering editorials would be pouring forth; terms like “abuse of power” and “chilling effect” would be on the lips of virtually every reporter in America.

A few quick things:

1.) Fox is not a news organization. Period.

2.) Fox news helped to organize and promote partisan political rallies, including situations in which their producers were caught rallying the crowds and their rabble was shouting down and ACTUALLY intimidating reporters from other networks.

3.) Fox is not a news organization. Period.

4.) Peter Wehner worked for the Bush administration. The Bush administration, in eight years, conducted more abuses to the field of journalism than anyone I can recall. A partial recollection of the Bush administration’s wrongdoings include:

-Paying Armstrong Williams, Michael McManus, and Maggie Gallagher and others for favorable opinions about WH policies or to attack opponents of the WH.

-Planting Jeff Gannon to lob softball questions.

-Used reporters to out a CIA agent, then sat by and watched reporters go to jail to protect their sources.

-Fed reporters misinformation about WMD in Iraq, then used those reporters stories as corroborating evidence of the existence of WMD in Iraq.

-treated Helen Thomas like a leper.

-waged a coordinated campaign against NBC.

-kicked all the NY Times reporters off of their planes.

-the Pentagon Pundit program, which sold the war by planting former military officers on networks. Uncovering this story earned a journalist the fucking Pulitzer.

-Staged mock press conferences with FEMA employees pretending to be reporters.

-allowed Ari Fleischer to tell everyone (but directed at journalists) they needed to “watch what they say and what they do.”

And that is simply off the top of my head, and god only knows what lies and abuses Peter Wehner was responsible for while working at the Bush era Office of Strategic Initiatives. By comparison, the Obama White House has merely stated the obvious, which is that the Fox news is not a news organization.

I’m thinking Peter Wehner can just stfu.

This seems like good news:

The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved a bill that would curb the health insurance industry’s limited exemption from federal antitrust laws and would allow Justice Department enforcement in the areas of price-fixing and market allocation.

The approval of the bill by a vote of 20 to 9, with three Republicans joining 17 Democrats in favor of the measure, is the latest sign that Congress is intent on cracking down on perceived abuses by health insurers.

I’ve heard reports that this is “retaliation” for the health insurance companies reneging on their deal, but it just seems to me like something that should be done anyway. Why shouldn’t they be forced to compete? Why should they be allowed to engage in price-fixing?

So far, I can recall Obama being compared to the following figures:

Hitler
Stalin
Pol Pot
Mao
Carter
Bush
Nixon
David Duke

I think now it is time to start the definitive list of people Obama has been compared to, good or bad. Include a link to the comparison.

There’s an incorrect premising underlying all the blather about Obama “Nixon-fying” the White House, namely that Nixon somehow failed politically. Yes, Nixon ended up having to resign, yes, the Republicans did badly at the polls in 1974. But it’s worth remembering that when Nixon got into office in 1968, Republicans had held the White House for any only eight of the previous 36 years (and those eight were Eisenhower, who wasn’t much of a Republican). Between 1968 and 2008, they would hold it for 28 out of 40 years. And this isn’t just post Nixon, ergo propter Nixon reasoning: Republican political success rested largely on gains made among white southerners and non-college educated whites, two groups that Nixon explicitly targeted with the Southern strategy and the politics of class resentment (I recommend reading Steve Pearlstein Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” on this topic).

Nixon won, ultimately. And anyone who sees the way the press cowers before Fox News today (and cowered even more cravenly before Dubya until 2005) knows that the press lost.

It’s great that Woodward and Bernstein took Nixon down. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. If the same kind of report came out about a Republican president today, Fox would be calling the report communism and Halperin and Politico would be spinning the whole thing as great news for Republicans.

The media likes the idea that Nixonian politics were proved a failure when Nixon was driven out of office. But it’s simply not true.

None of this is to say that what the Obama administration is doing with Fox is actually Nixonian. The comparison only makes sense if you equate Beck and Hannity with Woodward and Bernstein.

ABC’s the Note:

“Is President Obama Nixon-fying the White House?” Republicans ask

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who came pretty darn close to becoming a member of the Obama Administration, coined a new word on the Senate floor to criticize the President and his staff.

The man President Obama once nominated to be his Commerce Secretary wondered aloud on the Senate floor if the White House under President Obama is starting to be run like it was under Richard Nixon. “Nixon-fying” is how Gregg put it.

It is a point that is for debate, to be sure.

Do the men who write for ABC’s the Note have sex with barnyard animals, as some suggest? It is a point that is for debate, to be sure! Also, it would be irresponsible to not speculate.

I will give them high praise for excellent use of a Cavuto Mark in the title. But then again, the folks at ABC think Fox’s Neil Cavuto is their brother in arms (you really have to read that), so that is to be expected, I guess.