A couple paragraphs in to his column today, we get the following from Dana Milbank:

For Obama, a former president of the Harvard Law Review, the response to the Under-bomber has been a veritable Review Revue. And it’s not just a semantic thing: His instinct when facing all types of problems—Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Fort Hood shootings, the pending Gitmo closing—has led him to the same approach: Order a review. It is a hallmark of his governing style.

Arguably, this is exactly the type of leadership a president should provide, cool and deliberate even in a crisis. After eight years of seat-of-the-pants leadership, calm reflection and reasoned action has much to recommend it; if Dick Cheney were president today, we might already have invaded Iran to punish al-Qaeda for training the accused Nigerian bomber in Yemen.

Milbank then spends the next two pages mocking reviews and “cool and deliberate” leadership, informing us that Obama lacks the necessary fire and anger.

Richard Epstein tells us what we need to do to fix our ailing economy:

At this point, it won’t work to reaffirm the deadly triumvirate that drives this misery: tax the rich, greater local control over real estate development and special privileges for organized labor. What’s needed is to break from the past with some unimaginative, but necessary, New Year’s resolutions in the areas of taxation, real estate and labor.

On taxation, don’t play the mug’s game of imposing ever higher marginal tax rates on ever lower amounts of income. Play it smart for the long haul. Low-income tax rates (and no estate taxes) will attract into states and communities energetic individuals who would otherwise choose to live and work elsewhere. Treasure their efforts to grow the overall pie. Don’t resent their great wealth, but remember the benefits their successes generate for their employees, customers and suppliers. Repudiate the politics of envy for the social destruction it creates. Don’t fret about the states and communities left behind. Let them adopt the same sound policies to keep people at home. The outcome won’t be a zero-sum game. Enterprise is infectious. Open markets are the rising tide that raises all ships. High taxation is the tsunami that sinks them.

***

None of this activity costs the public a dime. All of it will increase tax revenues and reduce administrative expenses. The best test of a good policy is whether it is sustainable over the long haul. We know now that the progressive regime flunks this key test. At this point, all good libertarians can only take cold comfort that they have fought these destructive policies tooth and nail. In today’s overheated environment, our New Year’s resolution can be summed up in two words: deregulation now.

Tax cuts and deregulation- who could have thunk it!

This is kind of fascinating:

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years—farther than ever before in time and space—to reveal a “primordial population” of galaxies never seen before.

“The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday.

“This makes Hubble a powerful ‘time machine’ that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago—just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang,” the institute said in a statement released Tuesday.

Interesting stuff.

Probably will preserve the seat for D’s.

This year, he swore, he was going to come out of the shell he’d constructed, expand his horizons, get rid of all the old baggage encumbering his forward progress…

(Further explication: National Geographic)

A friend who used to work for another Dakota Senator writes:

Fuck! I bet Pomeroy doesn’t even run.

In ND, a popular, well-liked Republican with a good track record will beat pretty much any Democrat. Dorgan won an open seat to get in. Conrad squeaked by an asshole (Mark Andrews) in a semi-upset. Never seen even a good D beat a decent R in an open election in my lifetime in either Dakota.

But, goddamit, once they get in they fucking stay in for life. That’s just part of the deal, D or R. Karl Mundt, Nixon’s right-hand man on the HUAC, was in a fucking coma for half of his last term after he got into the Senate. Quentin Burdick died in office, like a real man, after forty-fucking-two years in the Senate. Tim Johnson’s brain fucking exploded and he can barely talk, but he ran for re-election and won.

Dorgan has always been a prissy little bitch. He wasn’t man enough to run against Andrews, so Conrad went for it and won. Fucking Byron had to sit around and wait for Burdick to die before he could sack up and run.

He should have been making a smelly puddle in his Depends before he even thought of retirement. What a sorry excuse for a politician.

The Democrats should snatch that ridiculous fucking toupee off of his square farmboy knothead, burn it in the middle of the mall, bury the ashes and have the rest of the caucus piss on the spot.

NO MORE HIKING. Especially with young co-eds.

I’m cranky, so it is probably just better if I don’t blog.

BTW- now that Dorgan announced his retirement from the Senate, do the HCR bill-killers still want a do-over?

Posted without comment.

While I disagree with Amy Argetsinger’s response to the Gannon question- they should have made it a bigger story and made it easier for people to understand, because cronies in the press corps throwing softballs is far more of a threat to the way our country runs than two idiots who make it into a WH dinner- I don’t really think it is fair to pile on her (not that DougJ was) or single her out for criticism. After all, Amy Argetsinger is not an investigative journalist- she is a writer for the Style section and co-author of the Reliable Source column, which is a gossip/around-the-town/politicians as celebrity kind of thing.

Not that DougJ’s spoof questions weren’t funny in their own right, because they were, but the problem is not that Amy Argetsinger is talking about the dinner crashers, because that is what she is PAID to do- that is her beat. Mocking Amy for covering the Salahi stuff is like mocking Robin Givhan for discussing the Michelle Obama’s arms. At any rate, the real problem is not Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, but that we have so many other alleged “journalists” stepping all over Amy and Roxanne’s turf. If I were them, I’d be pissed.

Full disclosure- I’ve had several email conversations with Amy, and she is a pleasant person as far as I can tell.

Politico editor John Harris responds to Greg Sargent about the fact that the Politico now serves primarily as an unquestioning conduit for Dick Cheney’s crazed ramblings:

1. I thought the Cheney comments were newsworthy, which is why they drew such notice by other news organizations and columnists. In fact, it seemed to me that the people who found Cheney’s comments most objectionable were the ones who found them most newsworthy.

2. If you look at the other stories we ran at the same time as the Cheney quote there was a Josh Gerstein piece leading the site comparing Obama’s response to Bush’s after the 2001 shoe bomber and debunking the notion that Obama’s response was more sluggish. We also had a piece looking at GOP politicization of national security.

3. Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do. Also in December we had a long Q and A with the other prominent former vice president Al Gore. That story might also have looked to some like providing an uncritical platform if you viewed it only isolation.

Sargent says:

It’s simply a fact that it does good big picture stories that change the conversation, and that it breaks news useful to both sides. But it’s unclear why Cheney’s continuing attacks on Obama as weak should continue to be deemed news, or why scrutiny of GOP strategy in other cases (or the Gore interview) should make it okay that Cheney is constantly given a free pass. My bet is even some at Politico see the constant elevation of Cheney as too cozy by half.

Here’s what I would like to know: was Spiro Agnew given this much airtime to blast the Ford and Carter administrations? I realize Agnew was actually forced to resign while Cheney wasn’t, but they are fairly similar figures in many ways.

Update. Maybe Agnew’s not the best comparison, given that that was too close to Watergate. Maybe Aaron Burr?

Remember when the WH asked folks to send them information of people lying about HCR so they could correct the record. Do you remember the freakout? At any rate, here was Big Government/Big Hollywood’s Andrew Breitbart on Glenn Beck theorizing what was going on:

Breitbart: Well, what people need to understand here is that they’re being community organized. And the White House absolutely understands how the Internet works, and understands that there are countless blogs, Media Matters, the Daily Kos, which are collecting information and putting out the disinformation.

What the White House wants to do is create a hierarchy of who its enemies are. Every week, or periodically, they meet with the netroots. And the netroots acts as an action gang that can go out there and attack the enemies of the president and attack the enemies—the, the, the people who would attack his plan.

So it is vital for this White House to find out who its enemies are, and then to sic its gang of netroots people on the American people.

Now here is Big Government/Big Hollywood’s Andrew Breitbart last night:

Since we have no information on how to hunt down the “other” Bertha Lewis — Ms. Psaki wouldn’t reveal who she is, citing “privacy concerns” — Big Government will err on the side of prudence and grant the White House its side of the story. I did ask Smith to find out biographical details on the other Wright, Ayers and Shabazz, but apparently privacy concerns apply to them, as well.

I end with this question: What is the point of the White House issuing visitor logs if those named can’t be identified and verified? “Transparency” would seem to call for nothing less, especially when those innocent people could easily be confused with the head of an organization recently defunded by Congress, a controversial preacher who shouted “God Damn America,” and an unrepentant domestic terrorist.

To review- having citizens email the White House when someone is lying so they can correct the record = unleashing the thugs. Providing names and addresses of private citzens who visit the White House so Breitbart’s morans can, in his words, “hunt [them] down” = no big deal.

Big clown.

I just slipped this question into a WaPo chat—can’t tell if the guy knows I’m kidding or not:

Cape Cod, Mass.: Does al Qaeda represent the same kind of existential threat to our way of life that the Salahis do? Imagine if the Salahis had been packing suitcase nukes or if they knew kung fu? We could have been looking at something far worse than 9/11, don’t you think?

Ed O’Keefe: The Secret Service at least has said that they take all threats—no matter who they come from or how they happen—equally seriously. And any mistake is detrimental to the agency’s mission and VERY embarrassing.

There’s also an ENTIRE CHAT devoted to the Salahis on WaPo at noon. I’m objectively pro-reporter-chat so I don’t mean that as a criticism.

But the last few weeks of SalahiGate coverage has been giving me flashbacks to Socksgate, Travelgate, and all the other very important scandals of the early ‘90s. Maybe I’m overreacting.

Update. He took this one too:

Re: Brit Hume: Have you seen any polling data on how the public would feel about waterboarding Tiger Woods? It seems to me it’s the only way to find out what he really did and didn’t do.

Thanks—I’ll be impressed if you take this one.

Ed O’Keefe: Nothing on waterboarding, but I think it’s noteworthy that several national polls—Post/ABC and Gallup—did poll Americans on their opinions of the Woods scandal. It’s like the polls had a BIG impact on AT&T and others that have dropped Woods as a spokesperson.

Imagine if national polls did this all the time! Would CBS cancel Charlie Sheen’s “Two and a Half Men”?

Update. I realize this is self-indulgent of me, but one more question I got into the second chat:

How big a scandal?: On a scale of 1 to 10 of Washington scandals, with 10 being the most important (say, Travelgate or Lewinskygate) and 1 the least important (say, torture, politicization of the DOJ, and all the bogus intel leading up to the Iraq war), where does Salahigate fall? I’m thinking about an 8.

Amy Argetsinger: Hmmmm…

Update. One more:

Baltmore, Md.: How come these kinds of made-up scandals afflict Democratic presidents so much more than Republicans? It’s really difficult for me to see how this is any worse than the saga of Jeff Gannon?

Why the weird double standard?

Amy Argetsinger: A guy of dubious credentials getting into the press corps is a story—and it WAS a story, just not as big a story as the Salahis, which I’d argue is both in proportion to their proximity to the president (the Salahis got a whole lot closer)... and also reflective of the fact that the Salahi story has a visceral appeal to a lot of readers. The Gannon thing is a little inside-baseball (most beyond-the-Beltway Americans don’t really know or care who gets to be in the press corps), while the idea of crashing a state dinner—which is supposed to be both exclusive and secure—has a significance easier to comprehend.

I’m pretty sure a lot of the other questions are from you guys, but I’m not sure, so let me know in the comments.

Have at it.

I’m not linking but Kaplan has a big Sally Quinn piece calling for the head of Desiree Rogers. It’s pretty fucking comical:

Obama has had some real successes this fall. He did a masterful job of bringing together incredibly disparate positions to craft a strategy for Afghanistan. He put himself on the line and will probably come up with a reasonable health-care plan. He left Copenhagen with at least promises of cooperation from other world powers regarding climate change. But he is not getting credit that he deserves because he is being ill served by those around him who will not step up as needed and take the fall for him.

The president needs to start making that happen. The first step would be to accept the resignations of Sullivan and Rogers today.

That’s right, folks—global warming, health care reform, and a couple of nuts crashing a state party dinner are all equally important issues.

But take heart, none is as important as a president getting a blow job from an intern.

I can’t do this justice, but Digby and Bob Somerby probably can.