BBL.

I have spent some more hours happily OCDing through the Lexicon, adding attributions, cleaning up links, and including such neologisms as PTDB, Green Balloon Juice, Teabuggers, Moderation (Your Comment Is Awaiting)—linked the WP Codex spam list there—and Firebagger:

Firebagger – Unfortunate portmanteau of FDL ‘Firepup’ and ‘Teabagger’, possibly coined by Firedoglake commenter Knoxville in December 2009 to celebrate the new anti-Obama partnership between Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist: “How can anyone seriously support any president as he pulls tom-fuckery on the American people? I’d be more than happy if Obama were to fight for the common good and the best interests of the American people. But he’s not. Till he changes course – and till others in his base see that he’s screwing around for all the wrong reasons and screwing us all over in the process – I’ll speak out against him. Call me PUMA. Call me Firebagger. Call me the last true Progressive standing.” First nutpicked for Balloon Juice here, courtesy of commentor Midnight Marauder.

Too much?

If you want to claim credit for a particular phrase, suggest additions, or criticize my copyediting skills, please do so below. Except for the peculiar line spacing between entries—that’s a FYWP, I’m afraid.

This is pretty interesting. A Washington Post reporter wrote a post that criticized DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee’s cozy relationship with the Washington Post editorial board. The post was taken off the site and the reporter was called on the carpet.

So much for those Chinese walls between the editorial board and the news staff.

Sorry to inflict my Kaplan fixation on you so long after the cocktail hour, but I find this kind of thing fascinating.

This is going into tomorrow’s Washington Post reporter chat, pretty close to word-for-word:

Isn’t it fascinating that the lengthy, amplified, magnified speech of the most powerful man in the world with his big captive audience — in the magnificent room and in smaller rooms all over the country — are outweighed by one man’s headshake and silent mouthing of 2 or 3 words?

And isn’t it ironic that, right when we saw the judge’s minimalist expression that overwhelmed the President’s torrent of words, Obama was railing about the “powerful interests” that would use their great wealth to speak far too much during election campaigns?

Someday, I’m going to learn to write like this, no matter how much box wine I have to drink.

Take it away, Bad Horse’s Filly:

Really? Another week has come and gone? It’s been a busy one, a productive one, but it went by too quickly. Because my schedule has been a bit crazy, you’ll notice someone has joined the What’s 4 Dinner Solutions’ team to help out – JeffreyW has already added some great cooking experiences and even better, pet pix! Check out his posts if you haven’t already.

On the board tonight:

Spicy Chicken Stew
Sweet Potatoes w/Apples
Tossed Salad
Shortbread

Click the link for recipes and shopping list.

And congratulations, JeffreyW… I, for one, welcome our new four-footed overlords pinups.

I went to a New York State artisanal spirits tasting this afternoon. I know next to nothing about hard liquor, so I learned a lot about distillation. I still don’t understand the difference between the tails, and the head, and the heart, but at least now I understand why vodka gets distilled to 190 proof while eau de vie gets distilled to 140 (water is added to get them both down to 80-90 proof later).

The stand outs of the tasting, for me, were the apple vodka and apple jack from Harvest Spirits and plum eau de vie from Mazza Chautauqua. These are pretty tough to find, in general, but Harvest Spirits is at all the big NYC liquor stores (Astor, Sherry, etc.). It’s unique stuff—the vodka has a buttery taste up front and a definite but dry-and-light apple taste throughout.

Probably the most exciting part for me, though, was meeting the guy who writes Spirits Review, Chris Carlsson. I’ve been reading the site for months and was sold as soon as I read this review of Bluecoat Gin:

If I could I would replace my blood with this.

It’s a great site—as far as I can tell, it’s the best place to get honest information about hard liquor (I like F. Paul Pacult for bourbon, but not as much for other spirits).

It turns out Chris Carlsson lives right around the corner from me and I may try to bring him by here to answer all your liquor questions at some point.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with Sam Alito mouthing “not true” when Obama said the SCOTUS ruling could open the door to an influx of campaign money from foreign donors. If the president bitch-slapped me on national tv, I might mouth something too.

I do have a problem with the disingenuous right-wing push-back on this and with the fact that PolitiFact and Dana Milbank are carrying the right’s water about it. Josh Marshall makes a very good point about:

The president is clearly correct. And it’s only a highly tendentious argument that claims otherwise. But what stands out to me is how sensitive Republicans seem on this point—Alito included. This is an important tell.

(emphasis mine)

I come from a long line of verbal sadists (though I don’t like to think of myself as one) and I know how the game is played—you prick, prick and when someone flinches, you know you’ve hit a nerve and you plunge the needle in as far as it will go.

The Republicans are flinching on the issue of foreign money in elections. Look for Bobo and chunky Bobo to start whining about the xenophobic implications of legislating this issue. That’s how you’ll know it really hurts Republicans.

If Democrats are smart, they’ll hit them so hard they’ll knock their clothes backwards like Kris Kross.

You all fill them so fast, I thought I would put another one up before the night shift checks in.

I see helicopter Ben got another term. Thoughts?

Granted, I am all hopped up on pain meds and I am ignoring the news and just icing my shoulder while watching Chuck S2 and Mad Men S1, so maybe I am just imagining this, but left blogistan seems to be a little bit less angry at Obama than the past few weeks, and some even seem downright hopeful.

I’m not sure whether to attribute this to a positive reception of the still black Obama’s speech, or thanks to the reminders from Alito and others what assholes the Republicans are.

Maybe some of both.

Here’s the Times panel on Obama’s SOTU (via TBogg):

* Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter to President Bill Clinton

* Lisa Schiffren, a speechwriter to Vice President Dan Quayle

* Alan Schroeder, journalism professor

* William F. Gavin, a speechwriter to President Richard Nixon

* Jonah Goldberg, National Review

This is just sad, from the Dickwhisperer:

Rochester, NY: Listless is right!

Where is the fire that we so often heard from the previous president? Where are the memorable lines “axis of evil”, “Mission Accomplished”, “git r done”? Can we attribute the lack of powerful rhetoric here to the fact that your brilliant colleague Michael Gerson isn’t writing the speeches anymore?

Dana Milbank:

A word I heard in the gallery last night for the speech was “Clintonian,” and I think that’s right. Clintonian in a bad way (its excessive length) and Clintonian in a good way (smart politics).

Apparently Apple released a product yesterday.

So how is it? For obvious reasons, Im unable to enjoy it atm.

Well, I was hoping that Obama would outline a clear plan towards wrapping up HCR that could rally Congress to finish the job and move on. I feared that Obama would pare back expectations with some plan involving splitting the bill or negotiating with Snowe. As far as I can tell neither happened.

Things could change again by the time you read this, but for now Nancy Pelosi claims to have enough votes for the Senate bill if the Senate reciprocates (and maybe if it doesn’t; that was not clear). That leaves Reid’s reconciliation whip count as the one major question left up in the air. If you have limited time, probably the most important call you can make today is to let both Senators know that we need a reconciliation deal now. Time will not do the bill any favors. We particularly need calls from readers in key states like Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia and Montana.

Mcc has the whip count here. Share your experiences in the comments.

The switchboard: 202-224-3121.

This is kind of shocking, and then again, it isn’t surprising at all:

Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency’s intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC’s Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

***

Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Whoops! My bad! I was just talking out my ass!

I wonder when all-around cretin Michael Goldfarb will get around to issuing corrections at the Weekly Standard?