I’m sure this is all Obama’s fault, too:

In a win for the banking industry, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on Friday to reject a measure that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to change the terms of mortgages for distressed homeowners.

Known as “mortgage cramdown,” the measure was defeated in a 188-241 decision as a proposed amendment to a broader financial reform bill expected to win House passage later on Friday.

The House had approved a mortgage “cramdown” measure in March over the objections of Republicans and bank lobbyists, but it died in the Senate.

Mmm. Blue dogs. Against the bailout, against preventing another crash. The rest of the bill passed, though. Now we send it to the Senate where Presidents Lieberman, Nelson, Baucus, and Conrad can neuter it beyond recognition.

I’m sure you will be surprised to learn that Bart Stupak voted against the overall bill. Apparently one of his other firm principles beyond opposing abortion is turning a blind eye to the bankers.

A kiss on the lip with tongue to Mitch Daniels from the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein:

The good Mitch, by contrast, is a principled but practical conservative who respects the intelligence of voters and would rather get something done than score political points. Daniels is a genuine fiscal conservative who took a $600 million state budget deficit and turned it into a $1 billion surplus but managed to do so without cutting spending for education and even increased funding for child welfare services. He pushed hard to lower property taxes but didn’t hesitate to propose temporary hikes in income and sales taxes to keep the state in the black. He privatized the state’s toll road and then used the $4 billion proceeds to launch a major public works investment program.

Tellingly, both Mitches like to talk about the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Washington Mitch conjures the image of long lines and uncaring bureaucrats and asks, cynically, whether you want folks like that determining your medical care. The Indiana Mitch, by contrast, rolled up his sleeves and transformed his DMV into an efficient, consumer-friendly operation.

Pearlstein spends a bit of the time comparing Daniels to Mitch McConnell, who if you remember, had a closer than expected race last election.

But the real problem is this- Daniels is concerned with good governance because he actually has to govern. He is accountable for his actions. Republicans in the House and Senate aren’t, and they couldn’t care less about governance, let alone good governance. Anything that goes wrong, they will just blame on Obama and the Democrats. Hell, they spent the first few months of this year blaming the DOW on Obama, a tactic that got dropped as soon as the DOW recovered.

Add to it that if Daniels were running in a house seat, the idiot teabaggers would probably work to oust him because he did raise taxes. As one of the wingnuts admitted yesterday, even St. Ronnie of Reagan would not pass the purity test these days. Add to it the completely rigged House seats where only the most extreme candidates on either side stand a chance, where screaming “You lie” in a join session of Congress gets you millions in campaign funds, and you whittle away any and all Republicans concerned with governance.

Add to that a Senate held hostage by ridiculous rules that a small group of corporate whores “moderates” exploit to funnel money to their states and to shake down the lobbyists, and you end up with what we have now. When the Republicans get back in power one day, it will be back to business as usual- tax cuts and praising Jesus. They won’t be led by a group of good government conservatives, and this is even assuming Pearlstein is even right about Daniels.

Patrick Power, Le Gout.

Dayv, Pigeon on a wire.

Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.

Click on the photos for a link to the photographer’s website. To see all photo threads, click on ‘photo blogging’ at the bottom of the post.

If your computer cannot read our email links at top right, my email is (remove the zeroes): portus0jackson0ii at yahoo dot com.

The Politico dedicates two staff reporters to a multiple page piece on President McCain as a critic of Obama’s.

Because that is new and original, and unlike the six months and several hundred million McCain spent in 2008 criticizing Obama.

The newest Red State offering:

Lately, we have collectively been saying a lot of people are conservatives, the noun, when we should be saying they are conservative, the adjective. Here is a good example:

George W. Bush is not a conservative. He is conservative, but not a conservative. While Christianity has certainly always defined who George Bush is, conservatism has not. Put another way in which I think we can all agree, George W. Bush’s gut instinct is a conservative one, but the fiber of his being is not that of a conservative.

I don’t mean to pick on a President I like, but it was Rush Limbaugh in 2005, who was the first real conservative (noun) to say George W. Bush was not a conservative, but had conservative instincts.

Here is where the trouble comes in — there is no rule to separate between the two. Congressman Kevin Brady sent out a press notice yesterday that said “House conservatives,” not “House Republicans”, would hold a press conference on the debt ceiling. The congressmen involved were Steve Scalise (R-LA), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Kevin Brady (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), John Shimkus (R-IL), Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Jack Kingston (R-GA), Mike Conaway (R-TX), John Fleming (R-LA), Eric Paulsen (R-MN), Chris Lee (R-NY), and “other House Conservatives.”

I am sure that each of these men is in some way conservative, some absolutely are conservatives, see e.g. Jeb Hensarling, but they are not all one of us. Several on the list are not by definition conservatives, but are by definition Republicans — it is the party that defines them and conservatism only describes one aspect of their being, some more than others.

I suppose we are now at the stage of the purges that the conservatives (noun or adjective, take your pick) are just a few weeks away from secret handshakes and hierarchy that most closely resembles not a political ideology, but the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

The Browns. Seriously.

Losing Bryant McFadden is turning out to be the worst player decision the Steelers have made in a long, long while.

Matt Taibbi has a big piece titled “Obama’s Big Sellout ” in Rolling Stone that people are sure to be talking about. There is a lot to quibble with—most notably, his claim that Rubinites didn’t like the stimulus package because they favor deficit reduction (I have never heard this and it’s naive to think that generally favoring deficit reduction means that you would oppose traditional Keynesian anti-recessionary measures in the teeth of a severe recession). He also doesn’t go into the details of the bail-out enough (I think it only makes sense to discuss it in the context of how much money the government will actually lose on it). But this part is striking:

While Rubin’s allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama’s meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America’s never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel “Siberia.”

Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had “excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system.” That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn’t even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.

What I’d like to know is if President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board really is “Siberia”. I have no idea what the answer is.

Steelers are 6-7 and lost to the Browns. I now can not watch Sportscenter for the fifth week in a row.

At least we have the Pirates.

I think I am going to bed until August.

And you know- good on the Browns and good for their fans. They played like an NFL team, unlike the Steelers. But as much as the Steelers sucked, the Browns d was great and their offense did not turn over the ball.

Thank you, Bad Horse’s Filly:

A little bit of comfort food (at least Ravioli is in my house) for what has been a very cold and busy week. I make fresh pasta for special occasions – my spinach lasagna being one of them. I have only made fresh ravioli once, and once was enough. Much like making my own steamed dumplings, effort vs. reward is definitely unbalanced. Especially when with a little bit of experimentation, you can find really good fresh or frozen ravioli at a reasonable price.

On the board tonight:

1) Ravioli w/ Rosemary Basil Cream Sauce
2) Tomato-Zucchini Confetti
3) Tossed Salad
4) Sorbet or Gelato

Click on the highlight for recipes and shopping list.

Five sacks, stupid penalties, no offense, we can’t stop the run, and are being outgained by a wide margin in total yardage by the worst team in the NFL (although now that we are poised to lose to the Browns, have lost to the Raiders and the Chiefs, we might own that title now).

This about sums up the mood in the Cole household:

It isn’t just that we are losing, but that we are just really, really bad. I mean, bad as in Pirates bad, where it isn’t even fun to watch the game.

You probably all already saw this on Washington Monthly, but since we pride ourselves here on making fun of Randers, we would be remiss if we didn’t pass this along:

Lloyd Grove: Tell me a little bit about what the show is going to be.

John Stossel: It will be one subject. The first subject will be maybe Atlas Shrugged or global warming—Atlas Shrugged because I think 50 years ago, Ayn Rand predicted today. It sort of sums up what I’m going to be reporting about.

Lloyd Grove: Ayn Rand predicted what?

John Stossel: Big government, nice-sounding legislation like “The Preservation of Livelihood Law,” which mandated that Hank Rearden’s production must not be bigger than any other steel mill, to make it a level playing field. It’s silly.

Lloyd Grove: Is that a new law passed by this Congress?

John Stossel: No, but it’s what Wesley Mouch, the evil bureaucrat in the book, passed. And what Tim Geithner and what Barney Frank might like to pass.

Not that I like Ayn Rand’s work, but even it deserves better than this.

The Salahis came in and trashed the place and it wasn’t their place (via Digby and Atrios):

When Ms. Salahi sidled up to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., she was faking a friendship she didn’t have. She was also cutting ahead of thousands of people who spend years trying to win entry into gatherings of Washington’s elite.

“At most parties in New York or Los Angeles, a bouncer will make a snap decision about whether to let you in depending on your looks or some shtick that that sets you apart,” says Juleanna Glover, a Washington hostess and a founder of the Ashcroft Group, a legal and consulting firm. “In Washington, there are no snap decisions. It’s a lifetime of wise decisions that make it so that you receive a state dinner invitation.”

[.....]

When the Salahis put their collection of digital snaps of the state dinner on Facebook, they flouted all the unwritten rules of power-wall etiquette. (Including a new one that nobody had thought to mention: Don’t put your power wall on Facebook.) As an enhancer of prestige, these photographic menageries always target a certain audience — constituents in the case of politicians, potential clients in the case of lobbyists. It tells those audiences, “I know how to get things done.”

For letting this happen, Desiree Williams deserves to be waterboarded, I’m sure.

Terrible towel- check.
Heath Miller jersey- check.
Beverages- check.
Cat fed- check.
Lily fed and walked and rocking her Steelers collar- check.

I’m ready. The only thing missing is the Steelers 4th quarter defense, which hopefully will show up tonight.

*** Update ***

Also, out of respect to TNC, I’m going to be rocking my ghetto name tonight- Jahn Coale.

I’m begging:

INGRAHAM: Would you agree to a debate with Al Gore on this issue?

PALIN: Oh my goodness. You know, it depends on what the venue would be, what the forum. Because Laura, as you know, if it would be some kind of conventional, traditional debate with his friends setting it up or being the commentators I’ll get clobbered because, you know, they don’t want to listen to the facts.

So help me ALLAH, if Gore sighs once in this debate I will punch him in the neck and kick him in the junk. But wouldn’t you love to see that moron up there just winking and blushing and making shit up?

Tommy: Did you hear I finally graduated?
Richard Hayden: Yeah, and just a shade under a decade too, all right.
Tommy: You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.
Richard Hayden: I know, they’re called doctors.

Make it stop.

*** Update ***

And as I am post this, MSNBC is reading Sarah Palin’s twitter feed. Shoot me.