Surprise! Romney now flip-flopping on criticism of Bush

Gee, that didn't take long. It was only - what? - two, three weeks ago that Romney eviscerated Huckabee for criticizing Bush's Iraq strategy. (I believe Romney said that Huckabee had "insulted" Bush.) Oh what a difference a few polls makes. With his campaign beginning to flounder, Romney is suddenly America's greatest critic of George Bush.

Mitt Romney has always been at war with Eastasia. Read More......

Kucinich endorses Obama, kind of

From Hotline On Call:

Democratic Presidential candidate and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich opened the New Year by publicly asking his Iowa supporters to vote for him in the caucuses this Thursday, and suggesting that if he did not make the 15% threshold, their second ballot should be for Senator Barack Obama.

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First sunset of the New Year

(Click images to see larger version.) Read More......

Merrill Lynch seeking a few billion more

But whatever you do, don't call it a rescue fund or critical cash injection or bailout or anything like that. They assure us that it's only a few bucks from China or the Middle East that are needed to bolster their reserves and in no way should be considered a bailout or sign of their incompetence with billions of dollars. No sir, not at all.

Wall Street keeps telling customers that sure, they've lost some money but everything is OK. They have plenty of cash on hand and can withstand such horrendous losses but moves like this say otherwise. Read More......

AP:"Huckabee may have gone too far"

Wow, an entire Associated Press story about how Huckabee may have made a fatal gaffe yesterday. The thing is, AP didn't quote outsiders saying this, they did their own election analysis, God bless them. They actually wrote a real news story, acted like real journalists, and analyzed the news rather than just regurgitating press releases in a never-ending contest of he-said-she-said. From AP:

Mike Huckabee may have finally gone too far.

After running an unconventional, surprisingly strong and sometimes strange race to the top tier of the Republican presidential campaign, the former Arkansas governor topped himself Monday with an eyebrow-raising campaign stunt.

He called a news conference to unveil a negative ad that he had just withdrawn from Iowa television stations because, he told a room full of journalists recording the ad, he had a sudden aversion to negative politics. Quite a convenient epiphany.

More after the jump...

Funny that Huckabee decided at noon that that line was too negative, because he used it six hours earlier during a national TV interview.

He used it on a Sunday news show, too.

And he didn't disavow the line Monday. "I said what I said. I spoke the truth," Huckabee said.

Huckabee has been embracing this fatal consistency for a while. While candidates like Romney simply disavow every past position that might harm their campaign, Huckabee embraces his prior inanities. AIDS may be caused by casual contact? Sure, Huckabee still believes it. It was right to feel sorry for a convicted rapist who then went on to sexually assault and murder two more women (after Huckabee helped free him)? Absolutely. And do we need to take America "back to Christ," screw the Jews, the Muslims, the Catholics and everyone else who isn't Southern Baptist? You betcha.

And Reuters is all over this too:

A staged event may have exposed presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee as a traditional politician rather than a self-described populist whose appeal has propelled him to the top of Iowa's polls....

A Baptist preacher, Huckabee told reporters he had changed his mind about the ad because he wanted to run a positive campaign. But critics said that by showing the ad to the media, he had nonetheless made sure his attacks on Romney would be seen and heard.

Analysts saw political calculation in the act. Some said the incident was only the latest of several gaffes that ultimately would burst Huckabee's surprise bubble at a critical moment in the lengthy presidential campaign.

"It looks slippery and starts to suggest he's not ready for prime time," Stephen Hess, an expert on presidential politics at the private Brookings Institution, told Reuters by telephone.

Hess said a political blooper right before the Iowa caucuses can make a difference "because so many make up their mind at the last minute."

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Pelosi's First Year

AP does an interesting analysis of the boom and bust of Pelosi's first year as Speaker.

Nancy Pelosi crashed through a glass ceiling when she became the first female House speaker a year ago. That turned out to be the easy part.

The reality of leading a bitterly divided Congress at odds with a Republican White House is that victories are difficult and disappointments many. Chief among them for the liberal San Francisco Democrat was failure to deliver on her biggest goal: ceasing U.S. combat missions in Iraq and getting troops on their way home.

I'm really terribly divided on the issue of Pelosi and Reid and whether they are to blame for the past year's losses. Their staff will tell you (and they are correct) that's it's very hard to get conservative southern Dems on board a lot of progressive legislation. It's very hard to get anything passed in the Senate when it's basically evenly divided D and R. And it's extremely hard to override a presidential veto.

I agree with all of that.

But... (More after the jump)... I can't help but get this nagging feeling that if the Republicans were in power they'd know how to handle a recalcitrant president. They'd know what to do with members of their own party who stray far too often. And they'd know how to handle Republicans in Congress who continually defend a president hated in the polls. On each of these points, I think our guys are lacking. And when I ask myself the question Joe always asks - "What would Karl Rove do?" - I just can't imagine the Republicans being as stymied as we have been the past year. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Republicans are smarter and tougher than our guys. And that needs to change. It's all well and good if we can increase our majorities in the House and the Senate next fall, but we will always be dealing with southern Democrats, obstructionist Republicans, and the majority of our elected officials running for the hills any time they have to vote on an issue smacking of "defense."

I doubt an increased majority in the Congress is going to make many of our members tougher. And it certainly won't make anyone smarter or craftier. And that worries me. Read More......

Shorter Richard Cohen: Lying is okay if you have "experience"

Yesterday I resolved to stop reading stupid WaPo op-eds. That lasted about eight hours, thanks to the . . . let's just say "inimitable" . . . Richard Cohen. He starts out with a huge lie, saying that John Edwards fibbed about the cost of his haircut (whaaa???), which is particularly ironic because the rest of the column is about the problem of lies in politics. It looks like he just threw it in there to have another Democrat along with the subsequent list of (real, actual) Republican lies, which then segues to an entire column about how one Obama misstatement has basically ruined Obama for him. Richard Cohen is very disappointed in you, Barack! Even though it doesn't always bother him when politicians lie. But this time it really did. Following so far? More fun after the jump.

The real entertainment is the following: after describing Obama's statement that there are more young black men in prison than in college as incorrect (which it is [UPDATE: apparently the statement would be true stated either as 1. All black men or 2. All young black men in prison *and on parole or probation*]), he says this: "Ought to be true is not the same as true." Ought? Ought?? This ought to be true? Either Cohen doesn't know what "ought" means, or he has some profoundly weird ideas about what the state of the world should be.

And lest you think this is a rhetorical goof, he follows it up with a truly wankerrific list of further "oughts" -- "After all, it ought to be true that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It ought to be true that he had ties with Osama bin Laden. It ought to be true that aluminum tubes were intended for a nuclear weapons program, and it ought to be true, really, that none of this mattered since what mattered most of all was a larger truth: Hussein had to go and the Middle East had to be urban-renewed for the sake of democracy." Richard Cohen is obviously a very serious person. "Urban-renewed," that's what we're doing in the Middle East. Uh huh.

The finishing touch is when he says that John McCain lies, but that's okay because Cohen knows McCain's character and McCain has a lot of experience. I kid you not -- lying is okay if you have experience and good character, according to the piece. But Obama doesn't have any experience and so his lies mean he's a bad person. Or something.

And just so you know, Richard Cohen is a journalism professor at Columbia. Good times! Read More......

Two days left til the caucus. Momentum and turnout are what matter.

As I said yesterday, I'm skeptical of many polls from national outlets at this point. But, the Des Moines Register poll is highly respected. For the past couple days, the national media pundits have been drooling over this new poll -- and what it would portend. (Many of them have been spun by the different campaigns -- and spun hard.) So, this poll is what it is. At this point, the campaign is about momentum and turnout. It remains to be seen how the Des Moines Register poll impacts either. But, this is what many Iowans woke up to this morning:
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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

It's 2008. Finally. This is the last year of George Bush's reign. It's been a long, long time coming. And, who knows what he can still wreak upon us. But, it's coming to an end. As much as Bush has destroyed our constitution, even he won't be able to wrangle an extension of his term. (He may try, but it won't happen.)

We've got a long, ugly campaign ahead of us. But, we will have a new President this year. Let's just all resolve to make sure it's not another Republican.

The fact that it's Bush's last year is reason enough to say: Happy New Year.

Have at it. Read More......

Germans moving away from TV

Fewer viewers in 2007 compared to the previous year. With the worthless junk and endless commercials (that leave about five minutes of viewing in a thirty minute show) it's no wonder people are looking elsewhere. There were discussions about this the other day in the comments, where some are also rejecting the system and just looking for a DVD or online when they want to watch something. It's an archaic model that will die on the vine if it doesn't modernize. There can be some good programs, but they're often lost in the mix of junk piles.

Even with TV being included with my internet/phone service (€30/month for everything including unlimited land line calls around the world), we just stopped watching. We know others who have done the same because they too became fed up with the rubbish on offer. The TV networks became much too greedy with their commercials and mindless junk so they have no one else to blame besides themselves. Who could have imagined this change happening just a few years ago? Read More......

Happy New Year, I guess

I love holidays. But New Years has never felt like a real holiday to me. Not sure why. Whatever. Read More......