Lou Dobbs says he may run for President. CNN has to take him off the air

CNN had a big debate tonight, but turns out they've got a potential presidential candidate within their own network.

Taegan Goddard has a report that CNN's Lou Dobbs is "seriously" thinking about running for President. He's clearly delusional and all that immigrant bashing has gone to his head. It's creepy.

So, Jonathan Klein, now you know. As long as Dobbs is making noises about being a candidate, take him off the air. Let Dobbs launch his campaign from some other platform, not from the perch of his hour long show at CNN. Read More......

Democratic Debate Open Thread -- Round II

The people get to ask questions now. Let's see how this goes....

That first question on Iran was great. Both the mother and the son were very powerful.

Did Joe Biden just say the I-word? Yes, he did.

Now, Hillary has to defend her vote for the Iran resolution. That vote is going to haunt her for the next couple months. She talks about aggressive diplomacy, but that's what she said about Iraq in 2002. Bush is STILL the President and she expects aggressive diplomacy? Come on, Hillary.

NOTE TO CANDIDATES AND THEIR CONSULTANTS: STOP, just stop, saying "This President" and "This administration." Say "George Bush" or "the Bush/Cheney administration." The approval ratings of Bush and Cheney are abysmal. You need to drive home the point that it's Bush who has damaged the country -- not "this president."

Love the guy who smacked the hateful, anti-immigrant vitriol of Lou Dobbs. CNN owns his hatred -- and fosters it, btw.

Richardson is right: Stop demonizing immigrants.

Okay, I'm getting a little tired of pro-Hillary hecklers making noise in the audience any time another candidate tries to call Hillary on something. I don't like it. As Joe noted, it's a very George Bush kind of move. I don't know if Hillary's people have organized this, but it's an effort to censor the candidates and it doesn't look good. And I just noticed in CNN's clips from the debate, Hillary did not get booed or interrupted for going after Obama and Edwards.

Would you require Sup. Ct. nominees to be pro-choice?
Biden: Would require nominees believe in a right to privacy.
Richardson: Wants nominees who believe Roe v. Wade is settled law.
Kucinich: Didn't answer the question.
Clinton: Yes. Have to share my view on privacy. [NOTE FROM JOHN: Oh pleez, what have any of these people done to help promote the right to privacy? Give me a break, the Democratic Congress has totally ignored the issue of privacy for years now - we've begged them to do something, anything, on the issue, and they've dropped the ball for years. They can take their putative support for the right to privacy and shove it.]
Obama: Have to believe in the right to privacy.
Edwards: I would insist that they recognize the right to privacy and that they recognize that Roe v. Wade is settled law.

Oh my God. Idiotic female student sets women's movement back 50 years. Do you prefer diamonds or pearls? Are you insane?

Um, James Carville is a CNN political analyst? Yes. He's also a declared Hillary supporter. CNN doesn't think that's relevant to mention? Come on, guys. Read More......

Dem Debate Live Blog and Open Thread

(NOTE: Joe and I are both blogging in this thread.)

Good God, what is this, a cross between Miss America and the Price is Right? Senator Clinton, come on down!!!!!

Holy cow, this is actually interesting. Hillary and Obama getting into it on health care. My God, it's an actual debate. Oh, never mind - Wolf Blitzer just killed the discussion, the first time we've had a real debate in the debates. Sigh.

Hillary is making faces, she needs to watch that.

And for the love of God, please CNN, let the candidates duke it out. The last thing we need is to stop the fighting and let the smaller candidates jump in. I'm sorry, but America needs to know how Hillary differs from Obama from Edwards, let them duke it out.

Wolf keeps saying the candidates are going to have plenty of time. 1) we really want to hear from the leading candidates the most; 2) stop the damn applause and heckling; and 3) CNN wasted 8 minutes doing nothing at the beginning.

Note to the audience at UNLV: Heckling candidates with whom you don't agree something we expect from Republicans -- not Democrats. Shut up.

"Is that a planted question?" Good one.

How did drivers licenses for illegal immigrants become the dominant issue in the Democratic nomination process? This is one of those stupid distractions that the media LOVES....they can't get enough of this issue.

Richardson thinks human rights trumps national security. Hmmm..... Read More......

We'll be live-blogging the Dem debate at 8pm Eastern

Joe and I hate these debates - too many of 'em, and not real debates. Still, with Obama and Edwards getting increasingly feisty vis-a-vis Hillary, with Hillary slipping a bit in the debate a few weeks ago, and with Obama potentially gaining some momentum, all the candidates might feel forced to shake things up a bit this evening, and that promises good theater :-) We'll be back at 8.

In an unrelated note, please keep sending me your tips. I've been noticing that the number of news tips from our readers has dropped over the past several months. That's a bad thing, since much of our content comes from tips that you guys find in your local papers, on other blogs, etc. So please, feel free to email me your tips. We can't read every newspaper and every blog and every site like boing boing or digg or reddit. We count on you guys for this, so please keep us in mind and send those tips to:

Thanks, JOHN

PS Don't assume that just because a great story is on a big site FLD or DKos or C&L; that we've already read it. If you see a great story, send it to us :-) Read More......

THIS JUST IN: Good news on the telcom immunity front

From Wired:

Civil liberties groups got a stunningly unexpected win Thursday as the Senate Judiciary panel passed their version of the new government spying bill out of committee without including a provision giving immunity to telecoms being sued for helping the government secretly spy on Americans.

The biggest winner from the development is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose suit against AT&T; in federal court would almost certainly have been wiped out by the immunity provision.

The provision - which was part of the version passed by the Senate Intelligence committee in mid-October - was widely expected to make it into the bill, due to the administration's full court press on the issue, the telcos small army of lobbyists and the vocal support of California Democrat Dianne Feintstein. Feinstein's vote was expected to reverse the Dems 10-9 advantage in the committee.

But after a long day of complicated finagling over technical amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and proposed alternatives to total immunity for companies such as AT&T; and Verizon, committeee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) decided to send the bill out of committee without an agreement on immunity.

It's not over by a long stretch, but this means that people like Feinstein who want to give Verizon and AT&T; immunity for having helped the government illegally spy on their customers now need 60 votes to include telcom immunity in the bill (i.e., enough to beat a filibuster). They may have those votes, since Feinstein isn't the only sell out. Still, now each Senator has to go on the record as to whether they support illegal spying on American citizens, and that's a vote that probably even faux Dems like DiFi would like to avoid. Read More......

Incredible Comet Bigger than the Sun

Not politics, but cool. Check it out in the northeastern sky over the next few weeks. And if you can get a good picture, send it to me. More on the story here, and you can find a map of the sky to locate the comet here. Read More......

God bless GOP Senator Larry "Wide Stance" Craig

"My concern is not with myself but with the posteriors of those in the audience" -- Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), on being given an extra 2 min. to speak at today's EPW hearing (Last Call! sources).

Of course this is the guy whose first line at his "I am not gay" press conference was to "thank everyone for coming out today."

Read More......

State Department ordering hand-held lasers to blind Iraqi drivers

Favorite line in the story:

While there is some risk that a temporarily blinded driver might crash into another vehicle, that is considered by the State Department to be a better alternative than the deadly attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent civilians in Iraq.

A better alternative. Killing innocent Iraqis. It's funny they don't like us. Read More......

The writers strike

I canceled my cable TV earlier this year. I was watching too much junk, Comcast made me want to jab a fork in my eye, and, most importantly, I realized that there were really only four shows I really liked . . . and I could get them all online. All legally, all on the network websites, all free. The commercials are shorter, I can watch them anywhere there's an internet connection (waiting in an airport, e.g.), and, best of all, I can choose when. And stuff I don't watch when it comes out, I get on DVD later.

It's hard to imagine this not being the model for future television consumption for many, many people. I was therefore surprised to learn that television writers aren't compensated *at all* for some of this (internet) and egregiously undercompensated for the rest (DVDs).

This is an excellent rundown of the strike details. I hope the union wins (and not just because I don't know if I can handle life without The Office). Read More......

Majority opinion and the gays

In the ongoing ripples of dissent over the recent passage of a major gay civil rights legislation in the US House (ENDA), an interesting issue has arisen as to whether it's ever appropriate to "take a poll" where civil rights is concerned.

The obvious answer is no. You never put the rights of the minority up to the majority. But that's not the issue at hand. The question that's arisen is whether gays should be polled about their own rights, and some in gayland think the answer should be no.

Between the Lines, the gay weekly in Michigan, just published the following editorial about ENDA and a poll the Human Rights Campaign conducted that showed that 70% of gays wanted ENDA to pass (even without language protecting transgender people), and only 16% of gays supported the position of United ENDA, a bloc of groups that wanted to kill ENDA unless and until transgender people were added back in (the reason they were dropped from the legislation is that it didn't have the votes to pass with trans included in this year for the first time ever). Here's what Between the lines had to say:

The day before the vote in Congress, HRC released the results of a poll they commissioned that found over 70 percent of LGBT Americans preferred passing ENDA without transgender protections rather than not passing the bill at all. The poll release was stomach-wrenching in its timing. It read like all the polls used to discriminate against LGBT people through the years. It was a jaw-dropper for this paper and was in appallingly poor taste.

First, as a community we know that principles should never be subject to polls. As a movement we have all struggled hard to fight majority tyranny. Here in Michigan we recentlty felt the impact of such a tyranny in 2004 when the majority of voters in Michigan passed Proposal 2, the anti-gay marriage amendment to our state Constitution. One of our key arguments was that it was patently unfair to vote on minority rights. Why then, should we be expected to embrace the results of the HRC poll as anything other than the majority of LGBT people "voting" away the rights and the very voices of a minority community within the larger LGBT community? We shouldn't accept that, and we don't.

Yes, but. The polls that harm the gay community are not polls of gay people, they're polls of the public at large deciding they don't want to give us rights. That's an entirely different matter from a poll of gay people about gay people and our rights. I mean, it's hard to argue that we're oppressing ourselves by doing what the majority of our own community wants us to do to ourselves.

Some will say, oh no, the poll in question was asking gays what to do about the rights of transgender people - so it is the same comparison, asking a non-trans person to judge what happens to a trans person. Not so fast. The poll was asking gay people if the landmark gay rights bill should be pulled, if their rights should be put on hold for years if not decades, pending the trans community upping its own poll numbers in Congress and nationwide. We were polling gay people on whether gay people should give up their own rights.

Now, that doesn't mean that the majority of the community can't get it wrong. But, to suggest that somehow polling gay people about whether they want to kill their own civil rights bill is the same as polling straight people about whether to pass an anti-gay ballot initiative, well that's just absurd. If anything, gay groups, especially HRC, are criticized most often for NOT listening to gay people at large. The one time they do, their critics now argue that HRC is listening too hard to the public it serves. Methinks someone won't be happy no matter what HRC does. To wit, this criticism of HRC re: ENDA from a Chicago gay paper that says that HRC isn't listening to the majority of gays enough:

Even more sobering is that officials at the Human Rights Campaign gave them [Dem leaders in Congress] the OK to do it [drop trans from ENDA]. HRC, after all, gets a lot of money from the GLBT community—some $25 million a year—precisely to represent us in Washington. That implies that HRC officials would understand GLBT community politics and sentiments and be able to convey those things clearly and forcefully to our allies in Congress.

So now HRC is supposed to do what the majority of the community wants, but when they poll to find out what the majority of the community wants, then that's wrong too.

Putting aside the issue of HRC, which is always an incendiary topic in the community, this issue of polling the community goes to the heart of the ENDA controversy. What does the community - not the activists, not the heads of national organizations and their staffs - but what do real gay Americans who don't live in Chelsea, San Francisco, or other cushy neighborhoods where it's safe to selflessly offer up one's rights for a few decades (it's not that selfless when you're already covered by local civil rights laws and are thus offering up other people's rights and not your own), what do the rest of the gays think? That's a valid question. And it's one that our groups should be asking far more often than they do. Read More......

Comcast sued for interfering with subscribers' Internet access

Hey, at least they weren't spying on them (well, in all fairness, they may have been and we just don't know it.) Yet another reason to believe the Net Neutrality crew. More from AP. Read More......

Australian Santas told not to say "ho ho ho" lest they offend women

Jesus Christ. I mean, Jeebus Schmist. Read More......

Reid may hold pro forma Senate sessions to block Bush recess appointments

Good. Finally something we can applaud. From Roll Call (subscription only):

With just two days to go until the Thanksgiving recess, Democratic leaders once again are considering holding the Senate in a series of pro forma sessions to stop President Bush from using the break to install any of his outstanding executive branch nominees.

The move comes as speculation mounts that Bush will use the period to push through some controversial appointments while Senators are out of town for the two-week period. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could all but block the president from doing so, however, if he opts to call the chamber into nonvoting sessions every three days — thus doing away with an extended recess.

There are growing concerns that Bush is going to jam through some controversial nominees, like his homophobic Surgeon General nominee, with recess appointments (short-term appointments (till the end of next year) that the president can make during a Senate recess without the Senate's approval). Reid is now talking about a procedural move that would keep the Senate in session so Bush couldn't make the appointments. Good. Though it does raise some serious questions as to why Senator Schumer said he just had to vote for Bush's Attorney General nominee, Michael Mukasey, lest Bush appoint an even worse nominee as a recess appointment. It now seems clear that the Democrats had the ability to block such recess appointments. So why did Schumer say that? And why did he vote for Mukasey? Read More......

Terrance has two fathers. He likes them a lot and he sings a song about them.

I'm going to guess this is in the Netherlands. It's like looking at a glimpse of our future. Our very very distant future. It sucks being reminded that in some ways, we're not number one at all.

Read More......

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning all you irresponsible radicals who want to end the war in Iraq and bring the troops home.

Radical and irresponsible are Dana Perino's characterizations of anti-Iraq war Americans, not mine. Most Americans are ready for this war to end, but George Bush wants to keep it going -- on his terms with your money and other people's kids fighting and dying. That's actually the radical, irresponsible position. But, as we all know, Bush world is bizarro world and truth and facts do not matter.

So, here we go. Read More......

Thud! More banking results announced

That's the sound coming from Barclays in the UK who are writing down $2.7 billion of bad business. Every day, more bad news from Big Finance and as much as they say "this is it" they have no idea. The numbers continue to change and probably will continue to bounce around for a while. A bit of oversight and regulation could have limited the pain but for some reason, oversight is viewed as a bad thing with Republicans who would have none of it.

While we're at it, a quick overview of failed GOP policies. Keep it handy as we move into the election year.

- Afghanistan: early success has turned into dangerous environment
- Iraq: black hole of spending, thousands dead, no plan for future
- Economy: Failure to provide oversight crushing US and world economy
- Weak Dollar: More expensive goods, higher gas prices, inflation concerns
- Human Rights: Remember when we used to believe in them?
- Katrina: Let them eat cake
- Taxes: Middle class treated as bank for excessive spending, handouts to rich and corporate America

The list can go on and on and on. Have a go at it. Democrats in Washington need to step back and see what the rest of us see and take action. The Bush and GOP record is a train wreck so why the wimpy attitude? Read More......

Australia responds to the critical question

Which (Australian) political leader would they like to see nude? The earwax guy wins! (Don't view unless you have a strong stomach.)

The survey found 34 percent of respondents wanted to see Rudd, 50, with his gear off, more than double the 16 percent who said the same thing about Howard, 68.

So what's the verdict for the US? Please categorize by political party. Read More......

Le Beaujolais Nouveau Est Arrive!

I know, I know. It's not quite the thing anymore thanks to too many years of pathetic plonk but it's my family duty. My in laws are from the Beaujolais and I was married in the region so this is the year I shall rally 'round the nouveau. I've heard good things about it but won't have a chance to pop open a bottle until tomorrow evening. It's actually an ideal wine to go with the Thanksgiving turkey and as long as I can find something decent for less than 4 euro/bottle, it's the house wine until December when it goes and turns into vinegar or whatever that is.

In the mean time, have fun, keep your red Beaujolais chilled and start dreaming of those yummy turkey and stuffing sandwiches that are only days away. If anyone has a chance to try the new stuff, post your comments. Read More......