German TV highlights failings of body scanners

Everyone who flies wants to be safe but again, when will someone provide solid proof that the body scanners are anything other than a huge waste of valuable money. Numerous experts have pointed out the problems yet that doesn't matter for those buying these expensive machines. Even if you don't understand German, it's easy enough to follow how this physicist beat the system. Read the rest of this post...

More chatter on forcing the House to accept the more conservative Senate health care bill

Now you know why many of us were arguing that the Senate bill had to be as good as possible, and why we were so upset that the Democrats didn't fight nearly as hard as they could have for a better bill from the beginning. We wouldn't have needed the conference to fix the bill had we gotten a better Senate bill in the first place. And Tuesday's vote in Massachusetts would have been irrelevant to passing a good health care bill had Democrats on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue tried harder, earlier. We would have finished this legislation months ago, and had a better, stronger bill. The errors compound, and you keep paying for them for a long time coming. More from the NYT. Read the rest of this post...

We're all bed-wetters now

Think about it. Read the rest of this post...

Politico buries fact that pollster predicting Coakley's demise is a former Gingrich staffer

Nice of Politico to let us know, in the sixth paragraph of the story, that a pollster who is claiming that Coakley is in a "free fall" just happens to have worked for Newt Gingrich. Mind you, we're not talking just that he's a Republican. We're talking he worked for a rabid, no holds barred, take no prisoners Republican who would do pretty much anything to win. Nope, no bias there.

Time for a blogger ethics panel.

UPDATE: Brad Woodhouse at the DNC weighs in on why you shouldn't trust this poll:

1. It was conducted in one night -- which is notoriously unreliable
2. It has a 20 percent Republican sample -- which is 5-8 points more than most polls. Obviously skewing the sample more Republican than the electorate is -- is going to skew the result in Brown's favor.
3. The poll was conducted, and the charged quotes in the article are attributed to, a former aide to NEWT GINGRICH -- which Politico pointed in the 6th paragraph.
4. Does anyone really believe -- as this skewed poll shows -- that Brown is going to win 77% of Hispanics and 26% of blacks? Those results alone should ring alarm bells about the accuracy of this poll.

Read the rest of this post...

Health care reform isn't just taking down Martha Coakley, it's taking down gay rights and the rest of the progressive agenda

And to be more precise, it's not health care reform as an issue. It's the way the issue has been handled by Democrats. And I don't mean they haven't been bipartisan enough. From Kerry Eleveld:

[N]ow we find that the exclusive focus on health reform has disillusioned the public as well as demoralized the progressive base because its mandates are so weak – that is the cautionary tale of Coakley.

Wouldn’t it be ironic, if health reform, the issue many LGBT leaders said must pass before we pushed more fervently for equality, became the stumbling block to every other progressive agenda item in Obama’s first term (not to assume a second one).

I'd go even further. It's not health care reform per se, or even the way health care reform was handled. It's health care reform as metaphor writ large for how the Democrats approach leadership and legislating. Weakly. Read the rest of this post...

Gun control groups give Obama an 'F.' I'm not so sure they don't deserve the same grade.

Fair enough, but where have gun control groups been the past ten years?

President Barack Obama received a failing grade from the a gun control advocacy group on Monday.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence blasted the president, whom the group endorsed in 2008, for not having taken significant steps to advance gun control laws.

"It's been a very disappointing year for us, especially considering what he campaigned on," the group's president, Paul Helmke, said during an appearance on MSNBC. "This year they ran away from the issue, and actually signed two repeals of good gun legislation."

Every year or so we have a major gun eruption in this country, whether it's the DC shooter, Fort Hood, Columbine, the shooting at the school in Virginia, the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, and where have the anti-gun groups been to channel the anger and fear over these tragedies into greater gun control? It's time our gun control groups, if they even still exist, started borrowing a page from the GOP playbook. A Republican would know what to do. Then again, the gun control groups are no different than any other liberal advocacy group over the past decade. Missed opportunity is their middle name. Read the rest of this post...

Kuttner on Obama, Coakley, and health care reform

From Robert Kuttner in Huffington Post:

How could the health care issue have turned from a reform that was going to make Barack Obama ten feet tall into a poison pill for Democratic senators? Whether or not Martha Coakley squeaks through in Massachusetts on Tuesday, the health bill has already done incalculable political damage and will likely do more. Polls show that the public now opposes it by margins averaging ten to fifteen points, and widening. It is hard to know which will be the worse political defeat -- losing the bill and looking weak, or passing it and leaving it as a piñata for Republicans to attack between now and November....

As a resident of Massachusetts, in the last two days I've gotten robo calls from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Martha Coakley, and Angela Menino, the wife of Boston's mayor -- everyone but the sainted Ted Kennedy. In Obama's call, he advised me that he needed Martha Coakley in the Senate, "because I'm fighting to curb the abuses of a health insurance industry that routinely denies care." Let's see, would that be the same insurance industry that Rahm was cutting inside deals with all spring and summer? The same insurance industry that spent tens of millions on TV spots backing Obama's bill as sensible reform?

If voters are wondering which side this guy is on, he has given them good reason.

Regardless of what happens in Massachusetts tomorrow, Democrats need to do some serious soul-searching about how it got to the point where we were fighting, tooth and nail, for Ted Kennedy's seat in liberal Massachusetts. And hopefully we can stop with the platitudes about needing to be more bipartisan and needing to move more to the middle. Been there, done that, isn't working, and actually seems to be hurting. Read the rest of this post...

Why did NY Fed work with AIG to suppress disclosure?

If the existing known history of AIG wasn't troubling enough, now there's this. The Geithner-watch is going to heat up quickly if his testimony stumbles on this or other reports related to AIG. People really want to get to the bottom on the AIG bailout and the easy treatment of AIG as well as the rest of Wall Street. Reuters:

The latest emails show a proposed letter to the SEC requesting the withdrawal of the confidential treatment request around March 10, 2009, after some information on payments was reported by media, but the letter was never sent to the SEC.

Instead of withdrawing the confidentiality request, the emails show further exchanges between New York Fed and AIG lawyers, that led to the insurer days later submitting a new confidentiality request. A draft of the request shows AIG asked the SEC to keep secret details about specific securities, their notional values, collateral posted against them and mark-downs in their market values.

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Monday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Today is Martin Luther King Day. The President and First Lady will be participating in a "service event" later today to mark the holiday. The federal government is closed, as is the stock market. In DC, a lot of organizations follow the federal schedule.

Tomorrow is Election Day in Massachusetts. A couple weeks ago, I bet a lot of Mass. voters had no idea that January 19th was the day they'd be picking a new Senator. That worked to Scott Brown's advantage because the teabaggers and Republicans knew. Most people weren't paying attention. Now, people know. And, a lot of apathetic Democrats now know Scott Brown's right-wing record -- and smiling and nodding when a supporter yelled "shove a curling iron up her butt" says a lot about the guy. All this added attention should help Coakley. I'm sure we'll see many predictions and prognostications today.

So, it's a holiday, but there will be news... Read the rest of this post...

Twitter 'joke' leads to arrest in UK

Did the police go too far or did this tweet go past the limits of common sense? The Independent:

When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers's travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. "Robin Hood airport is closed," he wrote. "You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn't see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. "I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post," said Mr Chambers, 26. "I'm the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine."

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Blair's foreign secretary warned against Iraq invasion

Blair has some supporters left, but the list is shrinking. It's going to be interesting to hear what he has to say when he eventually speaks at the inquiry. The Guardian:

Straw, foreign secretary at the time, gave what now seems prophetic advice in a letter marked "secret and personal", 10 days before Blair met George Bush at the US president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002. That was nearly a year before the invasion.

In his letter, about which he is expected to be questioned when he testifies at the Chilcot inquiry this week, Straw warned Blair, then prime minister: "The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few … there is at present no majority inside the PLP [parliamentary Labour party] for any military action against Iraq."

Straw warned of two legal "elephant traps". He said, "regime change per se is no justification for military action", and "the weight of legal advice here is that a fresh [UN] mandate may well be required".

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VIDEO: Scott Brown smiled and nodded as supporter suggested he 'shove a curling iron up her butt' about opponent Martha Coakley

Imagine had a Democrat smiled and nodded because someone suggested you shove a hot curling iron up a woman's ass. Imagine had candidate Obama done this. It would be the end of their campaign. But the media let John McCain and Sarah Palin get away with it when their supporters called Obama a terrorist and suggested that someone kill him. And so far, Scott Brown is getting away with finding it funny when his supporter suggests his female opponent be basically raped with a hot iron. And to think six months ago this was Ted Kennedy's seat.

PS: Before the Teabaggers claim that someone else had yelled something too, so perhaps Brown was smiling and nodding affirmatively about some completely unrelated remark, they'd be correct. Right before the curling iron remark someone appears to suggest that Martha Coakley kill herself. So perhaps Scott Brown was simply smiling and nodding approvingly about the notion that his opponent die.

Hotline has the video:

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