Ed Schultz to get his own TV show on MSNBC

Just announced.

Veteran talk radio host Ed Schultz joins MSNBC as host of "The Ed Show," premiering on Monday, April 6. "The Ed Show" will air weekdays, 6-7 p.m. ET. The announcement was made today by Phil Griffin, President, MSNBC.

That whole conservative thing is so six minutes ago. Read the rest of this post...

FOX's Glenn Beck compares Obama to the Nazis in Germany

Did he cry too? Look, Beck is an idiot. If he's not screeching about how oppressed he is as a white Christian male, he's busy crying on screen. And now he's discovered that the dime - yes, the American ten-cent piece - is actually secret fascist propaganda. Of course, he's absurd. But he's no less absurd than the crap Rush Limbaugh, the religious right, and the conservatives leading the Republican party spew on a regular basis. They've all, suddenly, picked up the same message - that Big Brother has arrived with the Obama administration.

Clearly, none of these people care about freedom or Big Brother. Otherwise, they'd have said something while George Bush was busy dismantling the Constitution, and illegally spying on American citizens, throughout much of this decade. But Beck and company didn't care about that. They only saw "fascism" once a Democrat got elected to the presidency.

In fact, none of these clowns see fascism. They see money and power - they assume their audience, their voters, are pretty much undereducated morons, so they have to continue feeding them a steady diet of Palins and plumbers - but they also see a way to possibly cripple Obama, and the Democrats more generally. If they keep hitting Obama with the low blows, just as they've falsely claimed for decades that the media was biased, maybe Obama will try extra hard to be their friends, and slowly move to the right politically (just as the media has moved to the right in an effort to fix its faux-liberal-bias).

Remember what Joe and I have told you before. The Republicans will always accuse us of something they're already doing.

ThinkProgress grabbed the video:

Read the rest of this post...

MSNBC: It’s News That GOP Budget Has Numbers In It

Greg Sargent noticed that MSNBC is reporting it as "news" that the new GOP budget has "numbers in it." Read the rest of this post...

Delusional religious right leader attacks Michael Steele, says GOP isn't conservative enough, that's why they lose elections

I do hope the Republican party listens to Matt Barber and his ilk. Perhaps we never have to see a Republican president, or GOP majority in Congress, or conservative appointee to the courts, again in our lifetime.

Today we find an improvident Republican Party lost in the political wilderness. As the GOP seeks to find its own Promised Land – a return to majority leadership – it has, to its own detriment, rebelled against the core conservative principles solemnized within its own party platform....

Liberal Democrats and “moderate” Republicans alike continue to misrepresent voters’ ballot box rejection of today’s “centrist” GOP as an overall aversion to larger conservatism. Frankly, it’s tiresome and a bit embarrassing. In fact, precisely the opposite is true.

Yes, the Republicans lost the White House because George Bush was too liberal. And they lost the Congress because Tom Delay and John Boehner hugged a few too many trees.

At some point, the GOP needs to cut out the cancer in its midst (that'd be you, Matt). The party has spent years building and coddling a ridiculously conservative base, all the while watching its moderate wing wither away on the vine. The result has been a conservative's dream of government - huge tax cuts, numerous wars, massive defense spending, and endless attacks on abortion and gays. And what did it get us? Huge deficits, two quagmires, and a sense by anyone who knows a woman or a gay person that the Republicans are intolerant, angry, and mean.

The ultimate irony of Matt Barber's argument, that the GOP has lost because it went too liberal, is that McCain lost the election, in part, because he went too conservative (though Barber argues, of course, that McCain went too far to the left, and that's why he lost - uh huh). Picking Palin as a running mate was an insane gamble to the right, and McCain checked the moderate nice guy image that he'd been culling for years, and replaced it with an angry old intolerant conservative (remember how McCain suddenly wanted Roe overturned?). And he lost.

You can't hold the presidency for 8 years, and the congress for 12, and claim that if only given a chance you could prove to the American people that your ideology works. The Matt Barbers of the world have been running the Republican party, and our country, for at least that long. And what has it gotten the party? What has it gotten America? Read the rest of this post...

OMB Deputy Director: GOP budget is "a series of talking points"

As we reported earlier today, House Republicans offered a budget today -- or what they call a budget. It relied heavily on Bush-era ideas. It's like Rep. Paul Ryan and his Republican cronies have no idea how much damage Bush's polices, which they abetted and endorsed, have done to the country.

Last week, at the presidential news conference, Obama pointed out that while the GOP was criticizing his budget, they didn't have one of their own. Ever since Obama uttered the words "We haven't seen an alternative budget out of them," the Republicans have been in a frenzy trying to figure out what to do. They've been tripping all over themselves on both sides of the aisle.

No one knows what's going on with Republican Senators, including Republican Senators. On the House side, after last week's photo op debacle, which elicited a week of untold mocking, they finally released something that is supposed to count as their budget.

Obama's team isn't impressed.

OMB Deputy Director Rob Nabors did a conference call today to compare and contrast Obama's budget with the GOP's budget. He noted the Republican budget offers the "same tried and true policies that have failed this country in the past."

In highlighting the key differences, Nabors explained that a "Budget is a plan that has to hold together and contain a vision." Obama certainly did that. But, Nabors took aim at the GOP budget saying that the Obama administration's "chief criticism" is that what the GOP offered isn't a plan. Instead, "it's a series of talking points." Harsh, but true.

And, while the Obama administration is willing to listen to ideas from the GOP, Nabors said there are not as many good ideas as we would have hoped for.

When the ideas are left over from eight years of George Bush, they'll never be good. Read the rest of this post...

Treasury gets even worse

It's bad enough the new economic team is stacked full of former Citi bankers and friends of Robert Rubin who helped usher in this economic crisis. Now it's getting to be ridiculous with even more people on the wrong side of this debate. Maybe having an empty team was a better option after all. The Plum Line:

Tim Geithner’s new nominee for number two at the Treasury Department, Neal Wolin, played a key role in drafting legislation in the late 1990s deregulating the banking system, a former Treasury Department official confirms to us.

The law that Wolin helped draft has been blamed by some critics, many of them Democrats, for easing up regulatory pressure on huge financial institutions, tangentially helping create today’s mess — and his role drafting it could come under questioning at his upcoming confirmation hearings.

Our reporter, Ryan Derousseau, came across Wolin’s role in researching our big profile of Wolin at WhoRunsGov.com. Stuart Eizenstat, a deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, confirmed that as Treasury’s general counsel at the time, Wolin “provided the technical and legal drafting” for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Josh Orton thinks this is "obnoxious" and adds:

The WH thinks Krugman's "naive," doesn't talk to him, and puts the deregulators in charge. Urg.

Double urg. Read the rest of this post...

ADP reports 742,000 job losses in March

The official report is out on Friday but the private report is not great news. It's not a surprise though nobody believes that only good news or mixed news is in the pipeline. Unfortunately in this case, the report is worse than expected.

Job losses in the U.S. private sector accelerated in March, more than economists' expectations, according to a report by ADP Employer Services Wednesday.

Private employers cut jobs by a record 742,000 in March versus a 706,000 revised cut in February that was originally reported at 697,000 jobs, said ADP, which has been carrying out the survey since 2001.

The big drop foreshadows a huge decline in the non-farm payroll reading in the government's employment report that will be released on Friday, some analysts said.

The good news is that layoffs may be reaching their peak. Maybe. Read the rest of this post...

Colbert mocks Glenn Beck's crybaby patriotism, mercilessly

Best part, about 5:25 into the video. Watch this. Possibly only second to Colbert's lampooning of Bush a few years back. Huff Post transcribes a small bit.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The 10/31 Project
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Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Oh, and since Glenn Beck is now making gay slurs, on the air, about Barney Frank, perhaps it's time someone asked, when was the last time you saw a presumably-straight guy (Beck is on his second marriage, to a woman) cry so much? I just find it kind of queer. Read the rest of this post...

The GOP's April Fools Joke on the American people: Bush's budget ideas are back

Wannabe Rising GOP star Paul Ryan has a piece in the reliably Republican op-ed page of today's Wall Street Journal touting the latest GOP budget joke. Ryan's op-ed could have been easily written by George Bush since it's basically a regurgitation of the policies of the last eight years. That's what got us into this mess in the first place.

According to NBC's First Read, both Senate and House Republicans were going to put on a little show today to dramatize their new budget:

A week after House Republicans held a press conference to unveil a budget alternative that had no hard numbers in it, they take another crack at it when Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, formally unveils the alternative at 10:30 am ET. But that is just on part of the GOP’s budget activities today, NBC’s Mike Viqueira reports. Already this morning, House and Senate Republicans joined in a grand show of budget unity when they met in a rate joint confab in the House chamber -- before the House was open for business. So the chamber was dark, Viq says, but the idea was for Republican members from both bodies to muster in historic Statuary Hall, where reporters could watch them march en masse into the House chamber. Afterward, they plan to hold a rally on the east front steps of the House.

Will they do a chorus line and start singing patriotic songs, too? You have to wonder who choreographed that number? I'm betting Lindsey, but he might have gotten some help from someone in the House.

It's one thing that the Republicans can't figure out the speaker at their big fundraising dinner. But, shouldn't they at least know what a budget is?
Read the rest of this post...

War on terror, RIP

Hillary says the phrase is dead, but the proof is in the pudding. From ABC:

The clarity with which the language has changed hasn't been fully reflected in the policies the president has pursued. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the president is formulating policies that some of his liberal critics say could have been promulgated by his predecessor.

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters matter-of-factly this week that the term "war on terror" isn't being used by the Obama administration, the president has yet to find an easy replacement.

In addition, the death of the term "enemy combatants" was announced in a legal filing earlier this month that nonetheless upheld the administration's right to detain those suspected of assisting al Qaeda.

Yeah yeah, not everything will change overnight, but this does mean that this administration will ratchet down the propaganda, and that's a good thing. Policy based on facts, on sound data, on science. The more our governance becomes, again, fact-based, the more we the people can hold our government accountable. You can argue facts, you can't argue with a demagogue (though you can throw all of their asses out of office). Read the rest of this post...

Newsflash (again): Norm Coleman cannot win in Minnesota

It's pretty clear that it's over in Minnesota for Norm Coleman. He's going to keep stringing out the recount through appeals and maybe a federal court case. But, he can't win. Minnesota deserves its second Senator and that's Al Franken. After yesterday's court ruling, Coleman should just concede:

Norm Coleman's lawyers all but conceded defeat Tuesday and promised to appeal after a panel of three judges ordered no more than 400 new absentee ballots opened and counted, far fewer than the Republican had sought to overcome the lead held by DFLer Al Franken.

The ballots include many that Franken had identified as wrongly rejected as well as ballots that Coleman wanted opened in his quest to overcome the 225-vote lead that Franken gained after a recount in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race.

"We are very pleased," said Franken lead lawyer Marc Elias shortly after the ruling, which calls for ballots to be opened next week.

Coleman legal spokesman Ben Ginsberg acknowledged that the Republican may have lost the seven-week trial and was prepared to appeal to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

"It is pretty much of a long shot with that few ballots being put in play," Ginsberg said, comparing the Republican's odds of winning the trial to someone betting on the winning team in the NCAA basketball tournament. "We are disappointed. But we feel the court is wrong and we will appeal."

We're going to have to create a very loud drumbeat to get Norm to give it up. He's hanging on to prevent the Democrats from getting the 59th vote in the Senate. We can't expect the Republicans to do the right thing. They never do. Read the rest of this post...

Palin out as national GOP dinner speaker. Replaced by Newt.

She was in. She was out. She had been asked. She hadn't been asked. She knew about it. She didn't know about it.

There was lots of drama surrounding the keynote speaker at the big, big GOP House and Senate fundraiser later this year. Now we know that it's not Sarah anymore:

Sarah Palin will no longer headline a major Republican dinner in June, a Republican official told CNN Tuesday.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich will replace Palin as the keynote speaker at a joint fundraising dinner held by the campaign committees of Senate and House Republicans.

The scheduling change follows a communications breakdown between Palin's political staff and her aides in Alaska that left the dinner's organizers unsure the Alaska governor would actually attend the Washington event.

These days, Republicans can't even pull off a fundraising event without screwing it up. Fundraisers used to be the one thing they really knew how to do. Good thing they're no longer running the country.

Oh, in case you were wondering, Newt's a Catholic now. He's anti-choice and homophobic, so he'll fit right in with church leaders (they'll overlook those multiple divorces and three marriages because they weren't Catholic ceremonies.) But, Newt is way out of touch with the average American Catholic. Read the rest of this post...

Wednesday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

Be wary. It's April Fools Day. Every now and then, someone pulls off a good one. So, don't get snookered if you see a story pop up that says "Republicans have an idea." You'll know it's a joke.

The President and First Lady are still in London. Later today, they have an audience with the British Queen, Mrs. Windsor. I just can't take seriously any country that still has a monarch. It's a ridiculous waste of money and just runs counter to every thing about democracy. In that respect, I guess I fit the definition of a republican as "Someone who favors social equality and opposes aristocracy and privilege." Power should rest with the people. In the U.S., Republicans (with a capital R) are the exact opposite of republicans. Our GOP thinks the elite moneyed interests should rule while opposing social equality.

On with the show... Read the rest of this post...

British newspaper to ditch ink, go Twitter! OMG!

Putting the twit in Twitter. Who needs more than 140 words anyway?

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet.

For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian's Twitterised archive as "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by", eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

What more do people need? The next words weren't all that important anyway. Read the rest of this post...

UK taxpayers get bill for MP's retirement

Talk about bad timing. Not only is the British economy falling but now the public has the honor of footing the bill for Members of Parliament so they can retire comfortably. I wonder if everyone else will see such a cushy retirement?

Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrat pensions spokesman, branded the decision a "spectacular own goal for MPs". "The pensions of MPs and other well-paid public sector workers have to be brought in line with reality. With members of the public losing their jobs and seeing their pensions plummet, MPs cannot insulate themselves from the harsh realities of the recession."

Susie Squire, the campaign manager at the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: "Asking for more money to plug the deficit in politicians' gold-plated pensions is an utter disgrace. These pensions have been a bottomless pit for too long, and continuing to pump in taxpayers' money is no solution in the long term.

"Why should taxpayers fund politicians retiring into the lap of luxury when they have seen their own pension reduced out of recognition? If MPs want such a generous pension, they must pay for it out of their own salary and not simply keep dipping into the pockets of hard-working people."

Sounds a lot like the great health insurance plans that members of Congress receive. What a feeling it is to protect such leadership. Read the rest of this post...

OECD - "international trade in a freefall"

This particular article is focusing on the problems the OECD report presents for Gordon Brown who is freely spending money to provide stimulus from the recession. The British economy is clearly in trouble and some have suggested (including George Soros this week) that the UK could be forced to reach out to the IMF for loans. Again, the British economy was too heavily focused on banking/finance so replacing that will not be easy or fast. The risk there is that there is too much spending with too little chance of recovery in site.

The US is also spending quite freely though the problems related to recovery do not appear to be as remote. Obama is going to need something to kick in soon enough but again, it's not nearly as dire as the UK situation. What this also suggests is that China could be in for more trouble. China is an export oriented country and even cheap goods are not making the cut these days. And as always, the poorest countries in the world will be hit hard. The Guardian:

The OECD expects global trade volumes to slump by 13% this year. "International trade is in freefall," it said.

It expects its member economies to shrink by an average 4.3% this year, with the United States contracting by 4%, the eurozone by 4.1% and Japan by 6.6%. It forecasts Britain's economy will shrink by 3.7% - the worst performance since the second world war.

Separately, the World Bank forecast that growth in the developing world would slow to just 2.1% this year from 5.8% in 2008.

"Across the developing world, we see that conditions of recession are affecting the poorest people, making them even more vulnerable than before to sudden shocks but also reducing opportunities available to them, and frustrating their hopes," said Justin Yifu Lin, the World Bank's chief economist.

Read the rest of this post...

It's time for Obama to meet Krugman

If Obama can reach out to nasty conservatives, he can certainly reach out to one of our own who is simply trying to help. And in any case, you can only be so successful at freezing out a Nobel laureate with his own weekly column in the NYT. Newsweek had this little tidbit:

But the administration does not seek to cultivate him. Obama aides have invited commentators of all persuasions to the White House for some off-the-record stroking; in February, after Krugman's fellow Times op-ed columnist David Brooks wrote a critical column accusing Obama of overreaching, Brooks, a moderate Republican, was cajoled by three different aides and by the president himself, who just happened to drop by. But, says Krugman, "the White House has done very little by way of serious outreach. I've never met Obama. He pronounced my name wrong"—when, at a press conference, the president, with a slight note of irritation in his voice, invited Krugman (pronounced with an "oo," not an "uh" sound) to offer a better plan for fixing the banking system.

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