Much discussion on Obama's lobbyist ban and the troubles caused by it (see Kagro, Yglesias and Sirota. I always thought Candidates Obama and Edwards were engaging in mindless populism with this issue and Sirota's post in particular really illustrates this point. David writes:

House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers announced today that the committee has reached an agreement with Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding subpoenas in the U.S. Attorney firing investigation. Conyers' press release is here.

According to The Hill, the Obama Administration played a big role in bringing about the agreement.

The Obama White House confirmed that “lawyers from the White House counsel’s office played an active role in moving the parties toward the accommodation,” while Bush’s office said it had reached the deal “at the urging of the Obama administration.”

[More...]

BOBBY JINDAL: While some of the projects in the [stimulus] bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes . . . $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disneyland . . .

New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Louisiana's transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans to Baton Rouge passenger rail service from the same pot of railroad money in the president's economic stimulus package that Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork on national television Tuesday night.

So much for Bobby Jindal's "principles."

Say hello to Accountability Now. It launches tomorrow, and is a political action committee which will seek out liberal candidates to move the Democratic party to the left.

Soliciting donations from their readers, the bloggers said they were planning to recruit liberal candidates to challenge more centrist Democrats currently in Congress.

The formation of the group is another step in the evolution of the blogosphere, which has proven effective at motivating party activists to give money and time to political campaigns, especially in local races.

Who's behind it? On the blogger end, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald and Daily Kos, to name a few. They've already bankrolled $500k. On the labor side, SEUI. Also involved: Move-On.org.

Fundraising starts for real next month.

In a blog post entertainingly discussing Bobby Jindal's silly jibe at volcano monitoring, Paul Krugman asks:

Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

In fact, the Founding Fathers designed our government to NOT have a standing army. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution provides among Congress' powers:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years

(Emphasis supplied.) The Federalist Papers discussed this limitation in detail in Federalist 26:

At Open Left, Chris Bowers and David Sirota argue that (1) there has been an ideological shift in the nation; and (2)GOP mythmaking must be demolished. Fine. But how to do it? What is missing from most analysis on the Dem side (and part of this is due to the inability to understand the important shift Bill Clinton achieved - to wit, proving that Democrats can govern) is the importance of results when governing. Take this TPM e-mailer:

. . . Unfortunately for Jindal (and the country), Republicans used that same argument for decades . . . Simply put, his party has been the one controlling our government for a long, long time. The problem isn't government, it's Republican government - and everyone knows it.

Marshall's e-mailer completely writes Bill Clinton out of the history books. More . . .

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

-H.L. Mencken

Via Digby, Mencken is proven right again:

A majority of Americans (54%) favor a temporary government "takeover" of major U.S. banks, but a much lower minority (37%) favor a temporary "nationalization" of the banks.

Um, ok. A "temporary takeover" it is. Sheesh.

Speaking for me only

The wheels are coming off for Roland Burris:

A Chicago minister tells The Associated Press he and other black pastors who previously supported U.S. Sen. Roland Burris now plan to ask him to resign. The minister spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because a meeting with Burris hadn't yet been scheduled. He says the senator can no longer serve effectively.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds linked to some Republicans and Republican journalists who lack a basic understanding of the Senate 3/5 rules for cloture (and for legislation raising the deficit). The gist of the Republican argument is that Democrats needed 60 votes to pass the stimulus and that is why Roland Burris was accepted in the Senate. This is how Reynolds puts it later:

Dems Abandon Burris. Hey, the stimulus passed, so now he’s just a liability.

Actually Burris was always "just a liability." As has been pointed out here, this claim of a 60 vote requirement (also made by Burris supporters when arguing for seating him) is false. What is needed is 3/5 of the number of Senators seated. Kagro at Congress Matters explains:

Why? Chicago Tribune:

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris has acknowledged he sought to raise campaign funds for then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich at the request of the governor’s brother at the same time he was making a pitch to be appointed to the Senate seat previously held by President Barack Obama.

. . . In comments to reporters after appearing at a Democratic dinner, the senator several times contradicted his latest under-oath affidavit that he quietly filed with the Illinois House impeachment panel earlier this month. That affidavit was itself an attempt to clean up his live, sworn testimony to the panel Jan. 8, when he omitted his contacts with several Blagojevich insiders.

(Emphasis supplied.) Speaking for me only

An interesting, positive [and accurate] appraisal of Bill Clinton's Presidency from someone whose existing fans may be shocked to read these words from him :

If your concern is for the economic well-being of the working class, than attacking Clinton is a strange place to start. Under his presidency, real household incomes for the bottom 10th percentile -- a pretty good Rawlsian metric for economic well-being -- increased by 17.3 percent, the largest increase of any president since the Census Bureau began compiling numbers. . . .

[ More . . .]

Chris Bowers provides a strange defense to "the Left" against Glenn Greenwald's charge that it allowed itself to be coopted by then-candidate Obama's Presidential campaign:

In this passage, [Greenwald] is explicitly accusing a large number of unnamed progressive organizations of cynically exploiting support for Obama--support which the leaders of these organizations apparently did not share--into increased traffic, membership and revenue. This argument is in unfair. It accuses the leadership of many progressive organizations of actually being on Greenwald's side in desiring more left-wing pressure on Obama, but being trapped because they engaged in bad faith support for Obama during the campaign, thus tricking their gullible new members into believing those organizations were actually cheerleading squads for President Obama.

(Emphasis supplied.) The defense is strange to me for 2 reasons. First, as I recall, Glenn cited to his own experiences regarding his Accountability Now project. Second, because Chris seems to accept that in fact these groups did not "desire[] more left wing pressure" on Obama. Bowers does not explain why these groups "did not desire," much less exert, "left wing pressure" on Obama. I would love to hear his explanation for that phenomenon.

Speaking for me only