As the snark goes, Obviously Obama isn't Jesus; Jesus could assemble a cabinet.

Democratic sources say that H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration.

It's the third withdrawal of a top Treasury Department staff pick in less than a week.

...

Democratic sources said that an issue arose in the final stages of the vetting process.

Taxes? Hookers? Not paying payroll taxes for his staff of live-in hookers?

Odd that there seem to be so few prominent Democrats with clean bills of health.

What lessons should we draw?

Obviously: That Bush is to blame.

Thanks to Anti-Harkonen Freedom Fighter Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Add Comment
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Good news? That's the highest level saying so since the question's been asked.

Bad news? It's still not a majority, and our politicians still cannot dismiss the hoax completely without serious consequences.

But we're getting there.

More Americans than at any time in the past decade believe that the seriousness of global warming is being exaggerated, a Gallup poll showed Thursday.

Forty-one percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they are doubtful that global warming is as serious as the mainstream media are reporting, putting public skepticism about the hot-button issue at the highest level recorded by Gallup in more than a decade.

The previous high came in 2004, when 38 percent of Americans said news reports exaggerated the seriousness of global warming.

Of eight suggested environmental concerns, like air and water pollution, "global warming" was rated dead last in importance.

That's the way to do it, I think: Get our environmental cred from talking about genuine pollution, rather than "pollution" by the harmless naturally-occurring gas CO2 ("The Invisible Killer").

And also talk about global warming fixes to come conveniently down the road.

And especially not during the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The number of Americans who thought global warming is already affecting the planet has also fallen, from 61 percent in March last year to 53 percent this year.

And a record high 16 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they believe the effects of global warming "will never occur."

The poll results suggest "that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans," Gallup analyst Lydia Saad said.

"Americans generally believe global warming is real ... (but) most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue," she said.

Via Cuffy.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Add Comment
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Wouldn't it just be cheaper to rename the whole damn state after them and be done with it?

More than one out of every five dollars of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedys.

The bill includes $5.8 million for the planning and design of a building to house a new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The funding may also help support an endowment for the institute.

The bill also includes $22 million to expand facilities at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and $5 million more for a new gateway to the Boston Harbor Islands on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a park system in downtown Boston named after Kennedy's mother and built on land opened up by the Big Dig highway project.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Kennedy, who at 77 is battling brain cancer, said he hadn't requested the money for the library and institute, and that there are dozens of other earmarks in the spending bill for homeless services and community health centers.

I say name that wind farm he opposes after old Teddy. And maybe a bridge somewhere. Yeah, that would be fun.

*Oops. Sorry about that. Lesson learned...don't do math while hopped up on cold medicine.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:23 AM | Add Comment
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None of which I dispute very much. But this is the take-away:

Limbaugh and his conservative critics have more in common than they think. The political import of the last two weeks of Limbaugh-mania is this: The Republicans' decline is now entering a phase in which its members are more emotionally invested in attacking each other than in attacking Obama. As long as that holds true, the White House can safely ignore the opposition, no matter how loud it gets.

I really wish Frum, et al., would make the substantive points they claim are so crucial as to mean the life or death of the party without resorting to personalizing the debate with cheap ad hominems.

If Rush Limbaugh's focus on upper-income-earner tax cuts is wrong, why is it necessary to mention him? Why not just say the focus on upper-income-earner tax cuts are wrong?

Frum and the rest deride Rush Limbaugh for being a grandstanding talk-show host interested primarily in increasing his own ratings by picking high-profile fights, while they are the real thinkers in the party, concerned only with the substance of what's best for America. If that's so, why does every other David Frum piece include a shitty little provocation about Limbaugh or Palin included specifically to create controversy, start a fight, and get traffic?

As Ramesh writes...

It would be destructive for the traditionalists to attempt to purge the reformers, who have some good ideas. But for the reformers to attempt to purge the traditionalists, who outnumber them, is just plain batty. If the reformers succeed, it will be by persuading traditionalists such as Limbaugh, not bulldozing over them.

If Frum's real goal is to help the party, and he thinks Sarah Palin is a empty-headed dolt who will say whatever the political script requires, wouldn't it be in his own best interest to actually win over the mainstream of conservative thought so that Sarah Palin regurgitates all the hard thinkin' Frum's done for her? Surely Frum is aware that is charisma is for shit -- even if he assumes (as he does) he's the brains of this operation, surely he can't be so self-deluded as to imagine he'd make a capable faceman.

So why is he hellbent on personally destroying those with charisma and audience? Why on earth wouldn't he want to retain the services of these brain-dead but smooth-talking troglodytes but enlist them in his own cause?

The answer is obvious. Part of it is gut-level cultural antipathy for people Frum doesn't consider upscale enough for his tastes, but most of it due to the fact that Frum is using food-fights to boost his very low profile even as he raps Limbaugh for being too blunt, crude, and self-promoting.

VDH on the Dust-Up: Here.

Hmmmm... You know, the NYT was recently casting about for a "conservative" (like David Brooks) to fill Bill Kristol's old slot.

The prize went to Ross Douthat at the Atlantic. Like yesterday. I'd congratulate him but I really don't like seeing other people succeed. Despise it, in fact. Pray the government will swoop down on them and destroy their happy-bastard lives. (In this way I am still very much a liberal.)

Point is, however: Seems it would have be an opportune time for a feller to get his name out there, let people know he was a proper conservative (i.e., the sort of conservative NYTs readers would ignore rather than actively despise), show he has what it takes to get conservatives talking about him and linking to him, etc.

Yup. Sure would have been an opportune time for that sorta thing.

Not that I'm suggesting that anything like this at all occurred.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 AM | Add Comment
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Personnel is policy:

A D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer employee and a private contractor have been arrested in a federal bribery sting, sources tell WTOP.

D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer employee Yusuf Acar and Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation (AITC) President and CEO Sushil Bansal have been arrested, sources tell WTOP.

Acar, 40, was taken into custody Thursday morning by FBI agents at his home in Northwest D.C.

In 2008, Bansal's firm received .Net Development Support and Peoplesoft Consulting Support contracts from the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Office totaling $350,000.

AITC has also received contracts from the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. In 2008, Bansal received the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Association of Indians in America, according to AITC's Web site.

The FBI is now serving a search warrant at the office of D.C.'s Chief Technology Officer, WTOP has learned.

"We are there as part of a continuing ongoing criminal investigation," FBI Washington Field Office spokesperson Katherine Schweit tells WTOP.

Poor, poor Obama. Such an insightful genius, and yet has no ability whatsoever to see people for who they are. Jeremiah Wright a racist? Get out!

Thanks to J.

Correction: The office of the CTO, not the home, is being searched, as we knew before.

I do not understand how I got this one wrong; I read "home" the first time, thought "That can't be right," and so read it again specifically to make sure "home" was mentioned. And the second time I read it, it also said "home." Or at least that's what my eyes told me.

I really don't know what happened here. Sometimes I jumble up the lines of an article, my eye reading words from either below or above the line I'm supposed to be reading them; maybe I did something like that here.

Anyway, sorry. Office, not home.

Posted by: Ace at 08:19 AM | Comments (2)
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Not a lot you haven't read before, but a worthy effort in showing Barack Obama for what he is.

Among other points:

Fifth, President Obama has continually presented himself as trans-ideological, the answer to "worn-out dogmas" and "worn-out ideas" and "stale political arguments." He doesn't subscribe to an "old, discredited philosophy." It is his critics, he insists, who do. It is they who are intellectually rigid, dogmatic, captives of old ways of thinking. Obama is the one who, like Lincoln, will "think anew and act anew."

Except that it is Obama himself who displays rutted thinking. It is he who is championing worn-out dogmas. And it is he who is advancing a deeply ideological agenda. Unlike Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who demonstrated policy creativity and attempted to advance "third way" solutions, President Obama is turning out to be utterly and conventionally liberal, embracing record-breaking spending programs and record-breaking tax increases and giving us a record-breaking deficit and record-breaking debt. Rather than par down his liberal aims in the light of the economic crisis we face, he is enlarging them.

Sixth, Obama has decried "the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle the big problems of America." He has said to his fellow citizens, "Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long." Yet Obama's White House, led by his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and his most important political adviser, David Axelrod, hatched a poll-tested plot to target radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. They are promoting what they pretend to lament: phony and foolish diversions, distractions and manipulations, immaturity and pettiness.

There is more. Obama has promised time and again to make "hard decisions," yet he has made almost none. He has talked about the importance of embodying a culture of responsibility, yet he pretends that the omnibus spending bill he signed yesterday was "last year's decision." He says our responsibility to our children is "to ensure that we do not pass on to them a debt they cannot pay" -- yet based on his own budget figures, Obama will add $7 trillion to our debt from 2009 to 2019.

This has led, sooner than anyone could have imagined, to a serious credibility gap.

Oh: And a fresh one, which the writer couldn't include due to its recency.

Barack Obama promising to stop the practice of signing statements.

Posted by: Ace at 07:44 AM | Add Comment
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Pretty much that's all there is for the moment. No reason offered as to why.

Somewhat related -- Obama decided to appoint Tony Ward, John "American Taliban" Lindh's zealous lawyer, to the Justice Department's Civil Rights division.

And also related: the San Francisco Police Union accuses Bill Ayers and Bernie Dorhn of direct involvement with the police station bombing that killed St. Brian McDonnell.

On Feb. 16, 1970, a bomb placed on a window ledge of Park Station killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell and injured eight other officers, the Chronicle reported.

The union said it had not been in contact with investigators nor did it have new evidence, but it cited Larry Grathwohl, who works with the conservative organization AmericaÂ’s Survival of Maryland and claims that he infiltrated Weather Underground as an FBI informant and heard Ayers confess, the Chronicle reported.

“There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn … are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station,” the Feb. 24 letter reads, according to the Chronicle.

This is old evidence, and not very strong evidence; the Politico and CNN wouldn't even report that Bill Ayers had "confessed" to babysitting Obama's kids based on one person's memory of it.

Still. What a crew.

Busted: Yusuf Acar arrested. It's a bribery case, apparently.

An official in the D.C. government's office of the chief technology officer has been arrested in a federal bribery sting, according to law enforcement sources.

Yusuf Acar, 40, was taken into custody this morning by FBI agents at his home in Northwest Washington, the sources said. The nature of the charges could not be determined. Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, declined to comment on the arrest, saying the case "is under seal."

Acar serves as an information systems security officer in the D.C. government. He worked for Vivek Kundra, the District's chief technology officer. Kundra recently left D.C. government to become President Obama's federal chief information officer.

Posted by: Ace at 06:33 AM | Add Comment
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Can't say I'll miss him at this point.

More [DrewM.]...Tedisco's lead is shrinking. The latest poll has him up by 4. His lead was 12 two weeks ago.

Posted by: Ace at 06:07 AM | Add Comment
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The American Film Institute released the list of movies that Barack Obama gave to Gordon Brown. Among the chosen:

The Godfather
Citizen Kane
Wizard of Oz
Star Wars, Ep. IV
ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
The Graduate

Posted by: Slublog at 06:04 AM | Comments (2)
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Ummm, yea right.

Driven by global warming, the ocean is expected to rise nearly 5 feet along California's coastline by the end of the century, hitting San Francisco Bay the hardest of all, according to a state study released Wednesday...

Below the fold - I unearthed some surveillance video of the super secret research facility where this study was performed and a few of the "scientists" who created it. more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:20 AM | Add Comment
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