Quote Of The Week

"In 1994, nobody had any memory of Republicans in power. Now they do, and it wasn't pretty. And so we have something to overcome that we really didn't in 1994."

-- Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) (via Politico).

By the way, this is great (and so is this).

Freaking Hilarious

LoL:

Four men were charged Tuesday after attempting to illegally access and manipulate the phone system in a district office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-Louisiana, a local U.S. attorney's office said.

Joseph Basel, 24, Robert Flanagan, 24, James O'Keefe, 25, and Stan Dai, 24, were charged with entering Landrieu's New Orleans office, which is federal property, under "false pretenses for the purpose of committing a felony," according to the attorney's office.

Law enforcement officials say they believe O'Keefe is the conservative activist of the same name who dressed up as a pimp last summer and visited an office of ACORN, a liberal community organizing group, in order to solicit advice on setting up a brothel, among other scenarios.

He secretly recorded the visits on video and posted them on the Web, leading to a media firestorm.

Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, his office said.

Articles on conservative Web sites connect O'Keefe to a man named Joe Basel, describing them as conservative student activists and filmmakers.

According to the news release Tuesday and an affidavit by FBI Special Agent Steven Rayes, who is based in New Orleans, Basel and Flanagan attempted to gain access to Landrieu's office Monday while posing as telephone repairmen. * * *

This FoxNews Poll Surprises Me

The poll shows Obama with a 50% approval rating, but that's not what surprises me. It's the answer to this question: "Who do you think is more responsible for the current state of the economy -- President Obama, former President Bush or Congress?" Six percent blamed Obama, 36% blamed Bush, Congress got 30% of the blame, and 20% said it was some combination of the three.

I thought more folks would be blaming Obama, given that he is nearly one year into his presidency. I have no doubt that more people will be blaming him this Spring if our economy doesn't start creating jobs by then.

Oops (With Update)

From Political Wire:

One more item, this time about Sarah Palin, from the soon-to-be-released book, Game Change:

The New York Times notes that "in the days leading up to an interview with ABC News' Charlie Gibson, aides were worried with Ms. Palin's grasp of facts. She couldn't explain why North and South Korea were separate nations and she did not know what the Federal Reserve did. She also said she believed Saddam Hussein attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001."

Yes, I know that BushCo was pushing the non-existent Saddam/9-11 connection to the hilt during the run-up to the Iraq Debacle, but I'm amused that Sarah Palin believed as late as 2008 that Saddam actually attacked us on 9-11.

By the way, I don't normally buy political books, but I might have to get Game Change, because that's the book which brought Harry Reid's "Obama is light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect" comment into the light.

And speaking of this whole Harry Reid dust-up, this is interesting:

George Will waded in to the controversy over what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called his “improper” comments about then-Senator Obama’s race. Reid apologized for the comments which appear in “Game Change”, a new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, hitting book stores this week.

Here’s what Heilemann and Halperin report in the book about what Reid said during the 2008 presidential campaign:

“[Reid] was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a ‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,’ as he said privately.”

On the roundtable, George Will defended Reid against charges of racism and provoked this spirited exchange with fellow conservative Liz Cheney:

WILL: I don't think there's a scintilla of racism in what Harry Reid said. At long last, Harry Reid has said something that no one can disagree with, and he gets in trouble for it.

CHENEY: George, give me a break. I mean, talking about the color of the president's skin...

WILL: Did he get it wrong?

CHENEY: ... and the candidate's...

WILL: Did he say anything false?

CHENEY: ... it's -- these are clearly racist comments, George.

WILL: Oh, my, no.

The whole thing is intriguing to me. Had Glenn Beck privately said that the country "was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," he probably would have been attacked for making a racist remark. The corollary to such a statement is that a dark-skinned African-American with a Negro dialect would be unelectable to the highest office at this time, and that is undoubtedly a true statement.

Reid's comments certainly pertained to race, but where they racist? Does the issue of whether a remark is racist depend on who is making the remark? Just asking. I'm not sure what that answers to those questions are.

UPDATE: This is from Joan Walsh at Salon:

[Michael] Steele and Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl are shrieking "double standard," comparing Reid's comments to the stunning 2002 musings of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who had to resign after he said the country would have been better off if it had elected Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond president in 1948. Oh sure: One guy is talking, perhaps inelegantly, about why he's wholeheartedly supporting our first black president; the other is wishing the country had elected a racist. That's exactly the same thing!

And Josh Marshall notes: "Talking about racism does not make you racist; advocating racism does."

Anyone See A Pattern Here? (With Update)

"We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama."

-- Rudy Giuliani on this morning's Good Morning America.

"I was there [in the Bush White House]. We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation's history. And President Bush dealt with it."

-- Mary Matalin on CNN (December 27, 2009).

"We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."

-- Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on Fox News (November 25, 2009)

I'm certain there are more examples out there, but you get the picture.

For seven years, all the Right-Wing extremists in our country could do was constantly bring up the 9-11 attacks and how afraid we have to be because of them. Geesus, that's all Rudy Giuliani talked about during his failed bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. To quote Joe Biden from 2007, "There's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence -- a noun, a verb, and 9/11."

So do I believe that "Rudy 9-11" just plain forgot that the most devastating domestic terror attacks in our country's history occurred eight months into Bush and Cheney's first term in office and that Bush/Cheney spent those first eight months ignoring the al Qaeda threat until it was too late? And did he also forget that the anthrax attacks and the failed shoe-bomber attack also occurred when BushCo was in power? Of course he didn't forget those things.

This coordinated attempt at a history re-write is simply a political tactic, and it is a damn good one in my opinion. I may not like many of the GOP's ideas, but you've got to give them credit when it comes to political maneuvering.

One reason Operation History ReWrite is so successful is because nobody calls the Republicans on it. Can you imagine being George Stephanopoulos -- the host of Good Morning America -- and having Rudy Freaking Giuliani come on your show this morning and actually say that "we had no domestic terror attacks under Bush."?

That's like a gift from God. Stephanopoulos could have responded, "Now wait a minute, Rudy -- you've spent the last eight years talking about the 9-11 attacks, but now you're trying to tell us that they didn't occur when Bush was in power?" Had Stephanopoulos done this, the video of the smack down would have been all over YouTube.

Yet the corporate media let GOP whoppers like that one simply slide away. That's not going to change, and the Republicans know this. They also know that the Democrats won't challenge them on it either. It's a very good place for the GOP to be politically.

UPDATE: Finally, an honorable Republican:

In a Bloomberg interview, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended President Obama's handling of recent terrorism threats and took issue with former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism.

Said Lugar: "It's unfair. I think the president is focused."

Lugar noted Obama has demonstrated "firmness" and "decisiveness," adding, "That's been the antidote to the criticism."

To be fair, other conservatives have come out against Dick Cheney's anti-Obama comments. As noted by Steve Benen:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), for example, said earlier this week, "I think [Cheney] had his eight years, and he's caused a lot of trouble for our country and perpetuated a war in Iraq unnecessary and wrong-headed. I would say it would be best he not be so critical right now." Similarly, former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, who left the GOP to become a Libertarian, called Cheney's vile criticism "asinine."

Plus, Stephanopoulos -- on his blog -- tries to correct his Rudy-9/11 oversight from this morning. [Let's hope that all of the Good Morning America viewers also read Stephanopoulos' blog].

LotR Trilogy Falls Out Of Favor

Here is an interesting piece from Salon about why The Lord Of The Rings trilogy is not making many Best of the Decade lists:

Maybe the immense hype surrounding the trilogy's release and all the attendant marketing burned itself out. Maybe the slow-burning backlash among a certain segment of Tolkien purists has gradually taken its toll. Maybe the context in which the films were launched -- the early Bush era, just after 9/11, when the "War on Terror" hadn't yet become a dreary mixture of Orwellian gag-line and grinding reality -- is now so deep in the cultural past that the movies have lost the invisible penumbra of meaning that seemed so strong at the time.

I've noticed this falling out as well. In the series At The Movies, no film from that trilogy made the two reviewers' top ten lists for the decade (Return of the King was the number one pick as the decade's best as far as viewer voting was concerned).

I think this has a lot to do with the fact that it was a trilogy, so some critics had a hard time separating out a single LotR film to include in the decade's top ten (although Rolling Stone did name the entire trilogy as the 10th best film of the decade).

The Return of the King might be an obvious pick for best of decade accolades -- given that it did win 11 Oscars -- but I've long been under the impression that those 11 Oscars were more of an acknowledgment by Academy voters of Jackson's overall achievement with regard to the entire trilogy (i.e., they waited to see if he could pull the whole thing off before awarding any major Oscars).

As far as the movie critic in me is concerned, I enjoyed Return of the King and thought it was a fine film, but I thought The Two Towers was better. Return of the King had some great scenes, but it was a lot longer than it needed to be and it did drag in parts, whereas The Two Towers seemed to be a better-paced, more-focused movie. In fact, Return is arguably the weakest of the three films.

Anyway, it is an interesting development.