Inches

• Today I'm standing at my window, watching the snow fall.  On Sunday my mother had described a book she'd read recently on the innocence and purity of small children, and today I watched some kids as they played in the snow behind my house.  From my window, I could see one child, crouched playfully, affixing a big white penis to the snowman he had just built.  Ah, yes, I thought, there it is.  Nothing more chaste and purely innocent than putting a wang on a snowman.
• UPDATE:  On an unrelated note, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs just mocked Sarah Palin in a news conference.  I won't spoil the joke for you, but if you've been reading Vendetta! this week... you'll get it.

Know your enemy

• You don't even need to read the article, the headline is enough:  In a Message to Democrats, Wall St Sends Cash to GOP.
• But the GOP, you know, they're the party of the people.  Not ALL people, but, you know, the people.  The rich ones, apparently.

Tea me off

• The Tea Party held a convention in Nashville over the weekend, and originally I wasn't going to grant it any coverage... but you'll see why I did.
• The convention started with a speaker who stated that voters should have to pass literacy tests prior to being allowed to vote.  Yeah, we had those at one point, they were called the Jim Crow laws and they were outlawed by the Constitution (I want to say 18th or 21st amendment, I was looking at the Constitution recently but I can't remember specifically which one).  So that pretty much set the tone there.
• But then came Sarah.  Sarah Palin herself took the stage on Sunday, and gave a 45-minute speech in which she... really didn't say much.  She offered the usual criticisms of President Obama, complaining about big government, saying the government wasn't working for the people (bank bailouts were a Bush policy, and I fail to see how tax cuts, jobs bills, and health care reform are NOT signs of a goverment working for the people).  She used a lot of blanket statements, lots of "this is democracy in action" and "we have to fight," but at no point in her speech did she lay out any clear agenda of what a Tea Party-run goverment would look like. 
• And that's really what drives me crazy about this whole movement.  It's anti-Obama, it's against big government and spending... but what exactly do they hope to accomplish?  We know they want to kill health care reform, but this is an idiotic mission statement since most of them are older, white, middle class Americans who will be BEGGING for their Medicare once they're eligible.  They fucking LOVE Medicare!  Isn't that socialized medicine?  At their last rally, one reporter went around and asked them what exactly they didn't like about the health care reform bill.  Beyond "socialism," none of them could list a single item.  But they could all tell you that they were against it because Glenn Beck is against it!  The whole movement is a bunch of people being manipulated by Fox News and the radical arm of the Repulican party, a militant protest arm with no stated goals and no intentions beyond that.  What exactly do they hope to achieve?  To defeat the evil black man.  How do they plan to do so?  By waving signs.  Compare it to 70s movements like the Black Panthers, and this "revolution" looks anemic.  There are a lot of articles across the internet analyzing the future of the movement, and what they think will happen as it grows and gains momentum.  Let me tell you:  nothing.  As soon as a Republican is back in office (god willing, no sooner than 2016), this whole thing goes poof.  Because it's not a movement, it's a carefully constructed group, flogged into a frenzy by conservative pundits, and thrown at the gates of the White House by GOP officials who would like Obama to fail.  It's as "grass roots" as astroturf.
• Need one last bit of proof?  You know I have it.  Click that link up above, where I link to the MSNBC article, and look at her left hand.  It looks like there's some kind of fuzzy blackness on her palm.  This is a photo from the Q&A session which followed Palin's speech.  In the Q&A, Palin wanted to be sure to stay on the established message.  Apparently concerned that she might accidentally stray from the Tea Party talking points, she did what anyone with the intelligence level of a 7th grader would do:  she wrote them down on the palm of her hand.  What do we learn from this?  That Sarah Palin really is that stupid, and that the entire Tea Party agenda fits on the palm of a woman's hand.  I don't think that's a case closed.

Got some

• It's Friday, and you know what that means:  unemployment figures come out!  Yay! 
• But still, good news, the unemployment rate dropped from 10% to 9.7%.  20,000 jobs lost in January, which was higher than expected, but a more interesting fact is that the unemployment percentage dropped while the percentage of Americans of working age rose.  So that's interesting. 
• I know it's a little pollyanna of me to continually present the good economic news while not posting the bad, but you can get bad news ANYWHERE.  Since I started this blog, economic indicators have all been slowly crawling upward, and that is the general trend that I see and that is what I will report on.
• Oh, and I promise I'll take the groundhog picture down on Monday.  Punxatawney Phil thanks you for your continued patronage.

Barry's got a baseball bat--UPDATED

• For the past year, Obama's critics have crticized him for not accomplishing a whole lot.  They saw him as well-intentioned, but inefficient, and too soft.  Finally, in mid-January, Masachusetts voters voted in Scott Brown to the Senate, sending a message to Barack Obama that they planned to block his agendas.
• And that apparently pissed the President off.
• On January 26, the President gave a forceful State of the Union address, clearly laying out his plan for the coming year.  Last Friday, he met with House Republicans in a grueling Q&A where he made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was sick of their shit, and if they were going to vote against everything he wanted then they'd better start coming up with some ideas of their own.  When one Republican pointed out that they had offered up their own version of health care reform, Obama quickly derided their plan as a bare-bones proposal with no merit to it.  Yesterday, he met with Senate Democrats for something like a pep talk, though it reads more like a call to arms.  In 2009, he tried to placate Republicans and give them what they wanted.  In 2010, he wants them to help or get out of the way.  Republican strategy has been to hold together and oppose the President on EVERYTHING in order to make him appear to be a failure; the President is reminding the nation that by doing this, the GOP has turned themselves into a giant obstruction and nothing more.
• President Obama has been consistently calm and cautious throughout his first year.  And I have no problem with that, I respond well to calm, rational thought.  But in an America where Fox News is the highest-rated cable channel, the calm approach doesn't work.  You have to make some noise.  The President has been making a blitzkrieg of public appearances this month, forceful speeches to remind the people of what he stands for, and to lay the blame on his political enemies in a way that he has declined to do until now.  He's the President, you voted for him, here's what he wants to do, and here's a list of who's standing in the way.  In a year where the entire House and a third of the Senate are up for election, it's essential to remind Americans of where we stand and where we're headed.  More importantly, it's essential to remind them who got us in this mess. 
• So, good stuff coming from the White House.  This is the kind of forceful leading that we need to see.
• On another item, I believe I had promised an update on the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the policy currently responsible for keeping uncloseted homosexuals from serving in the military.  The irony being that closeted homosexuals CAN serve as long as nobody knows their gay; does the open knowledge of a person's sexuality somehow magically change their fighting skill?  Irony aside, its supporters continue to defend the policy with masterful rhetoric, such as John McCain's recent "It works okay, so why change it?"  Yes, that's surely how all policy needs to be decided.  So, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen announced on... Tuesday?... that they planned to end Don't Ask Don't Tell.  Not asking, telling.  Here are the details:  the process will take aboiut a year, as the Pentagon has to go through a full review of the policy.  In the meantime, Mullen ordered a very lenient approach toward the policy until it's been fully repealed.  Of course, Congress does have to vote on the repeal, but it's expected not to be a problem since (if my information is correct) this vote would require a simple 50-vote majority in the Senate rather than a 60-vote supermajority, and the House just does whatever Nancy Pelosi tells them to so that takes care of the House.  By the next State of the Union, this thing could be all wrapped up.
• UPDATE: Little more sentimental than I usually post, but I read this editorial by a retired Navy Captain on CNN, and I thought it really summed up the harm that has been done by Don't Ask Don't Tell.  I very strongly recommend reading it.

Dad's raising our allowance!

• Okay, so, lots of news on this Monday morning, all of it swirling around President Obama's 2011 budget plan.  Of course it contains a record deficit (duh) so the GOP is up in arms... but I think Vendetta! has, in general, shown what it thinks about the GOP's opinions and where they can put them.  Obama's budget plan shows several of his key initiatives:  increased help for small businesses in order to encourage job creation, new education reforms to replace the pathetic No Child Left Behind, more money for college attendees, new funding for alternative and clean energy, new taxes on the wealthy (fuck you, moneybags!) and top investment banks (fuck you too!), and of course more money for airport security.
• CNN, as always, has a quick and helpful summary.  As CNN is quickly becoming the least partisan of the major news networks, their summaries are very useful.

Go-conomy

• Okay, economic policy is not my specialty, but a couple of interesting economic items have popped up this morning.
• The economy may still be in a rut, but it's growing at a pace that we haven't seen in six years.  The GDP grew at a 5.7 percent pace in the fourth quarter of this year.  To put that in perspective:  3% is considered a healthy level of growth.  Anything from 5-7% is considered a thriving economy.  Last quarter the GDP grew at 2.2%, which of course is sluggish and that did lead to some high-than-expected unemployment numbers (though those numbers are still down from early 2009).
• Some something is obviously working, and we do have a very strong and tangible sign of recovery.  Hang in there.
• In other economic news, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was confirmed for a second term.  This was a very controversial vote.  Bernanke presided over the 2008 financial meltdown, and the events leading up to it.  On that front, his critics blame him for being part of the problem.  But whether or not the meltdown was Bernanke's fault is up for debate; what is not up for debate is that he helped to keep the country out of a much worse depression.  I've read articles on Bernanke's actions in 2008, and though some of the results of his actions are certainly unpopular (can anyone say "bailout?"), Bernanke acted quickly and effectively in the face of almost catostrophic corporate failure.  If we want to blame someone, I have two good candidates:  1) Ronald Reagan, whose deregulation bonanza made our economy the toy of a lot of rich white boys, and of course 2) George W. Bush, a man who was so ignorant and so engrossed in his war that when Bernanke came to him to talk about the financial crisis, Bush said simply, "I don't know anything about that stuff, that's your area.  You do what you've got to do."  I'm not saying Bernanke is entirely blameless (though "Blameless Ben Bernanke" would like great on a campaign poster...), but the system was broken well before he got to it.
• Probably the most amusing piece of the puzzle is that, while many Democrats certainly spoke against Bernanke, most of the opposition came from the GOP.  You know, the party of deregulation.  The ones who elected Reagan and Bush.  For Republicans to try and oust Bernanke, forcing their sins onto him like some bald alliteratively-named scapegoat, makes about as much sense as this video of Nicholas Cage in a bear costume punching a woman in the face.

Rainbow Six

• See, that's a really clever joke in the title there, because Tom Clancy wrote a black ops novel called Rainbow Six, and we're talking about gays in the military, and their symbol is a... oh, go to hell, I thought it was funny.
• So!  In last night's State of the Union speech, President Obama promised a repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, the military policy that keeps homosexuals from serving openly in the military (I read that around 13,000 personnel have been dismissed since this policy begain in the 90s; with troop shortages being what they are, we think we could maybe have used those extra people?).  Gay rights advocates have been skeptical.  Obama has promised before to repeal the law; can we really believe that it'll happen this time?  When is he going to stop talking and get to the repealing?
• Well, how does next Tuesday sound for you?
• Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen (who I believe is Obama's military advisor... the article doesn't say, but he was on The Daily Show recently and I believe he was introduced as an advisor to the President) will discuss the issue during the Senate Budget hearings on next Tuesday.  Details will be provided about the end of the program, and how the army will undgero the transition.  This is much more immediate action than I think anyone expected, and I hope to be able to offer some significant details next week regarding the end of the policy.
• At any rate, good news there.  Lots of analysts out there right now are fairly hostile toward the President on this issue, and I just wanted to help correct the notion that no forward motion has been achieved.
• Meanwhile, since we're on gay rights... how's the same sex marriage trial going in California (you know, Proposition 8, may determine the future of same sex marriage nationwide...)?  Well, testimony has wrapped up, so we're done with witnesses.  Judge Vaughan Walker will consider the evidence, and on February 26th will schedule closing arguments.  So right now we're waiting.  The defense's main witness (the defense are the ANTI-gay rights side... I know, that's a different state of affairs) finally hit the stand the last couple of days.  Mr. Blankenhorn was referenced all throughout the trial by the defense, and they were obviously hinging their case on his testimony.  On the stand, he was terrible.  He was beligerant, argued with the lawyers, received a couple of verbal warnings from the judge, provided little or no evidence to back up his claims, and contradicted himself to the point where several times he actually said he SUPPORTED same sex marriage.  And this was the best witness the defense had to offer.  So... no big worries on this level.  The Supreme Court is still a bit unsettling.  Prosecution lawyers know they can count on four of the nine justices to support their cause, the trick will be getting that fifth justice.  The head lawyer for the prosecution is entirely confident that Justice Kennedy will that much-needed fifth vote; he should know, this lawyer argued over 50 cases before the Supreme Court last year and one over 40 of those cases.  If he's confident, I'm confident.
• Not much else happening.  The news today is still full of responses and fallout from the State of the Union speech, and all the news from Monday and Tuesday was focused on what was going to be in the speech, so... kind of a slow week unless you want to talk about the State of the Union speech.  In my opinion, if you want to know what you should think of the State of the Union address, then go watch it.  It's probably on YouTube or Hulu or both and a thousand other sites besides.  Democracy is always best when its participants do more than vote.

State of the U and me

• Hey, did you know President Obama gave his State of the Union speech last night?  If you've read any major or minor news outlet this morning, you probably have heard plenty about it... but maybe not so much on what was IN it.
• Swimming through all the pundit reactions and polls, I found a simple summary on CNN.  I won't do a lot of commentary on this since it's probably being reactioned to death.  Pretty much the standard themes you expect to hear from the President, a bunch of very good ideas, hopefully Congress lets him enact those good ideas.

Well, if it worked for Nixon...

• Remember the good old days, when conservative spies on Nixon's payroll infiltrated the Watergate hotel, in order to spy on the Democratic National Committee?  Yeah, those were crazy times, weren't they?
• On Tuesday, four conservative activists attempted to illegally access and manipulate the phone system in a district office of Senator Mary Landrieu (the article doesn't say, but we can guess she's a Democrat).  The leader, James O'Keefe, gained national attention in 2008 by pretending to be a pimp and secretly videotaping his encounters with ACORN, an organization designed to help the poor that has become a conservative target due to its voter registration drives (you may have heard conservatives preaching about the election manipulation by ACORN, even though after the videos were investigated by the Attorney General, ACORN was cleared of all wrongdoing).  I guess O'Keefe thought he'd try again, going for a bigger target.
• O'Keefe's motto, according to one conservative reform websites, is "Don't just respond to news, but actually create your own headlines."  I'm sure that "4 charged in US Senate office infiltration" was exactly the headline he was looking for.  Enjoy your ten years in prison, moron. 
• Also, let's take this opportunity to make fun of the pimp costume he wore when videotaping his investigation of ACORN.  One can only assume that the maintenance man costume he wore to infiltrate Mary Landrieu's office involved a fake mustache and nose glasses.