Sen. Mary Landrieu is blasting the men charged with tampering with the phones at her New Orleans office, dismissing a new explanation from the attorney of one of the men as “feeble.”
“Senator Landrieu believes this feeble explanation is a clear and calculated effort to divert attention away from the fact that his client stands accused of a federal crime that could land him in prison for up to 10 years,” said Landrieu Press Secretary Rob Sawicki, in a statement to TPMmuckraker.
Sawicki added: “The fact remains that they perpetrated a false …

Scott Brown’s election in the Mass. special election isn’t being attributed to a repudiation of the health care legislation, but rather his Patrick Henry-like statement to the effect: ‘Give us weapons to defeat the terrorists, not lawyers to defend them.’ The Republicans apparently see this as a rallying cry that may restore them to power. Gov. Bob McDonnell already quoted it in his response to the President’s State of the Union speech:

The two former Blackwater contractors who were charged this month with murder for the shooting death of two Afghan men left the military with other-than-honorable discharges for behavior ranging from assault to going AWOL and testing positive for cocaine, according to service records that surfaced in bond hearings, the AP reports.
A judge in federal court in Virginia has ordered Christopher Drotleff and Justin Cannon held in custody; arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday. The judge called Drotleff “a danger to the community based on the nature of the charged offense, his …

So remind me, since when did 41 percent of 100 suddenly constitute a majority?
Oh yeah, I remember now: since George W Bush slunk out of Washington DC in ignominy not 365 days ago. And since the wannabe bipartisan Democratic majority in BOTH houses swore their oaths of office this January, empowered by a landslide election and a popular mandate for change like none seen since the rout of the Goldwaterites in 1964. And yet, since then they have pussyfooted, wavered, caviled and serially wimped out on what that majority means …

That’s the warning coming today from the folks at the Center for Public Integrity, who caution that the recent High Court decision empowering corporations to spend unlimited sums on federal election ads could also have the unintended consequence of ending the ban on foreigners buying influence over U.S. elections. Some foreign companies, the authors write, are owned by foreign governments and also have U.S. subsidiaries. The result?
One prominent example is CITGO Petroleum Company — once the American-born Cities Services Company, but purchased in 1990 by the Venezuelan government-owned Petróleos de …

January has sure been a month for game changes. First there was a book of that name written by a coupla gossip columnists disguised as journalists. That’s the one that revealed Harry Reid had accidentally told the truth about reasons Barack Obama actually could be elected president.
And just when we thought we were getting away from the political Kitty Kelleys, comes the Massachusetts Senate race in which a lousy Democratic candidate lost to a lousy Republican candidate because 1) she was a lousy candidate, 2) she couldn’t keep her feet …

First of all, take all the weeks of merger negotiations and throw them out the window: It’s looking more and more like the only way the Democrats can pass health care reform — and they must pass health care reform — in the wake of Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts is to have the House take up the Senate-passed bill.
Sure, there are House Democrats who are choking on that very thought — folks like Rep. Anthony Weiner (N.Y.), who thinks parts of the bill are too conservative, and Rep. Bart Stupak …

When we last checked in on the U.S. history textbooks standards setting process down in Texas, the conservative-dominated State Board of Education was mulling one-sided requirements to teach high school students about Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority.

Now, in the home stretch of a process that will set the state’s nationally influential standards, a liberal watchdog group is worried that the State Board of Education will try to push through changes to claim that communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy has been vindicated by history…

Late last year, Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation came to Eric Odom with a proposition. Odom’s group, the American Liberty Alliance–a free market, anti-tax group launched in March 2009, after its leaders had helped put together the first Tea Party protests–could sign on with the National Tea Party Convention that Phillips was organizing. ALA could promote the convention on its website and to its members. In return, it would become a “gold co-sponsor” of the convention, which would cost any other sponsor $5,000.
That status would let Odom join other …

Forget about “the Aughts.” Never mind “the Naughts.” The decade just passed — and which promises to leave a lingering, bitter aftertaste — deserves a better, more descriptive name. So for what it’s worth, I hereby dub the past ten years “The D’ohs: A Decade of Conservative Failure.”

It’s as good as any of the others I’ve heard. Perhaps better. Here’s why.

Because despite the wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff” doesn’t just happen. Despite what Joel Achenbach seems to think, the debacle of the last ten years didn’t just happen. And, yes, plenty of people did see it coming…