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I've been mulling and snooping around to find out what prompted Sen. Dianne Feinstein's chilly statement about Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to run the CIA. LAT sheds more light. Seems like there could be a real fight over this...

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

And a new day is born.

Ann Coulter was scheduled to appear on the "Today" show Tuesday morning to promote her new book, "Guilty." But it's now been canceled, according to her website.

"I guess this ends the 'they just want to get ratings' argument about liberal media bias," Coulter wrote underneath.

As County Fair notes:

Coulter is still scheduled to appear on CBS' Early Show tomorrow, according to her web page. This follows the recent revelation that CBS considered including Coulter on the "independent" panel it created to investigate a 60 Minutes report on President Bush's National Guard record.

Matthews will still beg for her to come on Hardball I would imagine.

Because it's not good enough to set up drillling rigs in the sightline of national treasures, or poison more water, or gut the endangered species act, BushCo is upping the potential permanent damage one more notch.

In a massive FU to the people of Montana and Senators Tester and Bingaman (who've been battling this effort for months), former timber lobbyist and current Forest Service chief (for just 15 more days, thankfully), is granting Plum Creek timber company one of its fondest desires.

The shift is technical but has large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.

But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company's 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.

Scenic western Montana, where Plum Creek owns 1.2 million acres, would be most affected, placing fresh burdens on county governments to provide services and undoing efforts to cluster housing near towns.

In one of his many visits to Montana during the campaign, Obama took aim at the Bush administration over this very proposal: "At a time when Montana's sportsmen are finding it increasingly hard to access lands, it is outrageous that the Bush administration would exacerbate the problem by encouraging prime hunting and fishing lands to be carved up and closed off." Hence, Rey's rush to push this last effort through, despite united opposition in local and state government.

Missoula County, the entity that would have to provide all those services to would-be mountain residents, has strongly objected to Rey's proposal, and has demanded to see all of the documents relating to this decision, documents which still haven't been released, and won't be, if Rey has anything to do with it, which, of course, he does.

Rey suspects Missoula County's request for documents is a tactic - "an attempt to run out the clock."

Because if a decision is not made before the Bush administration - and along with it, Mark Rey - leaves office, then perhaps the amendment push will falter.

"They're hoping they'll get a different legal decision from a different administration," Rey said, adding that "elections are meaningful in that way."

McCubbin, however, insists "you cannot amend a document that you haven't identified and they still haven't identified the documents. We made our request six months ago and they've just now made what they themselves call a ‘cursory review of the documents?' This isn't Missoula County delaying anything."
According to McCubbin, the Forest Service recently identified 176,000 documents that are "directly relevant" that have not yet been provided.

Rey said he remains committed to providing all relevant information needed to make an informed decision, which is not the same as providing "every last scrap of paper."

Like most of BushCo's midnight efforts, this one will inevitably end up in court, because there's no way Rey is not signing the easement that would allow Plum Creek's development. Missoula County has substantial ground to sue, and will very likely do so. So this is essentially an obnoxious and arrogant exercise in futility, likely to do nothing more than secure Mark Rey an extremely healthy salary with some timber interest in the not too distant future. But it's also placing a large financial burden a small Montana county that has plenty of other demands for its resources.

Update: Breaking news on this issue, via MTMofo in the comments. Plum Creek is inexplicably doing the right thing here:

Plum Creek Timber Co. is abandoning a controversial deal brokered with Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, citing strong public opposition.

"Although we continue to believe that the easement amendment would be beneficial to the general public, given the lack of receptivity, we have decided not to go forward with the amendment," Plum Creek President and CEO Rick Holley wrote Monday, in a letter to Missoula County.

They probably don't want to have their legal department tied up in knots for the foreseeable future.

Please. Stop.

Although I confess if you had given me my own apartment and unlimited funds back in 1988 I probably would have built a Nintendo room. (via)

Earlier today, Minnesota's Canvassing Board certified the results of the Senate recount, with former comedian Al Franken holding a 225-vote lead. The Coleman campaign immediately announced that it will file an election contest tomorrow.

The status of the recount has been widely misreported and widely misunderstood. Under Minnesota law, the post-election process has three stages: canvassing, in which the returns from the precincts are tabulated and clerical errors in reporting results are corrected; recount, in which the ballots that were cast on election day are hand-counted; and contest, in which disputes about what ballots should be counted and any other disagreements are resolved. So far, only two of the three stages have been completed. The resolution of disputed issues remains.

Coleman's contest of the returns so far is not, as some have claimed, a "sore loserman" tactic. There are highly legitimate issues surrounding the election which have not yet been addressed by any body. Those issues, some of which appear highly meritorious, will be considered for the first time in the election contest.

A number of issues will be raised in the contest, but two are most important. First, Coleman argues that an additional 654 absentee ballots that were rejected on election day should be counted.

It was Al Franken who first started talking about the "wrongly rejected absentee ballots" when he was behind in the recount. Franken's theory was that the counties should go through the absentee ballots that they rejected, and did not count, on election day. The counties, Franken said, should identify any ballots as to which they wanted to change their minds, and add those ballots to the ones being tabulated by the Canvassing Board. Coleman objected to this procedure, in part because there was no uniform standard to guide the counties. The Supreme Court, however, directed the counties and the two campaigns to confer and identify any ballots that they all agreed had improperly been rejected. Those ballots would be counted by the Canvassing Board; any ballots on which the parties did not agree would be reserved for the contest phase.

The fatal flaw in this procedure was that the counties did not approach the task in the same manner. Some--in general, the more partisan, DFL-controlled counties--approached the job aggressively and put the maximum number of ballots in the infamous "fifth pile" to be counted by the Canvassing Board. Other counties took the position that to the best of their knowledge, the decisions they made on election day were right, and they put zero ballots in the "fifth pile." The result was rampant inconsistency.

The counties put a total of around 1,350 absentee ballots in their "fifth piles." The Coleman and Franken campaigns reviewed these ballots and concluded that around 400 of them were correctly rejected in the first place. (This suggests that some counties were, indeed, overzealous in selecting ballots for the "fifth pile.") The campaigns agreed that the remaining 933 ballots could go to the Canvassing Board and be counted.

In addition, the Coleman campaign identified 654 absentee ballots which it believed had been wrongly rejected, at least by the standards that were being followed by the other counties, but were not put into the "fifth pile" by the counties where the votes were cast. Coleman argued that for the sake of consistency, these ballots, too, should go to the Canvassing Board and be counted. Franken, however, refused to agree to count any of these ballots. (We're not hearing any more from local Democrats about "counting every vote.")

By way of example, in at least one county ballots were put into the "fifth pile" if they were witnessed by an election judge but not signed by the voter. This is inconsistent with state law, which requires absentee ballots to be signed by the voter. Most counties, therefore, did not put such ballots in their "fifth piles." Nevertheless, the ballots so identified by the county that de facto changed the statute have been counted by the Canvassing Board. Coleman argues that for the sake of consistency, ballots in the same category from other counties should likewise be counted.

The Coleman campaign says that included in its 654 additional ballots are some that satisfy all statutory requirements and, in addition, were marked "accepted," not "rejected," on election day. Nevertheless, apparently because of clerical error, these ballots were put in the "rejected" pile. Franken refuses to agree to count them, so they will have to be addressed in the contest.

The second principal issue relates to duplicate ballots. It appears clear that in several Democrat-leaning precincts, a number of ballots were counted twice. In some precincts, more ballots were counted than the number of voters who showed up on election day. The Coleman campaign raised this issue with the Canvassing Board, which concluded that it had no alternative but to count the ballots even though at least one member of the board said publicly that he believed they were counting some ballots twice. Coleman then took the issue to the Supreme Court, which held that it would require fact-finding to determine whether and to what extent ballots had been double-counted, and therefore the issue would have to be reserved for the contest phase. It seems likely that Coleman will win this issue, and his campaign believes it will represent a swing of 100 or more ballots in Coleman's favor.

So Coleman has ample grounds to file an election contest, and he most likely will gain a number of votes when additional ballots are counted and duplicates are eliminated. It is impossible to say at this point whether such gains will be enough to win the election. One way or the other, it is going to be a photo finish.

What you missed on Sunday Kos ....

It was an unusual Sunday in that we were treated to three stellar reviews:

• Devisltower reviewed Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air, a look at Joseph Priestly and the discovery of oxygen.
• MissLaura reviewed Milk, proclaiming it a winner: "Its representation of a politics at once pragmatic and radical, suffused with seriousness of purpose but open to fun, pushing hard from outside and in, makes it a valuable primer on movement politics for anyone tempted to believe elections and legislation are all."
• Adam B brought us insight into Frost/Nixon, with the observation: "The achievement of Frost/Nixon, and of the actors involved, is that you may not look at another political interview the same way ... or, perhaps, may finally recognize how you've been subconsciously watching them all along."

Additionally, we had a retrospective of the Bush administration's constant denial of problems as we headed toward economic crisis in Jed L's The Bush Recession In His Own Words.

And finally, we looked to the future with brownsox's rundown of upcoming electoral hotspots in Next Year's Model: New Hampshire Through Ohio, and Trapper John's brilliant and passionate call to arms in Why the Employee Free Choice Act Is So Important: The Power of Organization.

On the same day that the Minnesota Canvassing Board certified the results of the November 4 election, resulting in Democrat Al Franken's apparent victory in the state's U.S. Senate race by 225 votes, nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh baselessly claimed that Franken "stole the race" and asserted that "The Wall Street Journal has a story on this. They're counting votes twice -- votes that were rejected, all kinds of things." However, as Media Matters for America noted, the Journal "story" Limbaugh referred to was an editorial, which simply asserted that there was double counting, echoing the accusation by the incumbent, Republican Norm Coleman; it did not cite reporting to support its claim, only quoting State Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson, a member of the canvassing board, who the Journal said "has acknowledged that 'very likely there was a double counting.' "

From the January 5 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:

CALLER: Thanks, and many other of them. Hey, Rush, the reason I'm calling is when you started talking about Caroline Kennedy -- I'm starting to really get pissed off about a lot of different things going on here. And -- and, you know, we talk about Caroline Kennedy, we talk about Al Franken, and it's been building up for a while.

You talk about the Blago thing. You talk about everybody else. And what's really starting to frustrate me is the lack of accountability on the American electorate. We can't keep blaming Blago. We've gotta start blaming the people that are putting these people in office, and start holding us to accountability. And that's what has me frustrated. It hasn't been talked about a lot. And Rush, I tell you, you've told me one thing that I've always held to heart.

LIMBAUGH: Yes.

CALLER: Is you said you always have faith -- always have faith in the American people.

LIMBAUGH: I do.

CALLER: And I -- and I'm trying to believe in that. But we keep electing -- we keep electing these officials, and help me dissect that.

LIMBAUGH: We did not elect Al Franken. He stole the race. They are stealing the race up there blind in front of everybody's nose. They are counting absentee ballots. The Wall Street Journal has a story on this. They're counting votes twice -- votes that were rejected, all kinds of things. That's just -- the Democrats are stealing the election up there. The Democrats run Illinois and Chicago. Of course they elected Blago and Obama and everybody else. That is -- that's not gonna change.

SO, A WHILE BACK I MENTIONED THE 10″ ASUS NETBOOK, but since then I’ve gotten one and used it enough to form an opinion. My opinion is that it’s a pretty neat little gadget. It’s only a little bit bigger than the 9″ Asus, but it feels a lot bigger. The bigger screen is nice, but it’s the keyboard — which goes from cramped-but-usable to nearly full-sized — that’s the big difference. And you get a lot for the $383 that Amazon is currently asking: Windows XP, wireless, webcam with microphone, a 160 GB hard drive, an Atom processor, and 1GB of RAM. Also, it has a surprisingly high-quality feel for the price — it doesn’t feel like a cheap netbook, it feels like a small laptop. The 9″ Asus is entirely usable, but at the 10″ size a lot of the compromises seem to melt away. Battery life is good, too — I’m not sure you’ll really get the claimed 6-7 hours, but I’ve gotten 4.5 hours with some time remaining so it’s pretty good for such a lightweight machine. And did I mention it’s cheap?

Remember when they explained to us we needed to have the Republicans in charge "because they're good with money"? Remember how excited the Villagers were about having a Harvard MBA president? Ah, good times!

The deep river of private money that helped knit together the global economy has abruptly dried up, new government figures show.

As the global financial crisis grew more severe this summer, foreigners sold almost $90 billion of U.S. securities — the greatest quarterly fire sale by overseas investors since the government began keeping track in 1960. U.S. investors also are retrenching; they unloaded about $85 billion worth of foreign holdings in the quarter, says the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

"We've had a global panic. Everyone is pulling their money home," says economist Adam Posen of the Peterson Institute in Washington, D.C.

That's bad for economic growth in the U.S. because it threatens to starve capital-hungry companies and entrepreneurs. But it's especially serious for emerging-market countries that rely heavily on outside financing. Capital flows into countries such as South Korea, Turkey and Brazil were evaporating even before the mid-September Lehman Bros. bankruptcy made things worse.

The reversal of private capital flows signals an abrupt end to a nearly two-decades-long era of financial globalization, says economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. Private flows into and out of the U.S. for purchases of stocks, corporate bonds and federal agency bonds have dropped from around 18% of economic output to near zero "in a remarkably short period of time," Setser says.

AND HERE I THOUGHT the “culture of corruption” was gone.

With Rahm Emanuel having resigned from Congress to become Chief of Staff to President-elect Barack Obama, embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has quickly set the special-election date for Emanuel's Chicago North Side seat.

Embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) announced today that he has set April 7 as the date for the special election to fill former Rep. Rahm Emanuel’s (D) 5th district seat.

...

Blagojevich represented the north Chicagoland seat before Emanuel, who was re-elected to his fourth term on Election Day. Even with scandal-ridden Blagojevich still in office, the district is expected to stay in Democratic column.

The seat should be safe for whatever Democrat manages to win the nomination. With one blip on the radar (the 1994 election of Republican Michael Flanagan after the incumbent, Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, was indicted on corruption charges) the seat has been in Democratic hands since time immemorial, and sports a PVI of D+18.

The primary is only two months away, on March 3, and is almost certain to draw a host of competitors:

In a statement from his official office, Blagojevich designated a special primary election for March 3, 2009.

"I am pleased to set these election dates so that the people of the Fifth Congressional District can have a representative in Congress as quickly as possible," Blagojevich said in a statement. "With our nation in a recession, we need to ensure that Illinois’ voice is being represented in Washington D.C. to get our economy back on track."

With so little time before the primary, the advantage goes to the candidates who can raise the most money in the shortest amount of time, and have the greatest name recognition. However, given that the primary could be won with 25% of the vote or even less (as there are expected to be as many as 10-12 Democrats running), it's by no means a certainty that the more established candidates will win. With such a big field, the race for the nomination is wide open.

CONSUMER CHOICE saves “Dora the Explorer.” But I’m still in favor of it . . . .

ANNOUNCING THE automotive Darwin Awards.

Al Franken declares victory:...

David Kurtz http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

Download | Play    Download | Play

The economy is very sick," Obama said before meeting with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. "The situation is getting worse. ... We have to act and act now to break the momentum of this recession."

"The reason we are here today is because the people's business cannot wait,"

"Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don't act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment and the American dream slipping further and further out of reach...

"This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem at this stage. It is an American problem and we're going to all have to chip in and do what the American people expect."

In Obama's "bi-partisan Congressional" presser today, he called the economy "sick" and stressed the need for accountability on how the money from his massive stimulus package will be spent. As we've seen with TARP, and with no real oversight in place, you can't trust CEO's to do the right thing.

The AP contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings? What's the plan for the rest?None of the banks provided specific answers and most refused to explain why they are keeping the information secret.

Obama is stepping into an economic situation that is eerily similar to FDR and he's hitting the right notes when he says transparency and accountability are a high priority for him. That is going to be paramount if his new economic package is going to move forward. In FDR's time, just the fact that "change" was happening in America that didn't have the name "Hoover" attached to it gave FDR a huge boost to his agenda and to the American psyche that helped him get through his first 100 days. Hope and change do matter to the American public and Obama is using it wisely so far.

Obama is in a similar position to FDR, but what will Conservatives do? Will they try to block his policies that he wants to sign into law as soon as his first 100 days begin or will they become part of the solution? I think we know where Mitch McConnell's head will go. They want to appear to be relevant, but it was their control that has put us in this position to begin with.

I hope Obama's love affair with bipartisanship will come to an end very soon. Not because I don't think it's a good idea to have both sides working together, but because Conservatives are incapable of doing just that. They do not want Obama to succeed because it will weaken their grip on American politics for years to come at the expense of average Americans just trying to get by.

It's about ideology for them and not about the healing that our country is in desperate need of. I think Obama will soon feel their un-partisan wrath sooner rather than later and hopefully it will snap him out of any thought he had that he could work with Conservatives, no matter how "centrist" he goes. So here's the question.
How fast will Obama get fed up with Conservative obstructionism? Will it be in his first 100 days or shortly after?

I do know they filibuster Franken (who has just declared victory) and Holder as soon as Conservatives can. Will that be the beginning of the end to this bipartisan nightmare? If Conservatives did join in then at least Obama would be able to start healing the country, but don't expect any help from them.

The NYT, WSJ, and Paul Krugman take a look at the emerging details surrounding President-elect Obama's stimulus package, particularly the roughly $300 billion in proposed tax cuts.

Overall, the package will cover a two-year period with a price-tag of $675 billion to $775 billion, $270 billion to $310 billion of which would be spent on tax cuts. The balance -- $405 billion to $465 billion -- would be spent on infrastracture, health care, and other programs.

One thing to keep in mind is that in early 2008 Congress passed a $131 billion tax cut stimulus plan covering one year. Therefore, while $300 billion over two years might seem like a lot, it's actually the same level of spending as we saw in 2008.

The problem, of course, was that the 2008 tax cut stimulus didn't do much, if any, good.

Since the tax cut portion of the stimulus will more or less be a continuation of the 2008 tax cut stimulus, the real change from 2008 will be the $405 to $465 billion in spending on infrastructure, health care, and other projects.

On an annual basis, this is about $203 to $233 billion dollars in actual stimulus spending.

In 2007, the U.S. GDP was roughly $13.8 trillion, so that means the "new" part of the stimulus package will be about 1.5% of GDP.

by Alexandra Andrews, ProPublica -

In the spirit of the New Year, ProPublica is trying out a new feature, Quick Picks. Every afternoon, we'll write a quick post about the day's top stories from "Breaking on the Web," putting them in context and explaining why they're editors' picks, etc. And if a reader has recommended one of them, he or she will get a special shout-out. We're hoping you'll send us stories from your local paper, your favorite blog or magazine, etc. (Today's Quick Picks is unusually long because we've included stories from over the holiday.)

Read more...

From TPM Reader RW ... In regards to Obama's strategy re: tax cuts, the proper move is to offer a concession so as to split the GOP. If he is able to do that at the get-go, he'll log-roll them...

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

Ben Craw http://tpmtv.talkingpointsmemo.com/