Promoted by Devilstower. After all the bad news I've brought you on mountaintop removal, it's wonderful to see some success.

This summer, after months of conversations, some top executives from Bank of America agreed to accompany NRDC staff on a fact-finding trip to Appalachia. In July we flew them over moonscaped mine sites in West Virginia, took them to Kayford Mountain for a closer look at mountaintop mining, and introduced them to several local residents/activists who are fighting to save their beloved homeland from reckless coal mining companies.

Today, BofA released its revised its coal policy, which will have the immediate effect of curtailing commercial lending to companies that mine coal by blowing off the top of mountains in Appalachia. The policy states, in part:

Bank of America is particularly concerned about surface mining conducted through mountain top removal in locations such as central Appalachia. We therefore will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal. While we acknowledge that surface mining is economically efficient and creates jobs, it can be conducted in a way that minimizes environmental impacts in certain geographies.

Why is this so important? Bank of America still stands as a pillar of our country's shaky financial system. In fact, the trying economic crisis has only served to strengthen this behemoth bank unlike other once proud and stable institutions. All the more reason to engage BofA in using its investment power and influence to affect positive environmental change.

That's also why Rainforest Action identified BofA as the right company for a public campaign, hoping to convince the bank that investing in companies that practice mountaintop removal mining is a bad thing.

NRDC decided to get involved in a different way: By talking to the bank's executives directly and explaining the great opportunity available to them as responsible corporate citizens to help end this travesty. That's when they agreed to the West Virginia trip and saw first and what their investments in mining companies had been supporting.

Is BofA’s policy perfect? No. Is the policy as strong as we'd like? Not really. Will this shut down mountaintop mining operations? Of course not.

But BofA's bold step forward sends an unequivocal signal to the mining industry that business as usual is no longer acceptable. And for the worst offenders of mountaintop mining, like Massey, the bank's actions will effectively shut down the funding flow for this activity from one of the nation's largest lenders.

Make no mistake, this is a big step from a big player. And it marks a turning point in the campaign to end the war on Appalachia being waged by the coal industry. NRDC is pleased to be working with both our grassroots allies and leading corporations like Bank of America to stop mountaintop mining.

This Diary was originally posted at NRDC Switchboard

Once upon a time, we used to wait until the end of the year before adding new voices to the front page. This year, we retired the old way of adding contributing editors. We're now moving to rolling admissions.

We started with Jed, who joined us a couple of months ago. And today, we're adding Lithium Cola. From the bio I'll soon be adding to our About page:

LithiumCola, 37, grew up in Ohio and after bumbling about in Las Vegas and New York in his 20's 30's, ended up back in Ohio, which he is sure is indicative of something. He has worked in academia, technical construction sales, and on factory floors. The only thing he knows for sure is: never match.

Moving forward, we'll be more aggressive adding new voices that catch our fancy anytime during the year.

Also, we're launching several new initiatives to make sure our existing important voices get more "airtime", so to speak.

For those who want to keep a closer eye on what happens in our nation's Capitol, Kagro X is ruling the roost over at Congress Matters -- where we hope to do for the legislative process what we've been doing to the electoral one: democratizing it. Remember, once legislation hits the floor of the Senate or House, it's usually too late for us to do anything about. That's why the lobbyists hang out in the committee rooms, not the floor. Our goal with Congress Matters will be to keep a better eye on what's happening in those committee rooms, identify pressure points, so we can direct our activism at the right time and place. The site should prove immensely important in 2009.  

We're also going to launch, sometime early next year, a weekly email political newsletter, covering both legislative and electoral developments. It will feature original content (so few-to-none site reprints) from me, brownsox, and Kagro.

And we've got yet another site on the drawing board slated for a late Q1 launch. More details on that one when it's closer to reality. Right now it'd be too much vaporware for any announcement.

So lots of exciting things ahead for the site. No rest for those seeking to foster change.

KBR and Halliburton are the targets of a new class-action lawsuit alleging that U.S. troops have been sickened by water, food and fumes produced by the two massive private contractors, according to the Army Times:

Joshua Eller, who worked as a civilian computer-aided drafting technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said military personnel, contractors and third-country nationals may have been sickened by contamination at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq, home to more than 30,000 service members, Defense Department civilians and contractor personnel.

The details of the charges laid out in the lawsuit are macabre:

The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces."

Eller also accuses KBR of failing to maintain a medical incinerator at Joint Base Balad, which has been confirmed by two surgeons in interviews with Military Times about the Balad burn pit. Instead, according to the lawsuit and the physicians, medical waste, such as needles, amputated body parts and bloody bandages were burned in the open-air pit.

"Wild dogs in the area raided the burn pit and carried off human remains," the lawsuit states. "The wild dogs could be seen roaming the base with body parts in their mouths, to the great distress of the U.S. forces."

The troops that the contractors so love to claim to support are not only being exposed to toxic fumes and scenes of wild dogs dragging off body parts. No, they're getting extra treats in their rotten food as well:

Eller also accused KBR of serving spoiled, expired and rotten food to the troops, as well as dishes that may have been contaminated with shrapnel.

"Defendants knowingly and intentionally supplied and served food that was well past its expiration date, in some cases over a year past its expiration date," the lawsuit states. "Even when it was called to the attention of the KBR food service managers that the food was expired, KBR still served the food to U.S. forces."

In a separate incident reported by McClatchy, we learn that as bad as the military base-dwellers have it, workers "employed" by KBR sub-contractors are treated even worse:

BAGHDAD — About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport without money or a place to work.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions.

And that's how we spread American values around the world during the Bush administration: poison our own to save a buck and virtually enslave the poor from other countries.

When the GOP brags about winning the run-off in Georgia, it's worth remembering that through early October, most mainstream political analysts (with the notable exceptions of brownsox and Swing State Project) thought Saxby Chambliss had his re-election campaign locked up.

Take, for example, Stu Rothenberg on September 14 or Charlie Cook on October 2. Both said that Georgia was a safe Republican senate seat:

So when the GOP crows about their 'big victory,' they should keep in mind that they won where they were supposed to win, and that the flip-side of denying Democrats a 60-vote majority is that with Georgia in the bag, Republicans now hold just 41 seats.

Here's a potentially bloody primary fight that I'd like to see:

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has some Republican-to-Republican advice for Gov. Sarah Palin: If you want to make a run at the White House, keep your hands off my Senate seat.

Murkowski, up for reelection in 2010, is nervously awaiting word on whether John McCain’s former running mate will run against her in the GOP primary. But she says Palin is the one who should be nervous.

"I can guarantee it would be a very tough election," Murkowski said in an interview.   [...]

Asked Monday to respond to Murkowski’s comments, Palin’s communications coordinator, Kate Morgan, said only, "The governor has never stated her intention or desire to run for that office."

Nice non-denial there, eh?

And while some, including Murkowski, say that a Senator Palin would cost Alaska senate seniority, a Democratic pollster says that:

Sarah is interested in what is best for Sarah, and she is not necessarily going to get sidetracked by party loyalties.

Darn right!

Nate Silver's favorite punching bag makes fun of himself again, telling Alan Colmes that he thinks it's "rational" to believe Barack Obama is a Muslim.

We all know Barack Obama is Christian, but it's important to also say that it wouldn't matter if he were Muslim, or Jewish, or any other religion, because in this country, we don't impose religious tests.

At the same time, it's a smear to maliciously claim someone holds a religious faith other than their own, and to defend believing those smears as "rational" says more about how McCain nearly managed to get 46% of the vote than it does about anything else John Ziegler might choose to whine about.

From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE...

Song for My New Best Bud
(With apologies to the guys who wrote "Johnny Angel")

David Shuster, how I love him
'Cause he read my poll on the TV
Now I'm famous 'cause I've been on MSNBC

David Shuster, how I heart him
With those steely eyes and teeth so white
I could make up endless polls for him both day and night

It was a crap poll, and the choices were lame
But David didn’t care, and read them on the air

Now I'm someone, and I owe it to him
But he still can't pronounce "Kos" (though sometimes he comes close)

So David Shuster...
You rule the roost, sir
of the tra-dish-uhn-al media
You're my onscreen wikipedia
Now plug my new poll!

David Shuster (doobie woobie)
My poll booster (doobie woobie)

Don't worry...there'll be more cowbell in the final mix.

Cheers and Jeers starts in There's Moreville... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

Your one stop pundit shop.

David Broder thinks that any policy proposals that come from Robert Gates or Tim Geithner should get extra scrutiny.

Roger Cohen says that it's time to give the International Criminal Court another look:

Only by aligning America again with international law can the damage inflicted on America’s image and appeal by the Bush administration be undone.

Charles Seife wants the Minnesota senate race to be decided by the flip of a coin.

Ed Feulner gives the latest defense for a missile defense shield.

William Murchison whines that liberals need to stop harping about "restored constitutional liberties" just because they hate George Bush and Dick Cheney, and realize that we haven't been attacked since 9/11 because of:

... stringent federal measures to catch or head off terrorists: domestic surveillance included; Guantanamo included; the Patriot Act included; conceivably even waterboarding.

Karl Rove says that John McCain's defeat was all about the money.

John S. Duffield wants to reduce our dependence on oil by creating an incentive for companies to invest in electric cars and alternative fuels:

...for the sake of argument, we might consider raising the minimum price of a barrel of oil by $10 per year, so that it reaches about $150 a barrel by 2019. This would translate very roughly into $4.50 per gallon of gasoline.

That would be a painful incentive.

Joan Venocchi is outraged for John Kerry, although it looks more like an excuse to complain about Barack Obama.

Patt Morrison ponders the idea of legalizing and taxing marijuana.

This evening's Rescue Rangers are ItsJessMe, srkp23, mem from somerville, and YatPundit pulling a double, with vcmvo2 as editor.

~One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along ~Franklin D. Roosevelt~

The diaries up for rescue tonight are:

Health, Education & Welfare

• morisey presents the state of Texas healthcare in Texas: Healthy Women, Healthy Families. (YatPundit)
• mwchicago04 gives practical tips on Paying for College During a Recession in 7 Easy Steps. (ItsJessMe)
• In a must-read diary, FarWestGirl reminds us how important it is to make - and communicate - end-of-life choices well in advance in When choices affect life and death. (ItsJessMe)

Modifying the Economy, Our Beliefs, Our Behavior

• Bcgntn offers an interesting take on the auto industry's woes in Car Manufacturers Con. (YatPundit)
• Christian Wright was Almost Famous, but a CBS reporter disagreed with his opinion that tax dollars were better spent on the recent refurbishing of the Capitol Visitors Center than on two endless, purposeless wars. (ItsJessMe)
• James Paton Walsh reminds us that economics is still a "social" science in The Crisis of Logic. (jlms qkw)
• A Kossack/Salvationist Responds to a recent discussion that, according to mersenneary, presented a skewed look at the Salvation Army.   (ItsJessMe)

Modifying How & Why We Vote

• Seneca Doane reflects on a year of intensive work and draws lessons for the future, in Thoughts on the (phone) banking crisis. (srkp23)
• Vote For America shares a tri-partite writing on current topics in Auto Industry Throwdown, MN Recount Update and GA Runoff Rant. (jlms qkw)
• Dirty D looks at some issues on the meta of polling in OVERDETERMINED: Are polling databases a good solution to the sample size problem? (mem from somerville)

Doing Something: The Environment

• rperks shares a small bit of good news in the desperate world of Mountain Top Removal in Bank of America Puts a Deposit on Our Mountains. (jlms qkw)

jotter has High Impact Diaries: December 2, 2008.

asimbagirl brings Top Comments: Favorite movies.

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this Open Thread.

Try to decode this logic from The Weekly Standard writer Stephen Hayes:

BORGER: You just can't say no, because that won't go over with the American people.

HAYES: I'm not sure, I think there's a strong part of the country -- more than 50% in a lot of polls -- that are just opposing right now, that are very skeptical of these bailouts, and I think that if you have somebody like a Sarah Palin or another Republican who can articulate that opposition by presenting alternatives...

BORGER: But what are the alternatives? That's the point. You have to have 'em.

HAYES: Well, one would be not, y'know, $7.4 trillion giveaways.

Unless I'm missing something, Hayes is saying:

1. Actually, you can just say no.
2. You should say no by "presenting alternatives."
3. The alternative is to just say no.

When they talk about the intellectual deficit on the right, this is the kind of thing they are taking about. (By the way, Hayes seemed to think passing the bailout was a political plus for McCain during the campaign.)

As threatened, the Bush Environmental Positively-useless Administration has repealed key parts of the Stream Buffer Act. Previously, the EPA had been cooperating with companies to subvert the act, but judges in some districts were still slowing down approval of mountaintop removal operations. Now even that token obstacle has been removed.

Approval by EPA and the White House Office of Management and Budget paved the way for Interior Department officials to finalize industry-backed changes in the 25-year-old stream "buffer zone" rule.

Environmental groups had fought the change, because they hoped that either court actions or moves by the incoming Obama administration might use the buffer zone as a tool to more strictly regulate mountaintop removal.

Despite the destruction of more than 400 mountains, and the routine violation of the existing rules, the Bush administration still hustled through this gift to the worst operators in the coal industry. In doing so, they fulfilled one of the dreams Bush has held since coming into office.

For nearly five years, since January 2004, the Bush administration has been working to essentially eliminate the more than 20-year-old buffer zone rule. Generally, that rule prohibits mining activities within 100 feet of perennial and intermittent streams.

Coal operators already can obtain variances to mine within the 100-foot buffer. To do so, though, companies must show that their operations will not cause water quality violations or "adversely affect the water quantity and quality, or other environmental resources of the stream."

Ridiculously, the EPA and Office of Surface Mining had already been issuing such variances to operations that completely buried flowing streams, because blasting a stream out of existence somehow negates the need to worry about water quality. That's how 1,200 miles of flowing water has been eliminated from the Appalachian region.

Now the EPA has stopped even the pretense of caring.

Way back when he was running (unsuccessfully) for a seat in Congress, Bush declared that he wanted to do away with both safety and environmental regulations. There are plenty of dead miners and ruined communities to mark his accomplishments in the White House.

If it happens, it will be a very big deal:

Two sources close to Jeb Bush, including one who has spoken to the former Florida governor within the past few hours, say he is seriously considering a run for Senate now that incumbent Republican Mel Martinez has retired.

"He is receiving a lot of encouragement from both in and out of the state," an longtime Bush adviser said tonight. "He is going to take his time and approach this very methodically."  Bush will weigh, according to this adviser, how a run would impact his family, his business, and whether the Senate would be the best platform for the causes he'd advocate -- education, immigration, GOP solutions to health care and energy.

Bush left office with high approvals, and would be the strongest candidate the Republicans could find for the seat (with the possible exception of Governor Charlie Crist, who doesn't seem interested in a Senate bid).

His entry would clear the field for the Republicans, and might knock a few Democrats out of the field as well, although it being an open-seat race, someone decent would no doubt take the plunge, figuring that the toxicity of the Bush name alone could help out, despite Jeb's personal popularity.

He could be beaten by a Democrat, but if he ran, he'd start the race as the favorite. He wouldn't be favored like Mark Warner was favored, but the race would start as his to lose.

Other folks reportedly considering the race:

Republicans: State House Speaker Marco Rubio; Attorney General Bill McCollum; Rep. Connie Mack IV; Rep. Vern Buchanan; former House Speaker Allan Bense.

Democrats: Florida CFO Alex Sink; Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz; Rep. Kendrick Meek; Rep. Allen Boyd; State Sen. Dan Gelber; State Sen. Dave Aronberg.

Big three gasp for air
Heavy discount holiday
Long winter arrives

Also, also, too
Also, you betcha, wink, wink
Also, too, such as.

Haiku wednesday thread
Bill-O lurks from a distance
We will do it live

In the most coherent and cogent explanation I've seen of the financial crisis, AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers lays out how the decline in unionization which began in the mid-Seventies led to the burst of the sub-prime bubble, and ultimately to today's recession.  And he wrote it way back in April.

But the real roots of the crisis do not lie on Wall Street. The cause of the crisis can be found in the long-term weakening of the real American economy in an era of globalization—in closed factories, outsourced high tech jobs and low wage jobs with no benefits, and in the unsustainable effort to maintain middle class living standards through borrowing. It is to be found in the reality of lives like that of Kimberly Somsel of Westland Michigan, a member of the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate Working America, an unemployed single mother of two battling breast cancer and facing foreclosure due to a ballooning "2 and 28" loan payment. She is selling the family car and her furniture just to get by. Five houses on her block are threatened with foreclosure.

Powerful voices in our country say that public resources should be there for Bear Stearns, but not for Kimberly Somsel, to keep the champagne flowing on Wall Street, but not to build a future for Michigan. But there is another way — a return to a high wage economy driven by productive investment in the United States. This way requires not that we retreat from the global economy, but that we insist that the globalized economy have real rules that work for working people. At the center of these rules must be labor market regulation, and in particular, regulation that empowers workers to speak for themselves by acting together. But rules are no enough. The United States must pursue a real national economic strategy in a globalized world economy.

For thirty years, America’s economic elites and their political allies have pursued a combination of economic and social policies designed to produce a low wage economy. These policies—our labor laws and our broader system of labor market regulation, our tax policies and our approach to globalization, have yielded decades of stagnant wages and rising economic inequality.

But at the same time, policymakers of both parties have sought, with some success, to maintain high levels of consumer spending. The pursuit of the contradiction of a low wage, high spending economy has systematically destroyed the various ways we individually and collectively save and invest. Instead of an income driven economy, we have become an economy driven by asset bubbles fueled by cheap debt. The ultimate unsustainability of this strategy has brought us to our current economic crisis.

You really need to read the whole speech.  It's the summary of how we got here that I wish I had written, and it's just another powerful reminder of how critical passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is to economic recovery.  Without a real opportunity to join unions and build bargaining power, American workers will continue to experience stagnant wages. And as Silvers eloquently explains, stagnant wages lead to unsustainable debt and a a downward economic spiral.  The Employee Free Choice Act isn't just about fairness in the workplace -- it's a tool for engineering stimulus.  And it won't cost the government a dime.

Cross-posted at Congress Matters.

Paul Blumenthal at the Sunlight Foundation points out a great piece of information about that anonymous hold on the nomination of Neil Barofsky as bailout Special IG:

The first thing of note is that secret holds were, for the most part, abolished during the 110th Congress. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act mandated the disclosure of the identity of a senator secretly blocking a "measure or matter" "not later than 6 session days" after the initiation of the hold.

The Barofsky nomination provides a good example of the loopholes in this mandate of disclosure. If a bill or, in this case, a nomination comes up prior to a long recess, the disclosure of the offending senator’s identity will have to wait until the Senate reconvenes for at least 6 session days, not calendar days. So far, since the nomination was blocked, the Senate convened for two session days. While they are expected to convene tomorrow for a pro forma session, it is unknown whether the Senate will convene for four more days by the end of the year.

I actually count three session days since Chairman Dodd's November 21st statement noting the hold -- pro forma sessions on the 24th, 26th and 29th. The calendar at Majority Leader Reid's site lists a pro forma session for yesterday, December 2nd, with another scheduled for Friday, plus a working session on Monday. That'd take us to six session days since Dodd's acknowledgment of the hold, which may or may not have been in place for a few days prior to the Dodd statement.

So in all likelihood, next week will see us pass the necessary sixth session day required under the new rule, and we'll know who the chowderhead behind this delay is.

Everybody already suspects Jim Bunning, of course. And why not? Who else is saying things like this about the bailout oversight?

"I wonder why taxpayers should pay $50 million to a watchdog who has nothing to watch."

Well, OK, what other Senator, I mean. I've surely said something like that, but I don't count. The point is that the Members of Congress who assured us that everything would come under strict scrutiny should want to see this gaping hole in the oversight plugged ASAP.

And indeed, Max Baucus (D-MT) says he wants exactly that. And for very good reason. Baucus, you may recall, was outspoken during the bailout debate in committing himself personally to the creation of the Special IG job, and presumably to its actually being filled and performed. Now Baucus has expressed his displeasure with the delays created by the hold. Hopefully he'll also be sure to stay on top of insisting that the requirements of the new rules be honored, and with at least six session days having passed by next week, will follow up by demanding the name of the Senator responsible.

We're in Day Negative 48 of the Failed Obama Administration, which is pretty incredible given that we're still 48 days away from the Obama Administration existing. Of course, the number of people doing the Chicken Little act are about as numerous as the PUMA brigades that were going to take Obama down.

It's important to remember that the President makes the final call. Cabinet members advise and implement. So George W. Bush launched his administration with a cabinet that included Colin Powell, Tommy Thompson, Norm Mineta (a Democrat), and Ann Veneman (who was floated as a potential veep candidate for Obama). Remember how Powell was supposed to moderate Bush's hawkishness? Instead, he delivered that shameful presentation at the UN knowing it was full of lies. Why? Because the President calls the shots, and he'll ultimately be judged for all of his cabinet's decisions. It ain't Rumsfeld that people blame for Iraq.

So what about the "controversial" picks?

Hillary Clinton at State? One of Obama's tough tasks ahead is to repair the damage Bush did to our relationships around the world. By picking Hillary Clinton, the second-biggest political celebrity in government today, Obama just told the world he takes that task very seriously. He essentially gave them the biggest name he possibly could, double-underscoring his commitment to re-engaging the world as partners, not as missile targets. On purely pragmatic grounds, it was extremely well played. Politically, I see zero downside, except maybe the idiot traditional media and their bizarre Clinton fetish. But screw them.

And Gates... Yeah, he's the one that makes me wince, apparently reinforcing the notion that only Republicans can competently handle defense matters. But there are three mitigating factors:

1. It's supposed to be a short-term appointment, a one-year gig to transition seamlessly.
2. Gates has already promised to make closing the Guantanamo prison a high priority. In fact, he has long argued for such a closing.

   March 22 [2007]— In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.

   Mr. Gates’s appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush’s publicly stated desire to close Guantánamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.

   Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.

   Since the President makes that final call (or in Bush's case, the Vice-President), Gates was ignored by Bush. But his stance on this critical issue probably helped convince Obama to keep him around to implement its closing. And given the politically sensitive nature of the move, it makes it harder for Republicans to attack the move since it's Bush Secretary of Defense pushing for the closing.

3. Gates is aboard getting our troops out of Iraq. And like #2 above, it becomes easier for Obama to sell the move to various important stakeholders by having Bush's guy plan the withdrawal.

All in all, I would've preferred a Democrat take the helm, but there is a valid rationale for keeping Gates aboard for a short time.

Beyond that, time will judge the wisdom of Obama's choices. I'm not ready to pass judgment now, not when we're still 48 days away from even having a President Obama.

Remember Jeff Frederick, the Virginia GOP chairman who told McCain canvassers to compare Barack Obama to Osama Bin Laden? Well Mr. Frederick is sticking to his guns. Although he concedes his remark was dumb, he's defending it as 'true.'

Va. GOP chief: Obama remark was stupid but true

Virginia's Republican chairman said Tuesday that his remark tying Democrat Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden during the presidential campaign was stupid, but he refused to apologize...

...Frederick was asked about the remark Tuesday during a discussion of the 2008 Virginia presidential campaign with a group of newspaper editors. Obama was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Virginia in 44 years.

"It was a stupid joke I gave to somebody in a small crowd of people and that's what happens," Frederick said. "But you know, it's really unfortunate. We live in a 'gotcha' society."

Frederick said he got hate mail, angry phone calls and vicious e-mails for weeks.

Even so, he stood by the comment Tuesday, defending it as true and saying he was taking cues from Republican John McCain's campaign after running mate Sarah Palin said Obama had been "palling around with terrorists."

Notice that Frederick claimed he was just telling somebody a joke, and casts himself as a victim. But that's a load of bunk. He's no victim, and he wasn't telling a joke. Here's what actually happened, as reported in mid-October by Karen Tumulty of TIME:

With so much at stake, and time running short, Frederick did not feel he had the luxury of subtlety. He climbed atop a folding chair to give 30 campaign volunteers who were about to go canvassing door to door their talking points — for instance, the connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon," he said. "That is scary." It is also not exactly true — though that distorted reference to Obama’s controversial association with William Ayers, a former 60s radical, was enough to get the volunteers stoked. "And he won’t salute the flag," one woman added, repeating another myth about Obama. She was quickly topped by a man who called out, "We don’t even know where Senator Obama was really born." Actually, we do; it’s Hawaii.

This is the modern GOP. A party for extremists -- and liars.

• I bet you didn't know that Karl Rove lies.
• Bowers discusses the fake liberal ideological gap.
• What? This sounds like a "purge", and the incoming Obama administration wouldn't do that, would they? That was their rationale for not giving Lieberman the boot.
• Obama's approval ratings per Ras: 67-30. It was 52-44 after the election.
• Hardly a week goes by that I don't get some email demanding I stop using words like "fuck" because it does something or other to me "credibility". I doubt James Wolcott would agree.
• After all these years, Conservapedia is still hilarious.
• Best headline of the day:

  Erick Erickson Dances In End Zone After Late Field Goal By Saxby Chambliss Makes Final Score 48-3.

  The rest of the post is equally hilarious.

• Bush Jr. is now blaming his father for the nation's economic ills. Those guys crack me up when they talk about "personal responsibility".
• The Vatican is jealous of all the negative attention the Mormon Church is getting.
• The Hispanic Caucus wants Obama to nominate Rick Noriega for Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

  I like Rick a lot. He ran the Katrina relief operation at the Astrodome, so he seems to have the ability to put together an effective operation. Then again, his campaign team was an embarrassing disaster. So maybe he can't put together an effective operation? Some candidates lost despite running great races (Jim Martin, for example). Noriega lost running a shitty campaign.

Update: Oh, and this comment by rweba is the 25,000,000 comment on Daily Kos since it moved over to Scoop in 2003.

Math is fun.

If you go through and add it up, leaving aside Minnesota's undecided 1.7 percent for now, only about 49.8 percent of the nearly 306 million people in the United States live in a state where there's even one Republican Senator. Only 24.4 percent live in a state where both seats are held by Republicans.

Taken from the other direction, 48.5 percent of the country's citizenry lives in states where the electorate wants to see only Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents run things in the Senate. Less than a quarter support having only Republicans do so. That's a 2:1 ratio of Democrat:Republican in terms of straightforward statewide mandates for one party or the other in terms of population represented. That leaves the potential public constituency for some sort of centrist (though it could as easily be center left as right, considering the presidential map and the makeup of the House) management of the Senate at slightly over a quarter.

To review, that's about a 2:1:1 ratio for left:center:right, with the cumulative left+center:right ratio of 3:1.

Yeah, the Senate, no matter what happened last night when a Republican shockingly won a Senate race in Georgia (gasp!), provides zero evidence of a "center-right" nation. Neither did the totality of the Democratic landslide the past two cycles:

"Our polling showed that more than 60 percent of voters identified Obama as a liberal," top John McCain aide Mark Salter told Politico. "Typically, a candidate is not going to win the presidency with those figures. But I think the country just disregarded it. People didn’t care."

Wrong. People did care. Obama ran on an explicitly progressive platform, and Americans responded enthusiastically, flocking to his campaign in mind-numbing numbers — rallies topping 100,000 people, 12 million on his e-mail list, a staggering 3.1 million donors. Republicans frantically screamed, "Liberal!" and America responded with a "Right on!" and pulled the lever for the guy. Is that what a "center-right" nation does?

Does a "center-right" nation take a 30-seat Republican advantage in the House and turn it into an 80-seat Democratic advantage in just two election cycles? Does it take a 10-seat Republican advantage in the Senate and turn it into a near-filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the same time frame?

But nothing disproves the "center-right nation" fiction more clearly than the campaign Republicans just ran.

They spent the bulk of the election ranting about "celebrities," "tire gauges," "Rev. Wright" and "William Ayers," then capped it all off with the silly "Joe the Plumber" nonsense. Fear-mongering isn’t a hallmark of a party confident that its agenda is squarely in the American mainstream. Rather, it’s a sign of insecurity — that it can’t win votes by running on substance.

Yet substance was all the voting public wanted this cycle, and they proved it by electing the "liberal."

Wise dude, the guy who wrote that.

Spin?

In a briefing going on right now with reporters, Al Franken's lead recount lawyer Marc Elias made a stunning announcement: According to the campaign's methodology of tracking the recount results, they believe Al Franken now leads Norm Coleman by a margin of 22 votes.

This would be the first time that Franken has claimed a lead in this drawn-out process, and was clearly made possible by the discovery yesterday of ballots in the suburban St. Paul town of Maplewood, which gave him a net gain of 37 votes.

Remember, this isn't an official count. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has Coleman leading by 303 votes, which is also not official. So what's going on?

The Star-Tribune count excludes challenged ballots (up to about 4,800 6,000 right now), and there's tons of frivolous challenges mucking up the count. So the Franken campaign is noting the opinion of the local election judges on each ballot, and assuming that the state canvassing board will uphold those original judgments. That may not necessarily happen, and Franken's own math could be off. And given that 138,000 ballots remain to be recounted, this still remains a tossup at best.