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The press is supposed to confront and challenge politicians, to fact check, to provide a service to their viewership to be informed.

Which is why I'm less upset at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell publicly announcing that the Senate Republicans will be contributing an Amicus Brief to the case against President Obama's recess appointments than I am that Candy Crowley never bothered to mention that during the previous administration, Bush made 171 recess appointments--including Ambassador to the UN John Bolton--and Mitch McConnell never said boo to any of them.

There's nothing unconstitutional about Obama's appointments, as the Republicans well know:

The Justice Department is publicly rebutting Republican criticism of the legality of President Barack Obama's recent recess appointments of a national consumer watchdog and other officials.

The department released a 23-page legal opinion Thursday summarizing the advice it gave the White House before the Jan. 4 appointments. GOP leaders have argued the Senate was not technically in recess when Obama acted so the regular Senate confirmation process should have been followed.

Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz wrote that the president has authority to make such appointments because the Senate is on a 20-day recess, even though it has held periodic pro forma sessions in which no business is conducted. Seitz argued the pro forma sessions – some with as few as one member present – have not been sufficient for the chamber to exercise its constitutional authority to advise and consent to normal presidential nominations.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said Obama has endangered the nation's systems of checks and balances, and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch says the appointments are a very grave decision by an autocratic White House.

Autocratic? Such pearl-clutching hypocrisy. Sen. Mike Lee has promised to obstruct all further nominations as retribution for this completely legal tactic made necessary by Republican obstruction. This, of course, doesn't bother Mitch McConnell either. Because the tyranny of the minority to hold the entire country hostage against the desires of its populace is absolutely acceptable practice, if you're a Republican.

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Appearing yesterday on MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan Show, The Nation's Ari Melber reminded us how Republican obstructionism has crippled administration appointments -- and suggested what Obama and Harry Reid should do:

ARI MELBER: Most of you know Congress just left for vacation. Normally when Congress is on recess, the president can make recess appointments to advance nominees that have been obstructed, but it turns out Congress is not really on recess. Republicans are holding symbolic sessions during their entire vacation in order to prevent recess appointments. This is just the latest ploy in a long obstruction campaign by the GOP.

Since Obama came into office, Republicans have blocked an unprecedented number of nominees from ever getting a vote. Take judicial nominees. Republicans have blocked almost half of the nominees for judicial nominations, the worst obstruction rate in U.S. history. And the targets aren't random, either. GOP obstruction has hindered female and minority nominees the most.

Here's a disturbing statistic from the People for the American Way, and I'm quoting now: "Every district court nominee with unanimous opposition from the Senate Judiciary committee Republicans has been a woman or a person of color." You know, people forget that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was first nominated to an appeals court back in the day by President Clinton, but Republicans wouldn't allow her a vote on that nomination. Then, when President Obama nominated her to be the third woman to ever serve on our high court, the same Republicans complained she didn't have the experience as a judge -- even though they were the ones who kept her off the bench.

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Proving once again that partisan hackery is far more important than any sense of honor or national security, Sen. Lindsey Graham toes the party line and says he opposes ratifying the START treaty. After all, why should the fact that EVERY living Republican and Democratic Secretary of State and other national security experts urge Congress to ratify START or the verbal promise to address these issues of importance once they got their precious tax cut extension to the wealthiest 2% of Americans hinder a great opportunity to obstruct Barack Obama's agenda yet again?

And like Mitch McConnell and John Kyl, Lindsey Graham throws up a whole lot of nonsense to rationalize delaying the ratification of START:

Graham had been considered one of the GOP senators likely to support ratifying the treaty. The Washington Post had reported earlier this month that Graham would allow a vote on START if the Democrats moved fast to extend the Bush era tax cuts, and he had voted to start debating the treaty, which was interpreted as a sign that he could support final ratification.

But sounding vexed during the show, Graham seemed not only chafed by the Senate voting down a Republican effort to amend the preamble of the treaty; he also linked the START treaty to his resentment over how the current lame-duck session of Congress has turned out.

Graham exclaimed how hard it was to pass a bipartisan compromise over extending the Bush era tax cuts, and expressed his disappointment over repeal of the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy banning openly gay service members.

"If you want to have a chance of passing START, you better start over and do it in the next Congress, because this lame duck has been poisoned," Graham told CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer.

"The last two weeks have been an absolutely excruciating exercise. 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' a controversial topic - some say the civil rights issue of our generation, others say battlefield effectiveness - was passed in the lame-duck session without one amendment being offered," Graham said.

Graham complained of other parts of the legislative agenda of the Senate Majority and outgoing House Majority: "The DREAM Act, we've had two votes on the DREAM Act. Controversial immigration, there was no efforts to find a common ground there, passed without the ability to amend, to try to make Republicans look bad with Hispanics.

"We tried to fund the government by clean [continuing budget resolution bill] but we took a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill with 6,000 earmarks and it failed yesterday. We still haven't funded the government. We haven't had a serious debate on START. We've been fighting a multiple front war to try to do every special interest group's bidding in the lame-duck session.

That's not a way to ratify a treaty that has importance to the country," Graham said.

Right. Everyone knows that the only thing a lame duck Congress should pass is an unfunded tax cut adding trillions to the deficit through reconciliation.

Ironic that Graham voices his frustration with the DADT repeal when it was the Republicans that tied DADT to the START treaty in the first place to slow down the pace of the lame duck agenda.

His concern trolling about how the START treaty would control our ability to develop missile defense? Another big fat whopper that Bob Schieffer doesn't call him on.

President Obama issued a letter to the Senate on Sunday pledging to fully develop a U.S. missile defense system in Europe, as part of a final offensive to relieve concerns about the nuclear arms pact with Russia as it moves toward a final vote.

The letter reiterated administration policy but was an especially extensive and detailed statement on missile defense by the president. Parts of it were read aloud by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) shortly before a vote on an amendment that could have killed the treaty. That amendment was defeated, 59 to 37.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has been leaning toward supporting the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), took to the floor to welcome the president's letter. "A number of people on our side of the aisle have asked for it," he said.

But that's not enough for Lindsey, no how.

Maybe it's because he's read this op-ed at HuffPo: Any Republican Senator Voting for START Should Get a Primary Challenger

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(h/t Media Matters)

Rush Limbaugh constantly makes me wonder how he manages to find women self-loathing (or alternatively, mercenary) enough to want to marry him. He is such a disgusting misogynist. I pray that his latest bride has made the choice to remain childless, because I shudder at the thought of any child, but especially a little girl, being raised with such a sexist and hateful father.

Rush thinks it's amazing that one of the first acts of incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner was to add a women's restroom near the House of Representatives chamber. Currently, female congresspeople must walk down the hall to utilize the women's restroom near the Senate chamber. Inconvenient, to be sure.

But rather than simply acknowledging this long-needed addition, Rush has to get a little dig in on the attractiveness of our female congresspeople.

"Now, a lot of Democrat Congresswomen could have probably used the men's room and nobody would have said anything...might not have really noticed anything..."

[insert Beevis & Butthead guffaw here] hehehehe Powerful women are mannish, right, Rush? Well, I guess that's fair, considering that I think that right wing blowhards who self-medicate, take sex vacations to the Dominican Republic and love to decorate their homes with cherubs and gilt are clearly over-compensating for raging homosexual panic (yeah, I went there).

But of course in all this celebration of how the Orange One is clearly so much more interested in gender equality than the outgoing (female) Speaker of the House and her Democratic majority, the reason it took so long gets buried:

While hailing a victory for "potty parity", some female commentators have noted that the number of female congressmen actually fall from 76 to 71 in the new Congress, which convenes in January, after numerous Democratic women were defeated in November's midterm polls.

Efforts earlier this year to make lavatory access more equitable in all federal buildings stalled.

That's right. The Democratic majority TRIED to get the vaunted "potty parity" but the Republicans obstructed it.

Obstructing toilets in the name of equality. Yup, that's today's GOP.

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In this season of peace on earth, goodwill towards men, Santa Claus and other myths, House Republicans are once again showing they’re not only the party protecting the interests of the Have Mores, they’re aggressively the party who would literally take food out of a poor child’s mouth, brazenly blocking legislation to fund school meals for tens of thousands of hungry American kids. The increase would add up to a grand total of six cents per kid.

That’s all… six whole cents.

And to add insult to injury, Sarah Palin brought cookies to a Pennsylvania school to protest what she was spinning as a nanny state edict banning cookies from school lunches. You can’t even buy a cookie for six cents. Hell, you can’t even make them yourself for that little.

So while it doesn’t surprise or even shock me that Republicans could be so clueless and so heartless as to actually deny children food, some of whom are the children of the more than 15 million unemployed Americans and who only ever see a square meal at a school lunch, it does shock and sadden me that there’s not more Democrats pointing out how little money it costs to feed a child. By my calculation, and I’m no math wizard here, just one single Bush tax cut giving one single Republican fat cat a $80,000 bonus would buy… (clicketyclicketyclick on my calculator)… one million children a school lunch, and still have $20,000 left over to buy the human skull off the Skull and Bones Society. Now imagine how many school lunches $700 billion could pay for.

The House of Representatives just voted 234 to 188 to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts on incomes up to $250,000, after having blocked an earlier attempt by GOP members from offering their own bill to make the tax cuts permanent for all Americans, including the highest earners, which angered the Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner, who called it ‘chicken crap.’

Or, to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, if there’s not enough money to feed our kids a cookie, let them eat chicken crap.

Not that this will matter to the congressional Republicans, whose agenda is not actually improving the economy nor listening to economists, the wealthiest 2%, or any other American, come to that. But the country's wealthiest men, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, dismiss the calls of Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans and say that the wealthy SHOULD pay more taxes.

Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said that the rich should be paying more taxes and that the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy should be left to expire at the end of December.

"If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further," Buffett said. "But I think that people at the high end -- people like myself -- should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it."

The billionaire brushed aside Republican arguments that letting tax cuts expire for the wealthy would hurt economic growth.

"They say you have to keep those tax cuts, even on the very wealthy, because that is what energizes business and capitalism," anchor Amanpour said.

"The rich are always going to say that, you know, just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years, and I hope the American public is catching on," Buffett explained.

It's the simplest of messages and yet sadly not on the tongues of any Democratic politicians (including the President): if tax cuts worked, why isn't the economy better right now? Gates also expressed disappointment in the failure of the ballot initiative 1098 that his father, Bill Gates Senior, was very publicly endorsing, to raise taxes on the wealthiest citizens in Washington state, showing once again how easily the majority of Americans will vote against their own interests, especially in the face of big money advertising persuasions.

The Senate Republicans are like willful children: "You can't make me!" They obstruct, for obstruction's sake and here's a perfect example from Right Wing Watch:

If you need any more proof that Senate Republicans' sole mission at the moment is to prevent anything from happening in their chamber of Congress, look no further than the fact that today the Senate had to seek cloture on the nomination Barbara Milano Keenan to fill a vacancy on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, resulting in a vote of 99-0.

That's right - not one Republican senator spoke against her qualifications, record, or views or voted to prevent her nomination from receiving an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor ... and yet still they filibustered, forcing Democrats to seek a cloture vote in order to move ahead, simply because they are committed to obstructing the governing process in every way possible.

Earlier today, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy took to the Senate floor to blast the Republicans' refusal to allow the Senate to move on even noncontroversial judicial nominations:

Last year’s total was the fewest judicial nominees confirmed in the first year of a Presidency in more than 50 years. Those 12 Federal circuit and district court confirmations were even below the 17 the Senate Republican majority allowed to be confirmed in the 1996 session. After that presidential election year, Chief Justice Rehnquist began criticizing the pace of judicial confirmations and the partisan Republican tactics.

Among the frustrations is that Senate Republicans have delayed and obstructed nominees chosen after consultation with Republican home state Senators. Despite President Obama’s efforts, Senate Republicans have treated his nominees much, much worse.

I noted when the Senate considered the nominations of Judge Christina Reiss of Vermont and Mr. Abdul Kallon of Alabama relatively promptly that they should serve as the model for Senate action. Sadly, they are the exception rather than the model. They show what the Senate could do, but does not. Time and again, noncontroversial nominees are delayed. When the Senate does finally consider them, they are confirmed overwhelmingly. Of the 15 Federal circuit and district court judges confirmed, twelve have been confirmed unanimously.

That is right. Republicans have only voted against three of President Obama's nominees to the Federal circuit and district courts. One of those, Judge Gerry Lynch of the Second Circuit, garnered only three negative votes and 94 votes in favor. Judge Andre Davis of Maryland was stalled for months and then confirmed with 72 votes in favor and only 16 against. Judge David Hamilton was filibustered in a failed effort to prevent an up-or-down vote.

The obstruction and delay is part of a partisan pattern. Even when they cannot say “no,” Republicans nonetheless demand that the Senate go slow. The practice is continuing. This is the 17th filibuster of President Obama's nominees. That does not count the many other nominees who were delayed or are being denied up-or-down votes by Senate Republicans refusing to agree to time agreements to consider even noncontroversial nominees.

Look closely, ladies and gentlemen, because the Republican party is the face of evil. How could anyone in their right mind oppose unemployment benefits during the worst recession in living memory? Simple: Because when a Republican says people won't look for jobs because they're on unemployment, he's really complaining they still have too much dignity to accept slave labor at slave wages.

Because as always, the GOP is about cheap, disposable labor with no legal protections. With the help of Blue Dog Democrats, they may eventually get their way. But for now, they'll try to strip away whatever shred of dignity a working person has left.

And really, we can't have that, can we? The little people might get ideas above their station:

A debate on the Senate floor Monday over unemployment compensation crystallized, at least for a moment, the divide between the two parties in Washington.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the Republican whip, argued that unemployment benefits dissuade people from job-hunting "because people are being paid even though they're not working."

Unemployment insurance "doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said during debate over whether unemployment insurance and other benefits that expired amid GOP objections Sunday should be extended.

"I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here," said Kyl.

Is it really as simple as "I don't know anyone like that"? Because this is a huge crisis for millions. The longer the Republicans bottle up the unemployment benefits extension (for no other reason than they can), the more people without other options fall off the unemployment rolls.

You'd think someone in the media might see that as an important story. But maybe when journalists started getting hired from Ivy League schools, they lost any interest in what happens to the paycheck class.

Gee, I hope not. But I'd love to see some evidence to the contrary. The media should be out front, shaming these people:

In a conference call with reporters today, three Democratic Senators charged Republicans with obstructionism in all aspects of public policy, particularly stopping the Senate from passing a bill that would extend unemployment to millions of Americans, at a time when 7,000 Americans a day are losing their benefits.

Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) vowed to move forward with a motion to proceed on the unemployment bill, tied up with non-germane amendments (about things like ACORN funding and E-Verify which have already been voted on in the Senate in other forms) from Republicans that “amount to a political agenda” in Stabenow’s words, as soon as tomorrow. “The votes are there to pass this bill,” said Shaheen. Stabenow said that the bill could have passed a few weeks ago.

Asked by Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent, who has a writeup on this up, why the Senate cannot just plow forward on this bill, given their 60-vote majority in the Senate, Stabenow answered that “you can only do this one at a time.” She countered that Republicans have slow-walked practically all critical legislation since 2007, forcing cloture votes on ordinary measures to take up floor time and generally obstruct the legislation. Obstructionism in the Senate is not limited to filibusters, but also procedural actions when filibusters can be overcome. The result is a slow crawl that creates anxiety among Democrats and liberals and emboldens Republicans to claim that Democrats are running a “do-nothing” Congress. It’s a neat trick.

Democrats hope for a final vote on this bill by the end of the week.

Despite their many, many, many failings, the Democrats are concerned about what's actually going on out in the world and make attempts to actually improve things. The Republicans, on the other hand, worry about one thing only: winning.

WASHINGTON — The last time Congressional Republicans were this out of power, they turned to a college professor from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, to lead the opposition, first against President Bill Clinton in a budget battle in 1993, and then back into the majority the following year.

As Republicans confronted President Obama in another budget battle last week, their leadership included another new face: Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, who as the party’s chief vote wrangler is as responsible as anyone for the tough line the party has taken in this first legislative standoff with Mr. Obama. This battle has vaulted Mr. Cantor to the front lines of his party as it tries to recover from the losses of November.

As Republican whip, Mr. Cantor succeeded again on Friday in denying the White House the support of a single House Republican on the stimulus bill. That was a calculated challenge to the president, who, in his weekly address on Saturday, hailed the bill as “an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it.”

Mr. Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich’s years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich’s leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton’s package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks.

See what I mean? Faced with what any rational human being recognizes as impending economic catastrophe, Cantor's priority is .... finding the right message! As opposed to actually having a message, and looking for the best way to communicate it. But I digress:

“I talk to Newt on a regular basis because he was in the position that we are in: in the extreme minority,” he said.

The Republicans can certainly count some victories, although symbolic ones. Even White House aides said Mr. Cantor and his team had been successful in seizing on spending items in the stimulus bill to sow doubts about it with the public.

The fact that House Republicans have stood firm against Mr. Obama suggests just how unified the caucus is, though Mr. Gingrich, in an interview, said Democratic leaders like Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, did more to unify Republicans than anything Republicans did.

“I’d like to tell you Cantor did a brilliant job, but the truth is that Pelosi and Obey pushed the members into his arms,” Mr. Gingrich said. But, he added, “They have been good at developing alternatives so they don’t leave their guys out there chanting no.”

Oo, a little annoyed at the young upstarts, are we, Newt? Hey, the kid's a helluva lot more photogenic and doesn't have that messy personal history...