President Obama sat down for an interview with Larry King last night to talk about the situation in the Gulf and being President. I didn't realize today was the 500th day of his presidency, but some astute producer at CNN evidently did.

Here's an excerpt for Maureen Dowd:

KING: Some -- I know you -- you appear so calm.

Are you angry at BP?

OBAMA: You know, I am furious at this entire situation, because this is an example of where somebody didn't think through the consequences of their actions. And it is imperiling not just a handful of people, this is -- this is imperiling an entire way of life and an entire region for, potentially, years. So...

KING: Has the company felt your anger?

OBAMA: Well, they have felt the anger. But what I haven't seen as much as I'd like is the kind of rapid response.

Now, they want to solve the problem, too, because this is cost -- costing them a lot of money. And the one thing that I think is important to underscore is that I would love to just spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people. But that's not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem. And, ultimately, this isn't about me and how angry I am. Ultimately, this is about the people down in the Gulf who are being impacted and what am I doing to make sure that they're able to salvage their way of life?

And that's going to be the main focus that I've got in the weeks and months ahead.

Perspective is worth something.

On Israel, Gaza, and condemnation:

I think what's important right now is, is that we break out of the current impasse, use this tragedy as an opportunity so that we figure out how can we meet Israel's security concerns, but at the same time start opening up opportunity for Palestinians, work with all parties concerned -- the Palestinian Authority, the Israelis, the Egyptians and others -- and -- and I think Turkey can have a positive voice in this whole process once we've worked through this tragedy -- and bring everybody together to figure out how can we get a two-state solution, where Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in peace and security.

On being President:

KING: A couple of other quick things, because I know we have a little bit of a time limit.

First, do you still like this job?

OBAMA: Well, this is the best job on earth. I mean it's a -- it's an extraordinary privilege to be able to wake up every day and know that you have the opportunity to serve the American people and -- and make their lives a little bit better or maybe it's the next generation's lives a little bit better. And...

I'm not sure there was a particularly good answer to that last question. What's he going to say, after all? Every morning he wonders what crisis is going to leap up and smack him upside the head today? Or does he wonder which nutcase will be out there with some new non-issue yammering about it on FOX News? As far as I'm concerned, I give him credit for getting up every morning and dealing with the constant drumbeat of a crisis here and a disaster there.

It's not often I'm with Maureen Dowd, but I have to agree with her on this one: The scandal is too big, the pope is in too deep. (He's still in denial, calling the scandal "petty gossip.")It's time the Catholic Church had a female pope. (Heck, if Alanis Morrisette can portray God, why not pry open those closed minds even further?)

Pope Benedict has continued the church’s ban on female priests and is adamant against priests’ having wives. He has started two investigations of American nuns to check on their “quality of life” — code for seeing if they’ve grown too independent. As a cardinal he wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners and not take on adversarial roles toward men.

But the completely paternalistic and autocratic culture of Il Papa led to an insular, exclusionary system that failed to police itself, and that became a corrosive shelter for secrets and shame.

If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive. It could be an encouraging sign of humility and repentance, a surrender of arrogance, both moving and meaningful.

Cardinal Ratzinger devoted his Vatican career to rooting out any hint of what he considered deviance. The problem is, he was obsessed with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and somehow missed the graver danger to the most vulnerable members of the flock.

The sin-crazed “Rottweiler” was so consumed with sexual mores — issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion — that he didn’t make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges.

My late aunt Agnes (my godmother) was explaining to me some years back that she didn't approve of women who wanted to be priests.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because Jesus was a man, and so were the Apostles. That's why priests have to be men," she told me.

"Well, Aunt Aggie, if you really want to be literal, you should have to be Jewish to be a priest. Because Jesus and the apostles were," I said. (I can't help it. I love to mess with people.)

A devout woman, she looked at me, shocked at my blasphemy. But she still couldn't come up with an answer.

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The FOX News gasbags were all up in arms over the Dowd column and hey, you can always count on the All Stars to justify all wingnut behavior, no matter how hideous it is.

I can't believe Maureen Dowd's column garnered this much attention, but it has and is forcing Fox to try and dispel the charges of racism. Stephen Hayes should look at the background of Joe Wilson before he says it's disgusting to bring race into his outburst. Mr. Confederate flag was only showing his true colors.

Transcript via an email from Bob Fertik:

Bret Baier: Don't you have to be careful when you level the charge?

It's such a blunt object, when you say "racism" is a big charge.

Stephen Hayes: There is absolutely zero evidence that saying You Lied to the President of the United States had anything to do with race whatsoever and it is a disgusting smear for anybody to suggest that.

It is a sad day when a columnist in the NY Times can just imagine that

somebody is saying something, literally putting words in her mouth. She

prefaced the statement by saying "fair or not I heard him say 'You Lied

Boy.'" That's not fair. As a journalist, you can't imagine people saying things, you have to criticize them based on what they actually say and he didn't say this ...

Krauthammer: The accusation of racism is a sign of desperation by

people who know they are losing the national debate and they want to hurl the ultimate charge in American politics.

This is dealing from the bottom of the deck and I agree that it is a

disgusting tactic. It's done as a way to end debate. The minute you call someone a racist the debate is over, you don't continue. Accusations of racism are the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.

As for Maureen Dowd imagining a word that wasn't said, in my previous

profession I saw a lot of people who heard words that weren't said. They were called patients and many of them were helped with medication. The reason she won't be and others who are hurling the accusation is because it's a deliberate attempt to change the subject and discredit the opposition with unprovable and unproved ad hominem.

Juan Williams is pretty useless as usual. However, he did manage to knock down Bret Baier's stupid attempt to find equivalency between the people who questioned George W. Bush's legitimacy -- who did so for legitimate reasons, considering Bush actually garnered fewer votes than Al Gore -- and the "Birthers" and other conspiracy theorists attempting to undermine Obama's.

But the whole discussion was a classic Village exercise in self-protection. If you're not seeing racism on display in this country now then, you're not looking very hard.

Yes, some of the protests are by right wing Americans who didn't vote for Obama, but there are far too many zealots seriously going bonkers over the race issue. Let's face it: All these Nazi and Hitler signs are a way to be racist, but without putting color into the mix. It's just as odious, I might add.

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Gee, Karl Rove seems to have taken umbrage at Maureen Dowd's latest column. Especially this part:

So some respite from the pressure is clearly a healthy thing. Not as much respite as W. took, bicycling and vacationing through all the disasters that President Obama is now stuck fixing — spending a total of 490 days in the tumbleweed isolation of Crawford and rarely deigning to sightsee as he traveled the world. ...

What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.

Responded Rove, yesterday on Fox:

Rove: I think Maureen Dowd is a bitter, twisted, deranged columnist for the New York Times, who misses no opportunity to show her disdain for anybody on the conservative side of the aisle.

I actually went to an editorial board meeting at the New York Times and wasted a couple of bucks on some flowers to give Maureen Dowd at the meeting, so that it would give her a smile on her face, and that didn't even work. This is a dour, downbeat liberal. And, uh, it was an entertaining piece, I frankly agree with her that President Obama's entitled to go to New York and entertain his wife. I suspect I would have done it maybe just a little bit later in the year than now. But he's entitled. You do not want a president who feels confined in the bubble.

But why she felt so compelled to go out and trash somebody who did our country a great service for eight years and handled himself in an admirable fashion is just typical of Maureen Dowd's twisted, bitter little heart.

Well, I customarily don't find myself in the position of defending Maureen Dowd, but she was of course quite right. She's not merely trashing George W. Bush -- she's demonstrating the laughable falsity of Rove's claim that Bush was "someone who did our country a great service" (yeah, if by "service" you mean the agricultural kind) and "handled himself in an admirable fashion" (other than that whole running-the-country-off-a-cliff thing).

Being asleep at the wheel at 9/11, talking the country into invading another under false pretenses, sleepwalking through Katrina, inducing the greatest economic crisis since the Depression: Not exactly what I'd call "great service" or "admirable," would you?

Rove goes on to talk about how leaderless the Republicans are these days. Somehow, what goes unmentioned is the great damage his administration did to his party. Of course.

Men may not be necessary to Maureen Dowd, but a professional ethicist appears to be.

TPM:

Maureen Dowd in today's NY Times:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

TPM's Josh Marshall on Thurs:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Almost verbatim. Look, we bloggers take shortcuts and copy and paste others all the time. I do it because there are a whole host of people out there who write better than I. But we GIVE CREDIT when we do it, as I did above when acknowledging that this post came from TPM. For a Pulitzer Prize winner to lift work done by bloggers and pass it off as her own on the pages of the NY Times is just not cool.

UPDATE: MoDo admits to HuffPo that she lifted the words and will give Josh Marshall proper credit...but I'm puzzled by her alibi:

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column.

but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Now am I mistaken, or did MoDo just excuse her plagiarism by saying that she actually was trying to plagiarize her friend?

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Ah, Maureen! You're always just a little bit behind the parade, aren't you?

Maureen Dowd is thrilled DC is "finally integrated." To celebrate, the Times columnist made an A-list nightclub of her home then dined like French aristocracy.

Dowd bragged to MSNBC that Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen couldn't get into her big inauguration party last night. She's a celebrity! A crowd gathered behind her during the MSNBC interview, because, the cable network dubiously claimed, members recognized the columnist and were fans, apparently enamored of Dowd's pointless pop-culture references and tired arch emasculation of various male liberals.

Anyway, Dowd said she's very happy about racial discord ending forever — she grew up with black people, you know — so she drank champagne and ate croissants at the Lincoln Memorial, in celebration of DC being integrated. What? Why would Dowd tell this story? Is she trying to parody herself? On peyote? Off of Ritalin?

In another bizarre, self-undermining statement, Dowd said she would go easier on Obama than on Bush, but implied this was only because she was terrified the diverse crowd behind her would tear the columnist limb from limb.

Not only is she the new voice of race relations, she's also doing her part to bring the Times back to fiscal stability. But if the New York Times were my paper and I was trying to stay afloat, I think the last person I'd want to keep on is the person who spends my money on half-assed trend stories:

I didn't see this piece, but my friend Cos (who worked as a reporter with me) pointed it out the other day. "The New York Times is going out of business, but they send Maureen Dowd and her buddy to a spa?" she said, pointedly.

To be honest, I forgot about it (I tend to put anything having to do with Maureen Dowd out of my usable memory) until Dr. S. (another recovering reporter) just sent me this:

Carlos Slim or no Carlos Slim, these are lean times at The New York Times. On Friday, the paper handed down new, tighter guidelines for employee expenses. Among the new strictures: a $50-per-head limit on meals and an end to reimbursement for entertaining fellow Times colleagues.

So there was predictable outrage after op-ed star Maureen Dowd published a travel piece yesterday about her weekend spent scoping the scene at a new high-end spa in Miami. Dowd and another Times writer, TV critic Alessandra Stanley, spent a few day getting massages and detoxifying -- taking time out to have dinner with the city's chief of police at a swanky private club -- ostensibly in the name of researching whether the down economy is causing "spa guilt" among the well-to-do.

Did Dowd really manage to get the paper to pay for several thousand dollars worth of pampering just as her coworkers were being told to cut back? (Times ethics policies strictly prohibit employees from accepting comped meals or lodgings, or from letting their guests pick up the tab, especially if they're government officials.) Dowd's assistant said the columnist had "paid her own way, totally."* But a Times spokeswoman, asked about the story, framed it differently:

When our restaurant reviewer goes to a high-end restaurant, The Times pays and the limits on expenses are not applicable. The same is true with the expenses associated with Ms. Dowd's story. The visit and the payments were properly handled within our policies.

Update, 1.20.09: Dowd's assistant clarifies: Dowd paid her her own way out of pocket initially but will have her expenses reimbursed by the paper.

The media, they are so very different from you and me! (And if I were one of Maureen's co-workers, I'd respond with that traditional newsroom inquiry: "Who'd she do to get that?") More reactions here and here.

Connecting.the.Dots: V.P. for saving the planet

Facing South: Gulf Stream Coach - the politically connected company handed a $500 million federal contract to manufacture trailers for Hurricane Katrina victims knew its product was contaminated with dangerous levels of cancer-causing formaldehyde in early 2006. But they failed to notify residents or take any action to protect them.

Petrelis Files: AIDS exec gets a pay raise, then cuts food and supplements to patients.

Shakesville: Onward HMO soldiers, marching as to war

Newshoggers: If the only tool one uses is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: The "gas tax holiday" and objective journalism...Crude Reporting..Obama moves right, pundits cheer...Har Har Har...Maybe someday, Maureen Dowd won't write something juvenile enough to make Annals...Zzzzzzzz: get ready for CNN's exciting convention coverage...Can we stop with the "liberal media" trope now?...Bypassing the Corporate Media...Jane Mayer shines some light on The Dark Side...Tom "six months" Friedman is angry because the world hates us...Shut up!...Judy Miller in a tent...

Shakesville: John McCain knows nothing about the economy and has a crooked lobbyist as his advisor - and Americans trust that.

The Aristocrats: Maureen Dowd Theater

Needlenose: An historic figure analogous to President Arbusto is King Philip II of Spain - you know, the guy who launched the massive Armada (30,000 men on 130 warships) against England in a sort of quasi holy war - and got his ass kicked.

Truthdig: A.Q. Khan takes back his nuclear confession.

Excons: In a recent interview with the Washington Post, our CIA Director, Michael Hayden, seems to have taken advantage of every opportunity to tow the party line and spew all of the relevant Bush Administration talking points on foreign policy.

Zaius Nation: The Zaius/Gregarious campaign must keep up with the latest trends!

There are some smackdowns that are just better than others. I don't know why this tickled me so, but my mother, who shares my love of Gene Kelly movies, clipped this out of the dead tree version of the NY Times. Patricia Ward Kelly, the widow of the great Gene Kelly, took umbrage to Maureen Dowd's casual reference to Bush's soft shoeing as acting like Gene Kelly. Can you blame her?

Surely it must have been a slip for Maureen Dowd to align the artistry of my late husband, Gene Kelly, with the president's clumsy performances. To suggest that ''George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly'' represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight. If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.

When Gene was compared to the grace and agility of Jack Dempsey, Wayne Gretzky and Willie Mays, he was delighted. But to be linked with a clunker -- particularly one he would consider inept and demoralizing -- would have sent him reeling.

Graduated with a degree in economics from Pitt, Gene was not only a gifted dancer, director and choreographer, he was also a most civilized man. He spoke multiple languages; wrote poetry; studied history; understood the projections of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. He did the Sunday Times crossword in ink. Exceedingly articulate, Gene often conveyed more through movement than others manage with words.

Sadly, President Bush fails to communicate meaningfully with either. For George Bush to become Gene Kelly would require impossible leaps in creativity, erudition and humility.

Oh, snap! You get more truth in column inches in that letter than the last four years of Judy Miller's tenure at the NY Times.

No More Mister Nice Blog: Maureen Dowd and Larry Sinclair: Separated at birth?

at-Largely: Sunday's 60 Minutes segment on the malicious prosecution of former Alabama Governor, Don Siegelman, was blacked out in much of Alabama.

Obsidian Wings: Is a tuxedo "Christian garb?"

Bloggingheads.tv: This week in blogs

skippy the bush kangaroo: Who needs Republicans when we can fight amongst ourselves?

Arms Control Wonk: Norwegian Foreign Ministry hosting a conference on achieving a nuclear weapons-free world.