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Sally Quinn went on The O'Reilly Factor to announce that she and all the other Villagers are just all a-flutter over the Obama White House's puzzling decision to stand up to its an organization that clearly declared war on his administration from its outset, i.e., Fox News.

But first she had to stop and sniff disdainfully in the direction of Alan Grayson for his gauche style of political rhetoric:

O'Reilly: Do you know this guy? He sounds like a loon.

Quinn: I don't know him. But guess what? Here we are talking about him. And I think that's what this is all about -- he's obviously getting the attention she desperately needs.

O'Reilly: OK, there could be something to be said for that. He represents the Orlando area. But he's certainly kind of unhinged. When you hear rhetoric like that -- you know, the Dick Cheney shooting the guy in the face, and this and that -- doesn't it sound a little immature?

Quinn: Well, I think that it's worse than immature. I mean, what he said was so completely over the top that it sounds like -- it reminded me a little bit of Blagojevich, you know. I mean --

O'Reilly: No, that's good. That's a good -- yeah. Kinda unhinged.

Quinn: Yeah, unhinged. It made no sense. So I don't think you can take it seriously. And I also think that if he -- I can't imagine the Democrats feeling good about this. Or the White House feeling good.

O'Reilly: Or his constituents.

Quinn: But you don't want this guy on your team.

Heavens no. We want people like Sally Quinn. The kind of Village maven who would go on 60 Minutes and slag the Clintons:

"If you consider the life of Bill Clinton," she said on "60 Minutes," "whenever he leaves the White House, he's going to get on a plane, and where is he going to go?"

"What do you mean?" a baffled Mike Wallace asked.

"Well, he -- he doesn't even have a home," she sniffed. "I mean, when you think about it, he's homeless. I mean, they've lived in sort of government properties all their lives."

The kind of "social adviser" who would pen long Washington Post op-eds bemoaning the way the Clintons "fouled the nest".

Yeah, we need advice from Sally Quinn, all right.

And that commentary we should take seriously? I guess you just had to tune in three hours beforehand for that.

Harold's Left: The socialism of Firemen

Majikthise: Emerging narrative: Shut up liberals, you're ruining it. But the squeeky wheel gets the grease

Mondoweiss: LA Times columnist: Jerusalem is 'apartheid city' in 'apartheid country'

Calitics: The deliberate strangulation of democracy

Threat Level: Guantanamo defense lawyers being investigated over CIA photos

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Anatomy of a column...Don Hewitt, RIP...I. F. Stone and Robert Novak...When wingnut CEOs write op/ed pieces...Murdoch outs Rove as a liar...The Anal Cyst...Where do they find these people?...Apparently this business rag is run by hacks...News Corp. pushing for consortium...An explosion of truthiness...Ask This...Zell sells the Cubs...A Taylor-made Globe?

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From 60 Minutes April 12, 2009 Sen. Dianne Feinstein on support for the renewal of the assault weapons ban.

"You have lots and lots of Democrats who got support from the NRA this time, and so they agree with the NRA. They'll vote with the NRA," Stahl told Feinstein.

"I'm not going to disagree with that at all," the senator replied.

She admits she's facing daunting opposition. "The National Rifle Association essentially has a stranglehold on the Congress."

Asked if anybody from the Democratic Senate leadership or from the administration has asked her to back off, Feinstein said, "No. Nobody said a word to me."

And what about President Obama, who NRA supporters like to call the great "gun grabber"?

His Web site says he wants to make "the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent," but the White House doesn't seem to be interested in bringing it up - any time soon.

"There's some sense that the president has so many crisis issues on his plate right now that the idea of bringing up guns - which is considered part of the Culture Wars - would be such a diversion," Stahl told Feinstein.

"I agree with you. I wouldn't bring it up now," she replied.

Feinstein said she's going to hold off, for now, but vowed she would eventually push the issue. "I'll pick the time and the place, no question about that," she told Stahl.

You can watch the rest of the segment here: Gun Sales: Will The "Loophole" Close? From the article:

Just in the last four weeks, there have been at least eight separate deadly shooting sprees all across the country. Some of this can be linked to the recession since several of the gunmen had lost their jobs.

The recession is having an effect in another surprising way: in past downturns, people stocked up on things like canned soups. But this time, it's guns.

Even as the stock market has plummeted, shares in Smith & Wesson have nearly quadrupled since November, and sales of guns are going through the roof.

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Who dare he that doth chuckle in the visage of the economic turmoil?---Shakespeare Amato -1687

It's the Faux Outrage of the Week -- cooked up, as always, by the right-wingers and Media Villagers: President Obama's laugh on 60 Minutes. How dare he try to be a little lighthearted when going over the tremendous challenges that he inherited from George Bush and his court of merry neocons and CEO's? Steve Croft of 60 Minutes was dutifully upset:

STEVE KROFT: You're sitting here. And you're -- you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, "I mean, he's sitting there just making jokes about (LAUGHTER) money--” How do you deal with-- I mean, wh-- explain -

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well--

STEVE KROFT: --the mood and your laughter.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, I mean, there's got to be--

STEVE KROFT: Are you punch drunk?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No, no. There's gotta be a little gallows humor to (LAUGHS) get you through the day. You know, sometimes my team-- talks about the fact that if-- if you had said to us a year ago that-- the least of my problems would be Iraq, which is still a pretty serious problem-- I don't think anybody would have believed it. But-- but we've got a lot on our plate. And-- a lot of difficult decisions that we're going to have to make.

I'm surprised Don King isn't complaining whenever the phrase "punch drunk" phrase is used. I mean, he never bamboozled his boxers, right? No sooner does Memeorandum have the "punch drunk" line posted when, sure enough, a right wingnutosphere party breaks out.

First, if Croft was surprised by his laughter, then the question was OK at first, but the "punch drunk" comment was out of line. He was cooler to George Bush back in 2007. No "punch drunk" comments there. And Croft laughed himself. Was he "punch drunk" too? And it's not as if President Obama was yucking it up throughout the entire interview. And Croft would never have asked a Republican President if he was "punch drunk." You can take that to the bank. President Obama handled it fine.

Andrea Mitchell brought this latest Faux Outrage up today and on MSNBC:

Mitchell: You watch him day in and day out, does he have to worry about seeming a little too cavalier or is this us nitpicking him to death. He's laughing, it's a normal human being instinct.

Chuck Todd's instant response:

Todd: Republicans sit there and look and say, if George Bush had done that, he would have been roasted....When you're at a 30-35% job approval rating, yea, that's what happens. When you're at a 55-65% job approval there seems to be more forgiveness there. President Bush saw that in '01 and 02, where no matter what he said, if he made a gaffe, nobody cared. He was the popular guy and that never happened so that's where some of the Republican-conservative criticism is coming. This is who he is. Everybody comments, he seems like a cool customer. He doesn't seem to get too high or too low.

Mitchell: Yeah, and George Bush in the first year or two could do nothing wrong so --

Todd: That's right.

Mitchell: I think this is going a little overboard. Who knows.

Andrea knows, and that's why she said it. It's amazin' to see this sitting President, at this early stage of his term, with these problems, being ridiculed at every turn by the press. The Villagers were saying that the honeymoon was over as soon as he took the oath. It's media hype.

After all, Todd's point, predictably, misses a crucial factor: There is a reason why George W. Bush was at a 30% approval rating. Bush was caught lying America into war, tortured people, and allowed the survivors of Hurricane Katrina to fend for themselves. That was just a warmup, of course, to the economic collapse. And it wasn't until the latter stages of his disastrous presidency that he was even questioned by the press with any vigor. This was a President who was handed his office by the Supreme Court and not by the people. And yes, the press certainly gave him more than a two-month honeymoon.

But Todd misses the most critical point of all, which Mitchell seems to be leaning toward: There was nothing inappropriate about Obama's laughter, particularly not for anyone who watched the longer interview, during which he was sober and serious throughout. The light sprinkling of a smile only told us he was a human being who managed to keep his sense of humor in the midst of a difficult job. Making it out to be anything more than that tells us much more about his critics than it does Obama.

Hey, I thought it was liberals who were supposed to be the humorless ones, right?

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Steve Kroft visited the set of Reliable Sources to talk about his interview with President Obama on 60 Minutes.

KURTZ: Now, one of the things you asked about that's making some headlines this morning was Vice President Cheney, who was on "STATE OF THE UNION" last Sunday, was asked by John King about Barack Obama's presidency. And Cheney pointed out, the closing of the Guantanamo Bay prison, or the plans to close it, I should say, and said that he believes that President Obama is making America less safe.

You asked Barack Obama about that, and the president said, "How many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under these Cheney philosophy?" Obama said, "It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is great advertisement for anti-American sentiment."

Were you surprised that he went back at Cheney as hard as he did?

KROFT: I guess I was a little bit surprised. I thought there were going to be two responses. I think that either the first response was going to be, "I don't want to talk about Dick Cheney, it's Dick Cheney," or he was going to tee off on him, which he decided to do very, very aggressively. So I was a little surprised.

I'd like to know when Kurtz is going to ask if anyone was surprised that Vice President Cheney "teed off" on President Obama rather than asking if he deserved the same treatment back. Once Cheney opened his mouth as far as I'm concerned, the gloves were off. The President has a right to defend himself against the likes of Cheney, ex-Vice President or not.

Every "news organization" in town used Cheney's interview as an excuse to repeat his right wing talking points as a lead in to question Democrats with for a week or two straight after he gave that sorry excuse for an interview with Mr. Human Events John King. I would have been disappointed had the President not responded the way he did.

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President Barack Obama told CBS' Steve Kroft that he "fundamentally disagreed" with former Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that the new terrorism policies were putting the country at risk.

OBAMA: I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that Vice President Cheney has been at the head of a movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the wrong lesson from history. The facts don't bear him out. I think he is... that attitude, that philosophy has done incredible damage to our image and position in the world. I mean, the fact of the matter is, after all these years, how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many... how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn't made us safer. What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment, which means that there is constant effective recruitment of Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world.

KROFT: Some of it being organized by a few people who were released from Guantanamo.

OBAMA: Well, there is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting rough who are truly dangerous individuals that we've got to make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up. The whole premise of Guantanamo promoted by Vice President Cheney was that, somehow, the American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists. I fundamentally disagree with that. Now, do these folks deserve miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter down the block? Of course not.

KROFT: What do you do with those people?

OBAMA: Well, I think we're going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they are not released and do us harm, but do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this... this is the legacy that's been left behind and, you know, i'm surprised that the vice president is eager to defend a legacy that was unsustainable. Let's assume that we didn't change these practices. How... how long are we going to go? Are we going to just keep on going until, you know, the entire Muslim world and Arab world despises us? Do we think that's really going to make us safer? I... I don't know a lot of thoughtful thinkers, liberal or conservative, who think that was the right approach.

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From 60 Minutes:

Aside from the president he's the most powerful man working to save the economy, but you have never seen an interview with Ben Bernanke.

Bernanke is the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, better known as the Fed. The words of any Fed chairman cause fortunes to rise and fall and so, by tradition, chairmen of the Fed do not do interviews - that is until now.

The Federal Reserve controls the economy by setting interest rates. But after the crash of 2008, Bernanke invoked emergency powers, and with unprecedented aggressiveness has thrown a trillion dollars at the crisis.

Ben Bernanke may be the most important Fed chairman in history. The question is, can he help lead America out of this deep recession and when?

......

"What are the dangers now? What keeps you up at night?" Pelley asked.

"I think the biggest risk is that, you know, we don't have the political will. We don't have the commitment to solve this problem, and that we let it just continue. In which case, you know, we can't count on recovery," Bernanke said.

The Fed estimates the wealth of American families fell 18 percent in 2008, the worst since the Great Depression.

Transcript from the above segment to follow. Watch the entire episode here.

Continue reading »

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From 60 Minutes. The entire segment can be seen here. More results from Dick Cheney's secret energy task force? Or just more proof that businesses will behave badly when left unregulated? I hope we have some adult supervision return with the swearing in of Obama. Time will tell.

About the only economic break most Americans have gotten in the last six months has been the drastic drop in the price of oil, which has fallen even more precipitously than it rose. In a year's time, a commodity that was theoretically priced according to supply and demand doubled from $69 a barrel to nearly $150, and then, in a period of just three months, crashed along with the stock market.

So what happened? It's a complicated question, and there are lots of theories. But as correspondent Steve Kroft reports, many people believe it was a speculative bubble, not unlike the one that caused the housing crisis, and that it had more to do with traders and speculators on Wall Street than with oil company executives or sheiks in Saudi Arabia.

[....]

It's impossible to tell exactly who was buying and selling all those oil contracts because most of the trading is now conducted in secret, with no public scrutiny or government oversight. Over time, the big Wall Street banks were allowed to buy and sell as many oil contracts as they wanted for their clients, circumventing regulations intended to limit speculation. And in 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps, as well as electronic trading on private exchanges.

"Who was responsible for deregulating the oil future market?" Kroft asked Michael Greenberger.

"You'd have to say Enron," he replied. "This was something they desperately wanted, and they got."

Greenberger, who wanted more regulation while he was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not less, says it all happened when Enron was the seventh largest corporation in the United States. "This was when Enron was riding high. And what Enron wanted, Enron got."

Full transcript to follow.

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From 60 Minutes Dec, 28, 2008:

For nearly two years, Steve Kroft and 60 Minutes followed Barack Obama on the long and winding road to the White House complete with interviews, never-before-seen footage, and candid moments with Obama, his family, and his closest advisors.

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From 60 Minutes Dec. 21, 2008. Arnold Schwarzenegger expresses his desire to run for President if the Constitution is ever changed to allow it. Given the current list of contenders I'd say the rest of them would never like to see that happen any time soon.

"Well, you're a man of no small ambition. If the Constitution was changed, you'd like to be president, wouldn't you?" Pelley asked.

"Yeah, absolutely," Schwarzenegger acknowledged. "I think that I am always a person that looks for the next big goal. And I love challenges. I always set goals that are so high, that are almost impossible to achieve. Because then, you're always hungry for climbing and climbing. Because it's always interesting. The climb is always interesting. When you get there you just have to pick another goal."

Full transcript:

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I have maintained that the Obama presidential campaign will be studied and dissected by political scientists for years to come. It is, quite simply, one of the most impressive implementations, not only of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy, but of grassroots-level organizing that lifted the entire campaign of a serious longshot candidate right into the White House.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft sat down with the executive team of campaign manager David Plouffe, chief strategist David Axelrod (who will move to the White House as Senior Advisor), senior aide Robert Gibbs (who will move to the White House as Press Secretary) and communications and research specialist Anita Dunn to discuss the campaign about 24 hours after victory. They touch on the amazing organizing at the local level, the paradigm-shifting strategy to ignore the red state/blue state divide and those moments that threatened to derail the campaign, like the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Full transcripts at 60Minutes.com

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft examines the complicated financial instruments known as credit default swaps, and reveals how these little-known derivatives played a central role in precipitating the current market meltdown. In essence, speculators bet that homeowners wouldn't be unable to pay back their mortgages, and when those people started defaulting and the speculators tried to cash in their wagers, there was no money to cover the literally trillions of dollars in payouts. What it really boils down to is an unregulated gambling racket that Congress voted unanimously to create and legalize.

The world's financial system teetered on the edge again last week, and anyone with more than a passing interest in their shrinking 401(k) knows it's because of a global credit crisis. It began with the collapse of the U.S. housing market and has been magnified worldwide by what Warren Buffet once called "financial weapons of mass destruction."

They are called credit derivatives or credit default swaps, and 60 Minutes did a story on the multi-trillion dollar market three weeks ago. But there's a lot more to tell.

As Steve Kroft reports, essentially they are side bets on the performance of the U.S. mortgage markets and the solvency on some of the biggest financial institutions in the world. It's a form of legalized gambling that allows you to wager on financial outcomes without ever having to actually buy the stocks and bonds and mortgages.

It would have been illegal during most of the 20th century, but eight years ago Congress gave Wall Street an exemption and it has turned out to be a very bad idea.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft looks at what caused the financial crisis and the under-capitalized house of cards built on shifting sands that the financial giants thought would bring them big money with little risk. It also shows how the bailout money for which Congress capitulated to Bush and Paulson's pleas will do nothing to fix the problem.

On Friday Congress finally passed - and President Bush signed into law - a financial rescue package in which the taxpayers will buy up Wall Street's bad investments.

The numbers are staggering, but they don't begin to explain the greed and incompetence that created this mess.

It began with a terrible bet that was magnified by reckless borrowing, complex securities, and a vast, unregulated shadow market worth nearly $60 trillion that hid the risks until it was too late to do anything about them.

  In response to the attack ads being run by the McCain campaign and McCain-sympathetic 527 groups, Barack Obama reminds 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft that, contrary to the McCain mythology, the Iraq War didn't start in 2007 with the surge.

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Kroft: The McCain campaign, the last day or two, has been running nothing but ads talking about you and the surge…that you were opposed to the surge.

Obama: That's all they had to talk about. You notice that, according to the McCain mythology, I guess the Iraq war started with the surge. They seem to forget that there were five years before that where they got everything wrong, where they anticipated that we would be greeted as liberators. Where they said this would be easy. These are John McCain's quotes. That this would all pay for itself. Because the Iraqi oil revenues would more than cover it. The fact of the matter is that John McCain has been consistently wrong on Iraq. And now's the time for us to bring this to a close. Even the Iraqi prime minister and the Iraqi government recognize it's time to have a time frame. The Bush administration has talked about time horizons. And John McCain, moving forward, is the only one who stubbornly clings to reasons to stay in Iraq.

If you haven't read Barack Obama's prescient Iraq War protest speech, I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with it. Keep in mind while you're reading that this was delivered in 2002 when it was politically consequential to speak out against the invasion of Iraq, and when the CW was such that Iraq definitively had WMD and would be a cake walk. It's pretty amazing that a "naive State Senator" could have been so right while the Senate's foreign policy "expert" could be so wrong.

Bob Woodward's latest book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has just hit the shelves and as usual, contains some incredible new facts about President Bush's style of "leadership" and decision-making. On 60 Minutes Sunday, Woodward sat down with Scott Pelley and dropped the bombshell that the idea of the surge came from the White House and was vehemently opposed by the top military brass.

"What does General Casey, sitting in Baghdad, think of having additional troops?" Pelley asked.

"He thinks that Baghdad is a troop sump-a place you can put endless numbers of troops in. And he does not want to add force," Woodward said.

"The president, who has said in public, endless times, that he relies on his generals to tell him what they need, is actually going his own way here," Pelley remarked.

"That's right," Woodward agreed. "The records of the joint chiefs show that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody except the White House." 

So much for listening to the Generals on the ground.

And then there's this from the Washington Post:

In response to a question about how the White House settled on a troop surge of five brigades after the military leadership in Washington had reluctantly said it could provide two, Bush said: "Okay, I don't know this. I'm not in these meetings, you'll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do." 

There's Bush presidential leadership in a nutshell for you: In perhaps the most important decision of his entire presidency - the decision to double down on a failed war, putting the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis  at risk -- Bush, by his own admission, has "other things to do."

I wonder if Cheney is gonna call Woodward and curse him out again.