Is everything in the defense budget going to be COINy, or are we going to get actual, deep defense budget cuts?

When word leaked out that Caroline Kennedy had called David Paterson and let him know she’s like a Senate seat please, the optics of the whole thing were just so wrong that it was hard for me to imagine she knew what she was getting into, or what the consequences of a high-profile belly flop would be.

While Republican leaders like John Cornyn and John Boehner continue cheerlead for the continuation these un-American policies, the rest of the country has thankfully rejected them.

Yesterday at the Senate Progressive Media Summit, I spoke to five freshmen Senators about their positions on the Employee Free Choice Act. Jeff Merkley, Jeanne Shaheen and Tom Udall have all signed on to the bill, and Roland Burris said he wasn’t yet familiar with it. Mark Udall said that even though he had voted for it in the House, he thought that it might have to be massaged

David Iglesias, the one of the US Attorney’s fired to actually trying to do his job in a fair non partisan manner has just been tapped by the Obama administration to prosecute Gitmo detainees. This is an inspired choice. Not just for the “up yours” message it sends to the loyal Bushies, but because his unique skill set positions him to handle all the permutations of prosecutions to come in these cases.

Teddy linked to the stunning Russell Tice appearance on Keith O tonight. I wanted to add a few points.

First, Tice’s description of the program confirms everything we have surmised about the program. The program: Established the means to collect all American communications Analyzed meta-data to select a smaller subset of communications to tap further Conducted human analysis of those messages

That is, the Bush administration used meta-data (things

One of the amusing things of the past few weeks has been watching Norm Coleman’s Hundred-Lawyer Horde do turnabouts on the legal arguments which they’d been heatedly pushing for most of the previous two months. Consider his shifting stance on rejected absentee ballots: In November, his people said that there weren’t any that were wrongly-rejected, and thus none of them should be counted. Now they’re saying that they want the three-judge panel overseeing his recount challenge to count all 12,000-odd rejected absentee ballots, wrongly rejected or not.

• Caroline is out.
• Good news.
• More good news.
• Even more good news.
• HRC is on the job.
• Majority of Americans uninterested in protecting America.
• Huh — she probably has lots of great sitcom ideas.
• Meh.

Textualist indeed

Enjoy a ride with The Avett Brothers who take their music to new heights by placing a stand up bass inside a gondola, just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For those who missed it this morning, I thought I would post Dr. Wintley Phipps wonderful performance of Amazing Grace at The National Cathedral.