Marcy and I are at the Hart Senate Office Building with Atrios, Jerome, Bowers, David Corn, Brownsox and others listening to various Senators come in and talk about their issues.

Israeli high court reinstates Israeli Arab parties

President Obama has drafted an order to close Gitmo and has moved to suspend tribunal proceedings at Gitmo, and the military panels have started entering the orders. As further evidence of the determination to immediately address, and bring a new sense of enlightened justice to, the detainees in Guantanamo, the Administration has imposed analogous continuance motions in pending Habeas cases in United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

It’d be nice if Bush applied the Boy Scout standard to himself and STFU about his accomplishments.

Bob Corker put the UAW through the ringer and blamed every problem that the domestic automakers had on their union contracts. He was relentless in his efforts to start a deflationary wage spiral by demanding the UAW make cuts to achieve false “parity” with foreign automakers in his own state of Tennessee, who must peg their own rates to union wages in order to keep their employees.

I stepped onto the Mall as “Pride (In the Name of Love)” was playing, a rebroadcast–this time with Bishop Robinson’s speech–of Sunday’s concert. And the mood was jubilant, despite the day’s slightly confusing and delayed start for those walking onto the Mall. We were held up at the 7th St entrance to walk over because of what was said to be a broken water main and redirected to 3rd where we were told to go back to 7th, but eventually 3rd was open and we walked. And walked, a voyage of a million steps across the centuries though the 3rd St tunnel.

Hours after taking office on Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama ordered military prosecutors in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals to ask for a 120-day halt in all pending cases….The request would halt proceedings in 21 pending cases, including the death penalty case against five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the September 11 hijacked plane attacks in 2001.

Over the past few days I went to parties all over Washington DC — Media Matters, the DNC, Declare Yourself, FDL/Netroots Nation, the Illinois Home State Ball, the Huffington Post Ball and the Google Ball among others.  Pretty high profile celebrations with enormous crowds, and I was struck by one thing — I rarely saw Democratic politicians.  Aside from Barack and Michelle Obama at the Illinois Home State Ball, I really didn’t see any.

So if they weren’t out in public, where were they?

Sam Seder is teh funny.

• Big media reax here, here, here, here, and here.
• MoJo and The Nation weigh in. 
• Jane’s thoughts here.
• The Arab world’s reax.
• Sullivan has wingnut reax to the speech.
• HuffPo has ball roundups.
• Guess he’s not a strict constructionist after all.
• He’s lucky he only got booed.
• Obama’s first day on the job.
• Obama Administration to halt Gitmo trials. 
• The White House gets a blog.