Oh, oh, ohhhh! The Senate Republicans, with drama-queening Democrats Bill Nelson and Bob Menendez, are holding up the budget bill for fiscal year 2009 — a bill that funds the government through September 30 of calendar year 2009. Much chest-thumping and manliness is on display. Except that it’s all hissy kabuki, as the Republicans need this bill passed as much as the Democrats — and the rest of us — do.

It seems that Fred Lebed, Roland Burris’ partner, may have been thinking of favors he could do to support Burris’ candidate to be Senator.

Lovely daffodils via wit.

Mercifully, it’s warmed up a wee bit — if only for the weekend — and life is good. My daffodils are just about to burst forth in all of their buttery, golden glory. But, alas, they are still teasing me as tightly-shut buds.

Thus, the photo at left.

Funny new video from The Trews , Paranoid Freak, and a report from California’s Secretary of State claiming some Diebold voting machine audit logs have a delete button. The details are alarming even for those of us who are not paranoid freaks.

When last we met Mr. Tedisco, the Republican candidate for Sen. Gillibrand’s seat (in a district he doesn’t live in), he was refusing to say where he stood on the stimulus package. This week, he continued to refuse to say where he stands on the stimulus package. Happily, his guest, Mr. Giuliani, was less discreet.

CIA destroyed 12 videotapes displaying “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“Metric shopping” is the process of ignoring the most plainly obvious measures or statistics in favor of tortured or irrelevant ones that purport to prove your point. Republicans and conservatives do it a lot.

A preview of the next GOP convention.

A year ago, polls in California showed a close race if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger chose to challenge Barbara Boxer for her U.S. Senate seat. A new Field Poll today, though, shows how much damage has been done to the erstwhile Terminator’s hopes by that state’s ongoing deficit crisis — which Arnold had been dancing around for years, until the current recession caused it to blow up in his face.

One of the key points of the Franken motion to dismiss Norm Coleman’s contest of Franken’s recount win is that there is no legal or honest way that Coleman can add enough previously-rejected absentee-ballot votes into the vote totals to erase Franken’s lead — and that in fact, out of the thousands of rejected ballots Coleman’s people are trying to lob into the vote count, only a handful can actually make it. Franken attorney Marc Elias has been pointing this out for weeks now, when he discusses Norm Coleman’s Incredible Shrinking Ballot Universe.