When was the last time an American President was accused of lying by two NATO countries on the same day?

Keep in mind that this is more of a shock doctrine document than a blueprint; they have no support on the commission for all this, and they’re trying to gather it with this early release.

What does AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka think about the recommendations made by the co-chairs of the Catfood Commission?

Having put Petraeus in charge of Afghanistan, the received beltway wisdom is that there’s no way Obama can pull out of Afghanistan and survive politically in 2012 if Petraeus wants to stay. If he’d kept McCrystal, the thinking goes, Obama might have been able to blame the quagmire on him, throw up his hands and say “enough.” But he can’t do that with Petraeus.

Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of the President’s fiscal commission, are holding a surprise press conference at this hour to announce the chairman’s mark for recommendations to deal with the nation’s budget deficit. Included in those recommendations are benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare, as well as tax changes.

The Fiscal Responsibility Commission has just announced that they will have a press conference in the hall outside of the Dirksen office building on the Hill today at 1pm. Alex Lawson, who conducted the now-famous livestream video interview of Catfood Commission co-chair Alan Simpson, is on his way there. FDL will be livebroadcasting via Ustream [...]

Among adults age 18-64, and in case you didn’t know that’s the voting age, 22% are uninsured. Half of the uninsured have incomes over the poverty level. 40% of them have one or more chronic diseases. This is not about being young and libertarian and free, this is about not being able to afford health insurance.

Quantitative easing smashes the hopes of retirees with small amounts of savings. Congress and the Administration won’t help them or the enormous number of jobless Americans. That leaves the Fed as the only faint hope for improvement in the economy, and its tactics take money from retirees, or forces them into the stock market, and into the hands of the people who wrecked the economy.

We’ve seen this game of chicken play out over the past two years, with governors who appear far more ideologically committed than Walker and Ohio Governor-elect John Kasich. Rick Perry, Mark Sanford and even Sarah Palin all made rumblings about not accepting stimulus funds, and they all buckled in the end. Walker and Kasich appear sincere about killing the rail projects, but now that LaHood has told them that the money is “use it or lose it,” let’s watch and enjoy.

Just one day after the Department of Justice announced that it couldn’t find sufficient evidence to charge Jose Rodriguez for obstruction of justice (presumably because Rodriguez destroyed all of the torture evidence), the New York Times awarded its most prominent op-ed space Wednesday morning to Johns Bolton and Yoo so that they could rally the warmongers in the Senate against ratifying the New Start arms control treaty. It’s hard to imagine how two less-deserving figures could be chosen to speak to the issue of peace through nuclear disarmament. Bolton, you will recall, is best known for his quip that if the UN building lost 10 floors “it wouldn’t make a bit of difference” and even “joked” more recently about a nuclear attack on Chicago. It must have been that joke that made him qualified to write the op-ed on the New Start Treaty. Yoo, on the other hand, is a mysterious addition to the op-ed, as his area of expertise has been confined in the past to serving as the personal shredder for the “piece of paper” that George W. Bush called the Constitution while churning out one subsequently rejected legal opinion after another in attempts to legalize torture. Yoo even went so far as to say the President could crush a child’s testicles in order to get his parent to talk. It’s hard to see how that makes Yoo an expert on nuclear arms.