MSNBC’s “senior political analyst” Mark Halperin was suspended indefinitely on Thursday after calling President Obama “Kind of a dick” on Morning Joe. The president is not a dick—but, that said, the president did make a dick move. No, not the one that got Halperin to put in for a few extra weeks of summer vacation—the dick move was cutting the legs out from under congressional Democrats in an effort to prove his worth to whomever it is Obama looks to for approval, and improve his standing for his 2012 run.

A year after the BP disaster erupted in the Gulf, Cherri Foytlin walked from her home in New Orleans to the White House, to let President Obama hear firsthand the suffering that continues to affect the residents of the Gulf Coast. Sadly, she couldn’t get an invitation to get past the gate. (Rubbing salt in her wounds — she got to watch Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles stroll past her on the sidewalk on their way inside.)

Meanwhile, BP and certain parts of the government continue to try to spin the news, limiting media access to heroic rescuers, limiting scientific access to spill sites, and otherwise trying to hide the record and avoid accountability.

Access. It’s the name of the game.

A response to Spencer Ackerman’s opening gambit on Pakistan diplomacy.

In suggesting in his press conference with President Karzai that he will not negotiate with the Taliban until the U.S. military has demonstrated “effectiveness in breaking their momentum”, President Obama seemed to be embracing the shibboleth that you don’t negotiate with an adversary until you can do so from a “position of strength”. But when your strength is built on sand, as it is in Afghanistan, the notion that you must “negotiate from strength” is the worst kind of bunkum.

The problem in Afghanistan is not picking the right or wrong counterinsurgency strategy, but picking any military strategy at all.

Not only is the French public united against the war, but Sarkozy’s entire government might well collapse because of this opposition. But we already knew this was the kind of pressure Sarkozy was under, because we read it in the CIA memo conveniently leaked just days before the French president arrived in the US.

We have to do more than just be against the war. We have to expand the debate and allow for other solutions to be discussed besides just removing the troops.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, desperate in their efforts to kill the proposed legislation that would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions, have come up with another line of attack. They are making a lot of noise over the bill’s arbitration provision. The argument is just another straw-man attempt at gutting legislation that would enable more workers to have a voice on the job.