Just Another Week In Washington

It’s been quite a week in Washington. President Obama has been talking a lot, and as usual, both sides of his mouth appear to be working quite well.

At Real Clear Politics, for example, it has dawned on some that Obama’s oft-repeated assurance that “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it” would not be true under the current Health Whatever bill. Unlike the author of the article I’ve linked, I don’t think this admission is stunning at all. In fact, I don’t know where the hell this guy has been for the past several months, since Stupak-Pitts and its evil twin in the Senate explicitly strip women of their abortion coverage if they (or their insurance companies! or their employers!) DARE to take one penny of federal dollars to defray their health insurance costs.  Way to be on top of it, dude. Hey, do you think the Giants will ever win the Super Bowl?

The Supreme Court made a spectacularly bad decision regarding campaign financing, ruling that money was, in fact, speech, and thus corporations could not be restricted from “speaking” as loudly as they wanted for any politician in America. Hooray, now the corporations can buy politicians outright instead of using that quaint tactic, “bundling,” to group together smaller contributions to make one large, yet legal, “bundle.” Obama gently wagged his finger about that decision during the State of the Union, which apparently was simply unheard of. Trust the Village to focus on the alleged incivility of Obama’s comment rather the substance of it. Where, where is my fainting couch?

Meanwhile, Chris Matthews made quite an incredible statement about Obama’s alleged post-raciality. Apparently this mythical quality was so strong that it made the yellow-haired motormouth forget the President was black for about an hour. Yes, shockingly, Matthews was able to look past Obama’s skin color for 60 whole minutes on Wednesday! One wonders how he was able to do any reasoned analysis of Obama’s positions and qualifications during the election of 2008, then, since he seemed to be so focused on skin color that he couldn’t forget it before now. (snort) I can’t help wondering: If Matthews were a guy who didn’t tingle at Obama’s every utterance and invest him with beliefs and personality traits Obama simply does not possess, would Tweety still have a job at MSNBO?

In other news, we’re putting lots of missiles in the Persian Gulf in case Iran really has nukes. It seems to me we might be overreacting a tad, however. I mean, the evidence we’ve been using seems a bit…dodgy. Ah well – we’ve gotta feed that military-industrial complex, and we do it by being the biggest arms dealer in the world, selling lots of countries lots of weapons. So, even if Iran doesn’t have nukes, we still get to make lots of money pretending they do. It’s a win-win!

And finally…this is a blogroll call! Our blogroll is out of date, and needs to be expanded. Which sites do you visit that we don’t have listed? Which ones have gone to the dark (wingnut) side? We’d also like to add some good news sources to the list. I like Common Dreams and Truthout, now that the Kool-Aid has worn off; also, Raw Story.

Put your recommendations out there in comments, folks. It’s a big blogosphere, and we’d like to give traffic where traffic is due.

This is an open thread.